Electronic Alarms and Home Security Devices - 4-Channel PCI Video Surveillance Card

I'm looking into connecting my CCD camera to my PC so I can record and remotly monitor. I came accross a 4-Channel PCI Video Surveillance Card and thought this would be better and much cheeper than buying a seperate DVR multiplexer unit. The card reqires 80GB hard drive and I wanted to know if I could use an external harddrive instead of installing another internal harddrive. I wouid like to install the software for the card and record to the external drive. Any ideas or suggestions.

external hardrives are the same as internal. The computer will recognize it as a hardrive.

You would install the software and direct the program to record too that ext. drive.

An external hard drive is a great idea.

My only advice is to try and dedicate that computer to only recording video. The biggest weakness I see with computers as security video recorders is that they can be "fragile" when you also do other things with them like: surfing the web, playing video games... It is still a PC so it is suseptable to all the usual PC problems. The main reason I like DVR's better is because recording video is all they do. They very rarely crash, lock-up or get viruses mainly because they run a Linux operating system and are kept simple so there is relativley little to go wrong.

Thanks for the info but now you raise a question I hav'nt thought about. Does using the PC as a DVR slow it down???

My PC is a year old Dell DV051 Intel(R), Pentuim4, 2.80GHZ 2.79 GHz, 1GBram
Running XP Media Center Edition Version 2002 Service pack 2. Not sure what all that means but we only use it for homework. Typing reports and internet research. Instant messageing. No gaming, etc.

Thanks.

For four cameras that computer will be fine, but like was mentioned before, make it a dedicated computer.

Also, check the instructions with the software, there is usually a way to set it so that if the computer resets it will bring the program back up.

Thanks for all the input.