i tried this about a year ago but i quit when the external hard drive i was using to save the recorded shows became virtual unusable, even when the service was no longer running, and the only fix was to format the drive. i was afraid that the same thing would happen if i used my main windows drive and it scared me off. i thought it was just service was running it too hard and wore out the drive but i found the same thing happens on another dvr service (playon). has anybody else had a problem like that using an external hard drive on dvr services like this?
I use External USB 3 Drives and have had no problems with Channels/Emby/Plex DVR.
What make and model drive you using?
hard drives fail, some brands more often than not.
Your statement is not very informative or usefull.
Was it a new drive, or one u used before?
Did you check the SMART stats before you used it, then after it failed to see what failed?
I have platter drives that are 15yrs old and still are 100% with no bad sectors with over 100 TB's worth of read writes history.
I used Samsung SSDs for my DVRs and even my CCTV cameras dvr, been running fine for years and still running strong.
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the drive didn't fail. the recording directory became unusable. whenever i tried to access it windows would freeze up and i couldn't delete anything. the rest of the drive would be laggy as hell and take forever to load directory. this only happened if i was like recording 3 shows at once for long periods of time. i wonder if the problem is the hard drive isn't meant to be accessed that vigorously in such a short period of time. if the failure on the hard drive part then it would never be usable again. i've had multiple externals including ones that weren't very old happen to them.
sorry i wasn't clearer. the problem only seems to happen with recording on external drives. i wondered if there was a reason. right now i'm using an sd card and am not having any problems.
There is a known issue with windows explorer when viewing some media files. It can cause explorer to hang. It’s been discussed at length here on the forums, although it’s been a while. A search would turn it up I think. Any chance that’s the issue?
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but only on external drives? i don't have that problem when i use an sd card or my internal windows drive. sorry i just started using this again yesterday and haven't looked much on the forum.
i just thought of something. the big difference between internal hard drive and external hard drive is the limitation of the usb 3.0 connection. could it be that trying to access the files while recordings are being made is too much for the usb 3.0 connection?
Could be the cable, connector on the PC, internal hub, chipset, drivers, antivirus, Windows setting for the hub, port, etc.
You haven't even said if it's USB3 drive and USB3 port or drive make and model.
Did you run a disk test from the manufacturer?
Did you run Windows chkdsk on it?
All we can do is guess.
EDIT: Forgot to add it could also be the drive trying to pull too much power from the bus if it's not externally powered.
Try accessing it from a computer running non Windows. Like Linux or MacOS.
If it does the same thing, then it is the drive or cable, or some hardware issue.
It no, then its Windows....
I would also suggest checking your power plan settings if you're using Windows 10.
I got burned on that one with a new laptop, that even when plugged into AC the external drives would power down and it took up to 30 seconds for them to powerup and become ready.
I ended up using the powercfg command to set the DISKIDLE time on AC power to 0.
POWERCFG /X disk-timeout-ac 0
POWERCFG /Q will displays the contents of the current power scheme.
Forgot to add POWERCFG /? X will list values you can change
POWERCFG /? X
POWERCFG /CHANGE <SETTING> <VALUE>
Alias: POWERCFG /X
Description: Modifies a setting value in the current power scheme.
Parameter List:
<SETTING> Specifies one of the following options:
monitor-timeout-ac
monitor-timeout-dc
disk-timeout-ac
disk-timeout-dc
standby-timeout-ac
standby-timeout-dc
hibernate-timeout-ac
hibernate-timeout-dc
<VALUE> Specifies the new value, in minutes.
Examples: POWERCFG /CHANGE monitor-timeout-ac 5
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I was concerned about recording to an external HD, so I let the main recording directory be on an internal HD (old Windows laptop). So now all the main horsepower stuff takes place on the internal HD. Once a week, I just do a sweep and move almost everything to a secondary directory on an external HD. I don't have any issues playing back from the external HD except it might take a few seconds to get going if it hasn't been accessed in a while.