Anyone know of enclosures that power down the hard drive ?

I cannot speak for other "green" drives, but I know the WD Greens will automagically shut themselves down after a short period of inactivity.

Best answer selected by heartspeace.

Thank you for the information, as there are several vendors to choose from I will either get an WD or Hitachi - both seem adequate and well priced. I am not too concerned with the hard dive throughput rates because both it looks like can handle video throughput even at 1080p.

I was/am concerned a little bit with saving two channels video with the DVR and watching a third all at 1080p. I do assume that the DVR will optimize the drive just as it optimizes the internal drive now at nights. However, if the drives are truly running at Sata III even at 5400rpm I suspect it should be able to keep up.

If you feel different please response. I looked for such a subject (throughput on dvr with three 1080p streams going) but didnt find one. I did find this drive which looks perfect and made for the task but not for sale yet? Hitachi CinemaStar 5K2000


For those still looking at this topic - I STILL would like to find external power enclosures with spin down - especially for those tasks that need the speed (my normal computing day) rather than slower green drives.

Video is actually a very low-demand data stream. Even full bitrate 1080i (I assume you mean 1080i as 1080p is not one of the broadcast standards) only requires a 2-3 MByte/sec while high-capacity drives, even green ones, have minimum transfer rates on the order of about 50MByte/sec. So you shouldn't have any problems using a green drive in a DVR system.

Edit - actually I just re-checked and I see that 1080p is one of the standard ATSC formats, although I haven't heard of any commercial stations that actually transmit it. Nonetheless ATSC broadcasts still only carry about 20Mbits/sec which translates to only a couple of MBytes/sec.