Buffer filling on new HD

Does the drive have its own power source or are you just using the usb to power it? What hardware is running the dvr server?

The drive is USB powered (its the "gaming" series WD Black with speeds up to 130mb/s) and is driven by an NVIDA Shield Pro which is the host for the server.

Did you set the USB on the shield to always on and full power ?

It is set to always on, though when looking to double check I did see a ā€œusb modeā€ setting which was at automatic (recommended) but I changed it to max performance just now for good measure.

As I mentioned I donā€™t ever see a buffering issue with TVE channels but I also know they are lower bandwidth. Given that my HDHR is saying the tuner streams are 10mbps tho and this drive can handle 100 that really shouldnā€™t be a bottleneck eitherā€¦

Others may differ from my view, but your external drives should always have their own power supply.

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Correct. You were testing from the shield to the shield. All internal.
There is a low level network packet loss test you can run from a device on your network to the HDHR.
You could move that device to network connection points you want to test.
https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/troubleshooting:network_packet_loss

Thanks for the test - nothing but solid dots so thatā€™s good. 140k packets over a minute or so and 0 errors. Also plugged in my laptop to the same ethernet cord that is connected to the HDHR and am getting near max down speeds from my ISP with a 30ms ping. That, in addition to the general behavior when having two OTA channels running at once and not noticing any stuttering seems to indicate at least the input source being good...? Anything else worth checking?

@tmm1 Where does the buffer live on the shield when expanded storage is set up as external (not adopted). Ram, internal, or external drive?

If your shield is hard wired, do the same test with your laptop plugged into the network cable the shield is using.
That will test your network from the HDHR to the shield.

I don't know if this works using a shield as the dvr, but open a browser on your laptop and test the speed from it to your shield by using http://dvr:8089/speedtest where dvr is the IP of your shield.

It is hardwired - just tested the cable that was going into the shield on the laptop and got 800 down with a 26ms ping via online speedtest on 900mb service so close to max speed. I also tested on the shield itself via the Netflix support app and got around 500mb.

I was able to run the channels DVR speedtest from my laptop connected to a different ethernet port in the house with the shield re-connected. Download speed was just under 1000, latency and jitter were around 1ms

I didn't see where you tested the network path from your shield to your HDHR using you laptop plugged into the network cable that goes to the shield and running this test

If you did and the results are good, that tests the path from your server (shield) to the HDHR using your existing cables/switches/etc. as currently wired. That rules out a network problem.

I don't use a shield, but have seen many posts where putting the drive in a powered enclosure that powers the drive fixes many issues. Myself, I always use a powered enclosure for external drives.

After changing the one USB setting to ā€œMax Performanceā€ (always powered was already set) instead of auto and turning off ipv6 been good so far. Itā€™s only been a day but fingers crossed!

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The USB settings are the first things I set when adding a usb drive to the Shield.

I just re-read this entire thread, and you have mentioned a Shield as a client, but you have never given any indication to the forum as to the platform your server is running on ...

Are you running your server on a Shield? Or are you using a different server?

Yes I am running the server from the Sheild

Yea I wonder if that performance mode setting is newer? Donā€™t remember seeing it before.

I also wonder if turning off ipv6 helped with the network issues since Iā€™ve heard there can be compatibility problems using it.

Anytime I have setup a shield for some of my clients ... I always ..

  1. Disable Sleep mode.... developer mode.
    2 Make sure usb is max performance... where drive is connected.