Is it ok to use a hard drive from a pvr in a pc?

jjbtnc

Distinguished
Jun 6, 2005
5
0
18,510
I've popped out a couple of hard drives from some friends broken pvrs (sky+ and sky HD boxes i think) and ended up with 2 sata drives of 300gb and 400gb.
Is it ok to use these as the system drives in a pc or if not is it ok to use them as just data storage drives in a pc.

From memory there may be some performance issues as perhaps acoustic management is turned on in the drives, so they're quieter in operation allowing for a quiet pvr experience in the living room, the trade off being that they might be under performing. This is a maybe and it's also a maybe whether i could find a tool to turn it off and restore the performance of the drives.

The thing that is concerning me more though is that i have also seen remarks around the net is that the error correction on these drives can be different from normal pc drives. Errors in pvr video streams being less important but more common? so the hard drives are more tolerant of errors and let them slide - probably not the best explanation but i hope you get an idea of what i mean.
The comments i noted seemed to say that Pcs need to be a lot stricter with error control which is why using a pvr hard drive in a pc is not a good idea as you want top notch error control when concerned with pc data.
Would it be the hard drive itself that controls the level of error correction or would it be the device it is in that controls that aspect?

is this true or a bit of misinformation? One of the drives i took from the pvr is a Maxtor quickview model which is specifically marketed as being for pvr type devices, the other is a seagate which may just be a bog standard drive stuck in a pvr or has maybe had a few tweaks like acoustic management or error correction done to it.