Using an SD card as an HDD in the Polaroid 2001G DVR?
 

I found that the following SD to IDE adapter works in a Polaroid DRM-2001G

Sintech SD SDHC Adapter Card

The limits have not been found, but tested up to an 8GB card at SP recording speed. The manufacturer reports up to a 64 GB card should work.. but I'm not sure if that is an absolute or only the largest card that was available when the adapter first came on the market.

The behavior of the Polaroid is upon first start it flashes Hello several times, then reboots and begins displaying programming. Record and playback behave normally.

Both the adapter can be removed and placed into a PC, or the SD card can be ejected and placed into a PC.. both appear as LBA blocks.

Its a convenient take on the idea of an ejectable hard drive, and a lot denser than a DVD.

Interesting.

Also not surprising, since the Polaroid could accept almost any replaced IDE drive. I have a pair of custom modded decks, one has 250gb and the other 500gb. (I think it's 500gb, would have to open to verify.)

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.

I wonder if the CF card option would allow 128gb or 256gb CF cards?

I've often wonder when ISOBuster doesn't employ a bootable option, to prevent the OS from screwing with media operations. I'd wonder if that sort of safe mode would allow for more controlled recovery of both optical media and HDD media. The safe mode could mount any drive connected to dump the files, even USB. That'd be ideal. ISOBuster is already an excellent recovery program, but a safe mode would put it on par with the sort of restore interface we get with backup software like Acronis. Remove the OS as a variable.

We'll find out.. a 128gb is on the way.

For figuring out these storage formats I'm mostly interested in smaller storage, not larger.. but across other brands that might not be as accomodating.. I'm wonder if meeting their minimal size will make the most difference. At 256gb though is still a bit pricey. Fortunately most of the older ones are smaller than that.

If Peter has time perhaps he will chime in on this point. Although I tend to think he let's the OS do whatever.. but doesn't actively attempt to use windows routines to "mount" or "initalize" anything. He just by-passed the volume manager and directly accesses the sectors on disk.

The recorder likely isn't formatting block 0 of the hard drive, which contains the MBR partition table on PC formatted drives. Windows will find and mount partitions as long as the MBR is intact and the file system doesn't return massive errors (the NTFS MFT is intact and not overwritten).