Oversize HDD in NVR

Barboots

Barboots

Pulling my weight
Mar 15, 2018
410
241
Perth, Western Australia
Rookie mistake #26 - Buying a hard drive bigger than your NVR can handle.

In the pursuit of more days storage, I forgot the 6TB limit for my NVR 4116HS-4KS2... and bought a Purple 8tb. Upon installation I immediately noticed momentary glitch/pausing on Live View, and sure enough it's in the recordings.

If I partition the drive down to 6TB, do I "get out of of jail free"... or am I properly in the sh!t with the funds administrator? I'd rather not waste my time trying if it's a known yes or no. If it is a "maybe" I'll have a crack...

Cheers, Steve
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Barboots said:
Rookie mistake #26 - Buying a hard drive bigger than your NVR can handle.

In the pursuit of more days storage, I forgot the 6TB limit for my NVR 4116HS-4KS2... and bought a Purple 8tb. Upon installation I immediately noticed momentary glitch/pausing on Live View, and sure enough it's in the recordings.

If I partition the drive down to 6TB, do I "get out of of jail free"... or am I properly in the sh!t with the funds administrator? I'd rather not waste my time trying if it's a known yes or no. If it is a "maybe" I'll have a crack...

Cheers, Steve
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HI Steve,

It may not be the size of the HDD, many newer NVRs are able to handle larger than 6TB HDD even though some NVR claim only to be able to handle 6TB. ( i.e. maybe something else.. )
 
mat200 said:
HI Steve,
It may not be the size of the HDD, many newer NVRs are able to handle larger than 6TB HDD even though some NVR claim only to be able to handle 6TB. ( i.e. maybe something else.. )
Click to expand...
Thanks Mat, but it happened immediately on swapping the drive. As it's a new installation I'm looking over it several times a day.

I haven't swapped the drives back to fully confirm, however I've formatted and done restarts to no avail.

I'll probably have to pull it and partition to test. I mean who would have done this previously... you'd have to be a total moron.
 
Barracuda 1TB back in and everything is smooth as silk. The NVR obviously didn't like my attempt to partition off some of the disk with Windows, so it formatted it to full volume size on boot.

Unless someone has a partitioning trick to try, it looks like I am in trouble. Needless to say, I am very bummed out with my $400 mistake.
 
most/all NVR's will be running a variant of Linux I expect, so partitioning/formatting with winwoes is likely to cause the NVR to detect it as unrecognised partition types and it'll just wipe and reformat. Unless you made the partitions with linux ID's which might work, tho I'm not sure that the NVR OS would handle that either, since it won't know which partition it should be using so may just wipe it again anyway to get max storage. You could try creating a single 6tb primary linux partition and leave the rest unallocated and see if that works...
 
Aengus4h said:
You could try creating a single 6tb primary linux partition and leave the rest unallocated and see if that works...
Click to expand...
Yes I've now tried that, both with a Windows Tool and Parted Magic (Linux). When removed from the NVR the disk is totally unallocated, with absolutely no partition format to speak of.

Any partition I add gets wiped... probably because it ends up at the "start" of the disk?

If there is a better tool for working with the disk I'm all ears!
 
more a problem of identifying what on disk structure the NVR is using I think, so you can try to partition the same way, unless its just using it raw of course. Any newer firmware for the NVR that might add larger HDD support at all? Would be the ideal solution really, else sounds like getting a smaller HDD that it can support...
 
Aengus4h said:
... unless its just using it raw of course. Any newer firmware for the NVR that might add larger HDD support at all?
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Yep I suspect that's what it's doing.

The machine is brand new from Andy, so would likely have the latest firmware. It's a base model so probably doesn't have the horses to manage a larger drive.

If I had time I'd probably order a compatible NVR as I'd lose less money, but I need to have this sorted within a few days time... so just going to have to buy a 6TB
 
6TB HDD limit - I wonder what causes that.

It certainly is not a file system limit, as newer file systems can handle a lot more.
 
DH_NVR4XXX-4KS2_EngFrnSpn_V3.215.0000000.4.R.180119 is the latest firmware. I did not see any release notes but I'm guessing its like the new NVR5XXX firmware based on the date which means if you have any of the cheapo Chine market cameras hacked to have English on them, those might not work anymore with the NVR. As far as I know anything from Andy should be fine. If you want to try it let me know and I'll send you a link to the firmware as well as the most recent prior version.
 
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mat200 said:
6TB HDD limit - I wonder what causes that.

It certainly is not a file system limit, as newer file systems can handle a lot more.
Click to expand...
I figured that it must be processing power or register size being insufficient to handle the address range? It would be interesting to run it until full to see if it did in fact fill the drive.

However it's disconnected and waiting for you to buy it
 
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PLE - You had better hope you never need warranty. Terrible reputation in the industry.
 
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