Some time ago I thought my drive had packed in so I threw in a spare sata drive which was lying around. (Foxsat)

When it all seemed to work again I gave it no more thought until I started getting record errors quite recently.

I could actually hear the sound like when the heads disengage , like an occasional clicking sound while recording. You know what I mean. and the resulting recordings appeared to be stalling and pixelating briefly before carrying on.

Going back to my initial reason for swopping the drive - It turned out that it was nothing to do with a drive failure at all but something else and when I checked out the drive in my pc it was absolutely fine so I just left the old Foxsat drive in my pc and kept on using the spare "thrown in drive" until now.

Anyway, I now realise that I have to use an AV drive and have re-installed the original Foxsat drive without any further problems and the non AV drive seems to be quite happy back where it should be!

I could have just asked what the difference between the two types of drive are but I wanted to bore you all to death.:yawn:

This is the most embarrassing bit. I`m actually a retired computer engineer (for obvious reasons) so you can use words of more than one syllable if you can offer a fairly detailed explanation.

1 Low power consumption
2 Mimimal error checking, the odd single bit error in a AV application is irrelevant compared to the capability to stream continously to the hdd.

Example DV camcorders require firewire not usb, simply because they can sustain a continous data stream essential for a tape based media..

See

http://blog.mvidatarecovery.com/what...nics-ce-drive/

Many thanks yet again Graham.

The link you supplied describes the reasons perfectly.

I`m a bit worried about this part:-

Quote.

"Installing a regular PC hard disk can cause the life of the PVR power supply to be dramatically reduced".

but I`m sure that all will be ok as it wasn`t in there very long.

Cheers.

It could only do that if it overtaxed the power supply. Many PC drives are also low power as in the WD Green series.

So how big a risk am I taking installing CE drives in my PC?

I'd have thought any error correction changes would relate to how many times a drive will retry a failed operation before reporting an error to the host.

i.e. it would fail "fast" and let the host decide whether the operation was worth retrying, preventing the drive potentially blocking other read/write operations whilst retrying.

Need to check the specs to be sure, but I don't think they would get SATA certified if they just silently ignored errors, and even in a PVR even a single bit error could corrupt the filesystem if it was in the middle of filesystem metadata as opposed to a recording.

but why would you want to - usually there are at a price premium due to volume?

Because I'm a cheapskate and scavenge hard drives from old and broken Sky boxes and put them in PCs when the hard drives fail.

So much moves on over a few years - Installing a an old AV drive may well save a few pennies but will no doubt be a performace bottleneck (The hard drive usually is, as is skimping on RAM).