ZapperBox requires a minimum drive size of 128GB for DVR. HD and 4K recordings require about 5GB/hour and 1080p recordings require about 2.2GB/hour. This means that a 1TB drive can store 200 hours of HD or 4K video and about 450 hours of 1080p video.
Most hard disk drives work with ZapperBox but require an external powered USB hub or external power. Flash drives and solid-state drives do not require external power. So far, all external disk drives that we have tested work fine with the ZapperBox.
The USB ports on the ZapperBox do not supply enough power for hard disk drives. We have tested a few different USB powered hubs for supporting disk drives and they all work fine. Here is one that is Amazon’s Choice and works fine.
microSD cards and thumb drives have a “burnout” problem unless the 60-minute pause buffer is disabled. We have not experienced such problems with SSD (solid state drives) yet. Read about it in this blog post. If you use a microSD card or a thumb drive please ensure that its read speed is rated at 100 MBytes/second or higher.
Here is a list of drives that we have recently purchased and used successfully with the ZapperBox:
You can select from four types of storage media. Whatever you choose, please consider high end storage made by known brands like SanDisk, Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, etc.
1. microSD cards. These are the most convenient and most expensive per GB. The entire card slips inside the microSD slot and completely out of sight. It is like having internal storage inside the ZapperBox. As of January 2024, the largest available microSD card is 1.5 TB. We recommend that the 60-minute pause buffer be disabled when using microSD cards. This will ensure that the cards last for a long time.
2. Flash drives or USB thumb drives. These tend to be less expensive but are usually designed for removable storage and not continuous writing. We have not researched many USB thumb drives currently. We recommend that the 60-minute pause buffer be disabled when using thumb drives. This will ensure that the dives last for a long time.
3. SSDs (solid state drives). SSDs use flash storage like microSD cards and thumb drives but are designed to offer higher performance and more robustness than thumb drives.
4. HDDs (hard disk drives). HDDs offer the cheapest storage option per GB. They require an external power source with the ZapperBox, which can only provide 4.5W of power on the USB 3.0 port and 2.5W on the USB 2.0 port.
Since the USB ports on the ZapperBox are on the side, and not the rear, you can consider using a right-angle USB adapter like
this one.
