I would caution that Peter (the
IsoBuster author) is still working on the TFS2 support for reading these hard drives.
Its a difficult format to support.
One of the side effects of its (ahem.. uniqueness?) is that a card or hard drive can become (dual) formatted.. not that that will work.. but for example: I had an SD card formatted as a bootable USB Win7 installation media. (
After) formatting it in the Polaroid recorder it both worked in the recorder.. and continued to show up in a PC as a valid NTFS drive.
Peter and I now understand (why) such weird behavior works.. but 'eventually' the two file systems will collide as they pull blocks from the same storage device.. they will consume each others 'lunch'.
It also makes it (harder) to support a hard disk that might appear as two very different devices at the same time.. you have to make a decision as to which is correct.
To someone from 2003 or 2010 this must have driven them crazy.
And unfortunately I've identified at least Six brands that used TFS2 in their multiple models of DVR recorder.. it seemed to be the default in an LSI development kit.. which the manufacturers then 'tweaked' to support their particular set of Features in their recorders. (Those features included Timer recording and TVGuide or VCR+ metadata which isn't of much use today other than for titles.. but they are in different formats.)
So there are multiple 'variants' with the same 'signature' but different implementations.
JVC definitely used TFS2 in their consumer line and their Proline of DVR recorders. (Understanding the strange format peculiarities is a major step in the direction of backing those recordings up.)
Last night I got a look at a 2005 Toshiba RD-XS64 from France. Unlike (all) of the Toshiba RD-XS recorders released in N.A. and Britain and Japan.. it used the TFS2 file system.. custom tailored as well. It was made in Slovakia so I guess the designs were more aligned with SECAM than PAL or NTSC.
To be clear.. these are not (encrypted) video.. they are plain generic file systems with challenging storage patterns.
One thing about using SD cards. Is that smaller ones are a lot easier to find than hard drives at 4 GB. And the IDE adapter is the speed bottle neck, and perhaps the speed matcher.. since most drives are faster today and the recorders expected slower 4200 or 5400 rpm drives with 2 MB of cache or no cache.
Once the card is put into a PC it can be read at full.. 'card speed' which may be faster than the adapter would allow.
They made IDE to CF flash adapters for the PC for Photographers at one time and I was thinking of trying one of those.. but instead I had this SD to IDE adapter lying around in a junk box.. and I didn't really expect it to work.