For Dennis Smith, director of integrated services at Duncan, S.C.-based SFI Electronics, the answer is simple. “It’s better to just have larger hard drives,” he says. “It’s functional, economical, and in terms of quality, it’s just about equal. You should be able to offload an exact copy of video you have on your machine, with no degradation in quality. But once you get this information into storage media, playing it back may require reloading it onto the DVR, which can be time-consuming and cumbersome.”
Smith says his preference for hard drives is based on their affordability, with 1-terabyte drives available for about $300. Moving from a 500-gigabyte to a 1-terabyte recorder adds about $1,000 to the cost of a DVR, he says.