Great tips! I know @tmm1 that you mentioned this previously but I guess I forgot since I am not located with the Shield and HDD. I will have to have my daughter check the drive to see if it can support an external power supply.
Edwin, I think I had those sleep modes disabled before I shipped it over to PA, but I will try to get her to check that for me too. Do you think maybe those sleep modes are what was kicking in at midnight (my time) and caused the DVR drops I was seeing?
OK the server crashed again. It happened late Thursday. It always seems to happen then, most likely because it’s the heaviest recording day of the week with multiple simultaneous recordings happening. I got it back up and went into the logs and here’s what it showed in RED:
2020/02/27 23:22:41 write tcp 192.168.3.182:8089->98.151.102.81:57999: write: broken pipe
GET /dvr/files HTTP/1.1
Host: 6c76cb898ed2.channelsdvr.net:8089
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: en-us
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: session=...
User-Agent: Channels%20DVR/1.14.1948 CFNetwork/1121.2.51 Darwin/19.3.0
All this text was in the color red. Any ideas?
Sorry just getting time to do this for you, but my log now doesn't go back far enough to cover that time period. Do I do that HUGE "....n=-1" log download again to send to you, or is there a smaller file solution that will go back far enough, like 2 weeks or so?
You can use an n=50000 to get more lines. It just needs to include enough to be when you believe there was a crash.
OK I just sent the logs, back dated to 2/26, just before the crash.
I also mentioned I am having a lot of issues getting TVE loaded for our Xfinity account. I posted in another thread here, but was wondering since I sent the logs for this, if you could also see if there are any clues as to why this is happening too, while you're perusing my log files for this issue?
This is where I posted the Xfinity issue:
I got the logs. It doesn't appear that the DVR crashed at all.
That message that you saw was harmless.
I did notice that you had a number of log messages that looked like this:
2020/02/28 01:00:08.330788 [WRN] Buffer for 131AEEA1 ch1250 is more than 99% full (clients=1, len=33219788)
for recordings around that time. It appears the only thing "watching" that channel was a recording, which would indicate that your disk is unable to keep up with how much you are trying to record. So, your disk is either having problems or it is overloaded and you need a faster one. Most disks do not have any problem keeping up with multiple recordings, so something is unusual here.
I also noticed you're still having these errors as you were before so it does appear the disk is still having issues.
2020/03/02 15:02:24.601023 [M3U8] Generator: err=cannot create temp file: open /storage/A8E26A9EE26A710C/NVIDIA_SHIELD/Streaming/m3u8/2504/stream.m3u8795610442: no such file or directoryOK thanks. I am seeing more of those errors from yesterday:
2020/03/03 10:59:00.510859 [TNR] Opened connection to 131AEEA1/0 for ch1613 AXSTV
2020/03/03 10:59:00.894341 [DVR] Recording for job 1583269140-78 from 131AEEA1 ch1613 into "TV/The Top Ten Revealed/The Top Ten Revealed S01E07 Songs About Sex 2020-03-03-1059.mpg" for 31m59.973100149s
2020/03/03 10:59:00.917871 [IDX] Generating video index for job 1583269140-78
2020/03/03 11:06:27.824453 [M3U8] Generator: err=cannot create temp file: open /storage/A8E26A9EE26A710C/NVIDIA_SHIELD/Streaming/m3u8/2509/stream.m3u8896424428: no such file or directory
2020/03/03 11:18:09.622039 [M3U8] Generator: err=cannot create temp file: open /storage/A8E26A9EE26A710C/NVIDIA_SHIELD/Streaming/m3u8/2509/stream.m3u8616723074: no such file or directory
2020/03/03 11:31:00.492362 [TNR] Closed connection to 131AEEA1/0 for ch1613 AXSTV
I did try adding a "Y" USB cable to increase the power to the HDD, but apparently that's still not enough. I am going to try adding an external USB 5V power supply to see if that fixes this once and for all. Do you think a solid state hard drive would work better? They're pretty expensive compared to disc based per GB, but it's worth it if it is all that will fix this.
SSDs have much lower power requirements, but the increase is cost per GB isn't worth the trouble.
I'll just stick to the mantra that external USB drives should always be powered by an external supply, not the bus itself.
