No, this forum is populated by people who have been discussing all things HDR-FOX since 2010, and have a great deal of experience and technical knowledge both with HDR-FOX in particular and with electronics and software in general. For example: I am a digital electronics design engineer with 30 years experience in the design of military-grade computing and communications hardware (which has a design service life of 20 years).
The reason for the nit-picking is that the detail of what you say does not add up. As an engineer, I expect to see evidence for any claim - either in the post itself or in the general experience. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I'm not seeing much of that here. Genuine facts are only arrived at by being robustly examined, so if your intention is to arrive at genuine facts, you will appreciate the nit-picking as necessary to get to the fundamental truth.
I take on board your suggestion that a 2.5" drive might get a system with a dicky PSU working again, but I would regard this as clutching at straws - if the PSU has degraded to that extent, I seriously question its remaining life. I remain very sceptical about your statement that you have repeatable results across three PSU modules and alternate 3.5" drives, because as far as I can see this is a fault condition and all combinations have to be suffering from the same fault. One of my units has been in continuous use since 2010, and the others are not much younger. If there was a systematic problem with PSU life I'm pretty sure I would have noticed.
If you had said something like "hey guys, I've found that if a PSU has a dodgy 12V output, swapping a 2.5" notebook drive for the 3.5" drive overcomes the problem", nobody would have turned a hair and you would have been applauded for the suggestion. But you didn't. Your post sounded like you are querying the ability of the HDR-FOX to run the stock 3.5" drive, hence the arguments - because there is no general experience of that.
2TB are not stock drives, and if they have a higher start-up power requirement than the stock drives, therein lies the problem. What it sounds like now is that you have bought in a batch of HDR-FOXes that have been upgraded by a third party using inappropriate 2TB drives, and then sold on under false pretences.
You originally stated that you couldn't find anything posted about this, but my analysis (not including the 2.5" work-around) is covered in the link I provided before (which links out to
Commissioning, Disassembling, and Repairing an HDR-FOX - click). I will add this work-around to the corpus, with credit to you.
