Disc crash?

In the interests of not losing a ton of stuff (OK I'd probably never have got round to watching most of it:)), last night I started copying my ailing hummy's 1TB disc (about 600GByte used, all SD content) to a freshly FAT32 formatted 1TB USB drive (Hitachi "Simple Drive") plugged in the front panel USB. I'm underwhelmed by the transfer rate: something on the order of 10 hours to do 100GByte, give or take a factor of two, which works out about 2.6MByte/s c.f backups from a PC to these drives which I measured running at over 13MByte/s. I think I'll have to stop my mass "select all" copy and be a bit more selective what I really want to keep! But I don't actually know how to cancel a started copy, or what the hummy's equivalent of a PC's "safely remove drive" is for that matter.

If the USB drive copy rate seems suspiciously slow compared with anyone else's Hummy experience I'd love to know and I'll test some other drives/cables (though usually when USB goes bad I find it reverts back to the absolutely dire sub-1MByte/s rates of USB1.0, and clearly this is doing better).

Previous transfers by FTP (powerline ethernet units) worked out about 6.7MByte/s to or from the hummy. I'm guessing the slow transfer to a local disk might be something to do with this decryption business (whereas the FTP just copies the encrypted content). Interestingly, the Humax support person I talked to today seemed to be claiming that FTP-ed content would be restorable on any other HDR-FOX T2 model (ie the encryption keys are common to the model, not to the individual units)... but I'm not entirely sure one of us wasn't misunderstanding the other. Anyone verified this or interested in testing it ?
 
I did start to experiment with transplanting recordings, but the file I ripped to send to somebody else with a HDR-FOX wouldn't even play when restored to my machine let alone another one. I've not got around to picking up the threads on this since, but there is a lot of hear-say evidence against it. It would be worth proving finally one way or the other.

I suggest somebody makes a very short HiDef recording, does nothing to decrypt it, and checks they can put it back and play it locally (I failed when I copied it back to a different folder rather than overwrite my original and risk ruining it - I don't know if that caused a problem). Then put it on a file share somewhere and we can all download it and see what happens.

Ref data transfer rates, I was getting about 200MB/min copying from the Humax to a USB portable drive (see Trail Guide, Stage 1.8) so that's not a lot different from what you are experiencing. My Hummy is over a year old now - if I want to back it up in its entirety I will extract the hard drive and access it directly.
 
Well we got a warranty replacement a few weeks ago.

Interestingly all the stuff it took several days to copy off the hummy to a USB drive went back onto the new one overnight. Strangely asymmetric.

Bit dubious about the new box too unfortunately. Nothing like the previous one's disk problems, but on four occasions now have found it unresponsive to remote or front panel switches and have had to power cycle it and found it has missed recordings. The old box at least didn't crash hard. Hmmm.
 
Interestingly all the stuff it took several days to copy off the hummy to a USB drive went back onto the new one overnight. Strangely asymmetric.

That makes sense to me. When copying SD content off, the box decrypts it - in hardware but it still adds latency. Copying back on is just a direct copy.
 
Bit dubious about the new box too unfortunately. Nothing like the previous one's disk problems, but on four occasions now have found it unresponsive to remote or front panel switches and have had to power cycle it and found it has missed recordings. The old box at least didn't crash hard. Hmmm.
I don't like the sound of that. Don't get stuck with a pig in a poke!
 
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