Cheapest option for Xferring Panasonic HD recordings to external hard drive

[dafoe]

I have 150-200 VHS tapes that I want to archive on an external hard drive. I'm moving soon and I have no intention of dragging these with me. I don't want to spend 40-60 dollars on blanks that I'm just going to throw away. As far as I can tell my only other option is DVD-RAM. Which is not preferable given it's limited compatibility. Am I missing something. What about DVD-RW? No way I'm trusting these to one hard drive. So I'm going to need a backup hard drive as well. In retrospect I probably just should have bought a capture card. But it is what it is. Trying to keep my costs down. Anybody have any ideas?

[jjeff]

Yes -RW discs are the best way to go, but if your talking about the E80H you wrote about in another thread, it doesn't write to RW discs, only -R and RAM discs. The first Panasonic model to support -RW discs was the '05 EH-50, your E80H is a '03 model year.
With your current setup your best bet is to just bite the bullet and purchase a couple 100 spindles of Verbatim -R AZO blank discs, currently ~$25 on Amazon. DON'T waste your time on the cheaper LIFE grade Verbatims, they are a cheaper line that while they may work on newer Panasonics, they tend to fail on the very old ones like your E80H.
You could try the capture card idea to your PC but that can also be a can of worms as often times a capture card doesn't like the dirty glitchy signal of VHS and tends to really screw things up. A DVDR was made for such crappy signals and has the ability to filter out the junk while still recording what you want.

[dafoe]

Thanks for the reply. I ended buying a Verbatim DVD Ram disc for less than $6. It hasn't been smooth sailing, but it's getting the job done.