(I know that the specs say that the Shield will supply a constant voltage directly to the USB bus, but what is true on paper versus experienced in reality are often quite different.)
Most users have success with spinning disks. Unless you have a very unusual workload an average speed spinning disk should be fine. There’s something particular about your drive that is causing issues that most people don’t experience.
It could be a sign the drive is failing. Are you able to run diagnostics on it? (maybe by unplugging it from the Shield and plugging it into a laptop or desktop) Most disk brands have utilities that you can download from their websites for free.
Thank you and I'd have to agree. I will try to get my daughter to assist with adding the power supply whenever she can, which is the hard part! 
This Shield is totally dedicated to Channels DVR only. I recently had my daughter remove all the apps which can be removed, with the exception of Channels DVR of course. There shouldn't be any unusual workloads with it.
In a normal situation, should the Shield's 3 GB RAM and ARMv8 quad core processor be enough to record, transcode and playback multiple, simultaneous streams (ATSC/MPEG2, TVE, etc.) without issue?
Unfortunately the Shield Server with external HDD are remotely located at my house in PA. My daughter lives there while going to college nearby, but she is very busy and is not very technically literate, so I have to FaceTime with her and walk her through it which takes an inordinate amount of time explaining each step. I keep it all to the bare minimum.
The easiest thing to do I think is to have her try a power supply and if that doesn't fix it, send a new SSD HDD or a disc based one with a power supply, but then I have to walk her through moving the DVR storage location. 
From your previous comments, it sounds as if the HDD does not have a connector/barrel jack for a power supply. (Although, if I'm wrong, that's a good thing.)
To ensure your drive is getting sufficient power, put a powered USB hub between the Shield and the drive. That way the extra power will be certain to drive the HDD, and it will ignore the (possibly) insufficient power coming from the Shield's bus.
(Perhaps it's just me, but I've never seen/used an external USB HDD that didn't have an external/separate power supply. The only bus-powered external HDDs I've seen/used were FireWire-based—a spec which allowed for more bandwidth and power than USB2 did at the time.)
This is the drive I am using, a Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB. It gets its power from the USB bus:
I was going to put a USB style power cube like that from a phone charger on the power side of this USB Y adapter. Do you think that'll work?
Here is a question in the manual for this model and I am wondering if maybe this could be the issue, like when the Shield comes out of sleep and the drive is also sleeping?
Q: Did you get an error message telling you that the drive has been disconnected when coming out of sleep mode?
A: Ignore this message since the drive remounts on the desktop despite the pop-up. Seagate drives
conserve power by spinning down when you set your computer to sleep mode. When the computer
awakes from sleep mode, the drive may not have enough time to spin up, causing the pop-up to appear.
That cable looks like it takes the feed from the computer and splits it into a data+power stream and a power-only stream; in other words, the opposite of what you want.
If your drive does not have a separate discrete power input, I believe your best option is to put a powered hub between the Shield and your drive.
I don't believe that is true based on when I researched this cable. I will double check.
Here is the description on the Amazon page I bought it from:
Description
This USB 3.0 dual charge cable is made for connection and additional power supply of your USB 3.0 devices. Thus you can connect e.g. external 2.5 or 3.5 HDD enclosure or other USB 3.0 external hard drives etc. With the USB3.0 adapter extension code connecting to your notebook or PC without additional power supply .
The USB3.0 cable extensiion offers a convenient connection to hard-drive enclosures, printers, modems, cameras, and other USB-compatible devices.USB 3.0 standard support data transfer speed up to 5Gbps, 10x faster than USB 2.0 cable.
Yes, as I said:
In other words, everything is flowing from the single-ended side to the double-ended side. That cord does not allow power to be injected into anything, it merely splits the power coming from a computer's USB hub.
No you are wrong. The single ended side is a female USB connector, so it can't connect to the PC's female USB port. Read the description more closely and go to the product web page.
Otherwise we will agree to disagree, but thanks for your assistance, it's much appreciated.
Well, without knowing what product you're talking about, everything is guess work. The only link you posted was to the external drive you are using. In reference to this Y-cable you've purchased, all you've posted is a picture. And from the posted description with the picture, it is not going to serve the purpose you are hoping for.
If you have additional information, then please post. But otherwise, without concrete details everything is guess work. We can't magically know your exact situation unless you provide the details.
