I bought a generic hybrid DVR off FleaBay for the shop to replace the two ancient DVRs that were having good days and bad days.
Adding drives was dead easy.
Haven't played with networking yet. Looks easy.
Haven't played with IP cameras yet. Looks slightly less easy.
First disappointment. Its got atleast three monitor outputs, but just a single output feed for all of them. No main/spot setup that I can find. I guess its time to play with the networking, and swing one or two of my surveillance monitors over to my desktop. That was easy. I had a spare VGA port. I was afraid all I had left was display ports.
No looping. I think only my old Dedicated Micros had that anyway. It would have given an alternative way to do what I needed to.