A month ago, I diagnosed my Lorex DVR. The hard drive was failing. The box would hold for 30 to 90 minutes, then HTTP requests would start timing out, then ports would stop answering. I’d pull the power and restart it. After an hour or so, same thing. The drive inside had been running since December 2018. The diagnosis seemed solid.
On August 8th I was about to order a 4TB replacement.
Instead I opened the case and disconnected the old WD Purple, leaving it physically bolted in but with both cables out, and set up a polling loop from my Mac. Every 60 seconds, an ICMP ping and a full HTTP request from my Mac. 39.6 hours.
I got 1,174 samples back. 209 faults, and the drive cables had been unplugged the whole time.
The box failed the same way it always had: HTTP requests hanging until timeout, then port 80 refusing connections entirely. Same two-phase signature, just the drive wasn’t part of it.
What made the original diagnosis easy to land was the failure’s shape. The box doesn’t fail continuously. During my 39-hour run it had clean stretches as long as five hours with zero faults. If I restarted it and watched for an hour, it looked stable.
The old WD Purple may have been shortening the stable windows. With the drive connected, the box would fall over in 30 to 90 minutes; without it, just over three hours. Accelerating something isn’t the same as causing it. A replacement drive would have moved the timeline, not fixed the box.
It’s a 2019 unit on 2019 firmware from a vendor that discontinued the product. The realistic direction is replacement. The existing coax cameras carry over to any analog DVR, so the swap is straightforward when I get there.
What I’m checking first is whether Frigate has retention recording already enabled. If it does, the DVR is just an RTSP source and the drive doesn’t matter either way. “Leave it diskless” becomes a $0 fix for a problem that wasn’t the problem.