Daytek 950-S, the story so far....

[oldfart13]

I think it should be very easy to clone drives for these units. The 160 Gig drive that I pulled out of a brand new unit that had mobo problems has 2 file folders on it that are about 65 Gig total in size. The info that I had for the Liteon 5045 units was that the files were as much as 5 Gig in size. At any rate, it should then be pretty easy to swap the drive for a larger one as long as it's formatted as FAT32 (which I confirmed for the pulled drive). I don't think the power supply is any more robust than the Liteons, so you probably shouldn't go past 400 Gig. I'll see if I can't come up with a cheap Western Digital that is 250 Gig to 400 Gig to test my theory.

I don't see what the trouble was that people were having with these units. The 2 I have managed to salvage work very well. The editing function is a bit flaky though....you make a selection and you can't back out of it nor can you cancel it, so make absolutely sure this is what you want to cut or delete. You can frame by frame edit, but it backs up a couple frames so it's not absolutely accurate but it's great if there is some black to make the cut from. It's great for commercials and there is no pause where the commercial was cut, unlike some other units. I did a burner replacement with one that was compatible with the Liteons and that also works very well. I have all but retired my Panny E80H now in favor of the Dayteks, as they are more versatile. The timer is set for 24 hour time but you get used to that after awhile. I'm actually looking for a couple more units that I can fix or salvage parts from. Swapping the hard drives out only takes a couple minutes but I'm thinking of pulling the drive cable out and making an external drive case for at least one of the units so drive swaps are even faster.

The only bad things about the units are the no copy flags on Macrovision tapes are recognized as well, if you record from HBO, it will probably not allow you to transfer the content to a DVD. I found that out last week while trying to transfer HDD recordings from that channel to the burner. Of course the work around is to pull the drive and do your editing and authoring on the computer.

If you have any other questions about these units, please let me know.

[oldfart13]

Interesting discovery I just made. If you put in a raw unformatted or even old computer formatted (Fat32 or NTFS) drive into one of these machines the drive will be automatically formatted so it is usable in the recorder! That means you don't have to clone drives like you do a Liteon. Just drop in the new drive and away you go! Time to get a new 250 or 400 Gig drive to test this out on. It works perfectly on a 60 Gig I just had lying around here. As well, now the editing features work since I upgraded the firmware last night. Sweet!

[kennywally]

do you think all the recorders are fat32 formatted?

I'm just gathering data, as I will try to put a larger hdd in my panasonic e100hs first

[samijubal]

If you put a larger HDD in a Panasonic it will format the drive to whatever size the original drive was. I read somewhere there are companies that sell HDDs with the software needed to allow a larger drive installed on them. I don't know if it works or not.

[kennywally]

samijubal

THANKS,

At least the drives are coming down in price and I won't have to spend a fortune on it.

So this could just be an EPROM issue?

I suppose, eventually, if the machine still works, I may be putting in a flash drive because the hdd seems to be selling out. I suppose then, I'll just have connector issues

[samijubal]

I found one of the places, they are for Tivo not DVD recorders. It was in a Panasonic post, I guess whoever answered doesn't know the difference between the two.

[oldfart13]

Latest news is that my GSA-H22L LG DVD burner suddenly refused to see double layer discs anymore, so I retired it to one of the Daytek 950-S recorders. Lo and behold, the drive seems to like this new home. A disc that my LG-4040B would take 25 minutes to burn in the recorder now takes about 16 minutes. If you're like me and end up running out of space on the hard drive and want to burn a quick disc to get space back, but inevitably run out of time before your show starts, this is indeed a boon. The GSA-H22L also retains the fast forward and reverse functions when used as a playback device for burned discs. I'll have to try it out in my Liteon 5001 to see if it will also work in that.

[oldfart13]

Confirmed playback of VCD and SVCD NTSC and PAL CD-Rs and RWs. That makes all my old recordings from the 1990s to now compatible with this unit....

[highvolumeJP]

Daytek DVD Recorders are actually rebadged LITEONs, aren't they ?

[oldfart13]

The non HDD ones I have been able to convert to Liteons. The HDD ones use Cirrus Logic chips and are their own beast. Those cannot be successfully converted to Liteons....

[highvolumeJP]

The non HDD ones I have been able to convert to Liteons. The HDD ones use Cirrus Logic chips and are their own beast. Those cannot be successfully converted to Liteons....

Are you sure they still use Cirrus chips and not the Magnum ?

[oldfart13]

If they converted to Magnum then it would have been with the 950-T units. I don't have one of those so I cannot confirm. I can confirm the Cirrus Logic chips with the 950-S units....