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HD-FOX CF Host UPD

Black Hole said:
I think I've found an icon which is not listed in the wiki:
Click to expand...
That's the recording drive symbol (obvious, I know). You can give the recording drive a name too, which will be displayed here rather than 'drive1'.
It looks like you have an NFS share set up as the drive free space is larger than it should be.
The issues I found with a USB stick are that timeshift can be stuttery on high def. channels and that it was not possible to boot into HDR mode: this seems to require a hard drive.
 
I'm pleased to report no hitches (so far) with this new Kingston 64GB (not GiB!) UPD, with the TSR working fine (very handy).

The constant hammering of the TSR buffer gives me an incentive to turn it off when not in use, not something I bothered with previously. It would be great to have a hybrid UPD - some of it Flash but with a large chunk of RAM. There is no need to preserve the TSR buffer over a power-down.
 
Well, here I am two months later... and it's failed. The TSR has stopped working (even though the UPD is still identified as a recording drive), and the [Modsettings] folder is empty therefore no remote shares (it was working this morning). Actual recordings still seem to be present though (intermittent). Pressing the record button produced an error message on the front panel display and a reboot. And the CF isn't working.

The situation isn't quite the same as previous failures, this time I have been hammering the UPD with TSR buffering.

I give up. I'll source a cheap portable HDD - or use one of those I have knocking around already. As a bedroom installation though, the silence of a solid state drive was ideal.
 
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Black Hole said:
As a bedroom installation though, the silence of a solid state drive was ideal.
Click to expand...
Now that SSD drives are getting really affordable why not put a small capacity SSD in a USB housing? I suspect you wouldn't have TRIM support so you would lose some performance but you should still have way more performance than is required.
 
Would not the problem that BH appears to have had with the flash 'wearing out' be the same on an SSD?
 
Trev said:
Would not the problem that BH appears to have had with the flash 'wearing out' be the same on an SSD?
Click to expand...

USB sticks appear to have particularly cheap flash chips, very slow and wear out quickly. Presumably the makers don't expect you to thrash them. An SDD should have considerably better quality flash chips in it, since it expects to work hard.
 
Trev said:
Would not the problem that BH appears to have had with the flash 'wearing out' be the same on an SSD?
Click to expand...
Ultimately yes (because all flash memory has a limited number of write cycles) but I would guess it would be a great deal slower as SSD drives have much more sophisticated controllers.
 
Black Hole said:
Well, here I am two months later... and it's failed. The TSR has stopped working (even though the UPD is still identified as a recording drive), and the [Modsettings] folder is empty therefore no remote shares (it was working this morning). Actual recordings still seem to be present though (intermittent). Pressing the record button produced an error message on the front panel display and a reboot. And the CF isn't working.

The situation isn't quite the same as previous failures, this time I have been hammering the UPD with TSR buffering.
Click to expand...
Mine failed after a very few months of very light usage. No TSR as it wasn't big enough.
I give up. I'll source a cheap portable HDD - or use one of those I have knocking around already. As a bedroom installation though, the silence of a solid state drive was ideal.
Click to expand...
It's a shame nobody was interested in helping out more with the diskless/network drive solution.
 
My network isn't fast enough for that (not from the bedroom anyway). Your diskless project is doomed to failure if running it requires hosting the software on a UPD which only lives for a few months (albeit an interesting project). The other use I can see for it (recording direct to a central server) is stymied by the encryption.

This always was an experiment, although I am surprised I keep trashing UPDs even without a TSR function, and even more surprised there are so few reports of it happening. I guess there are few people with HD-FOXes using them with CF but without a real HDD connected.

af123 was trying similar, he has not reported failure.

It would not be beyond the wit of man to knock up a hybrid device which puts the TSR into RAM, but that's a project which gets added to the maybe... sometime list. I see I can pick up a 60GB Kingston SSD for £27 (I don't buy from Hong Kong if I can help it), so for the sake of the chase I'll try it out.
 
I'm about to try a 128GB UPD on my Sammy TV to replace the 1TB HDD. I run the HDD with timeshift (TSR) on. I mainly only use the HDD for timeshift and only actually record on it on the occasions that I have run out of recording channels on my T2
 
At about £30 for a 120GB SSD, it's not a great deal more expensive than a huge UPD (although one needs to add a USB-SATA adapter/enclosure to that cost).
 
The one that just died was a Sandisk Cruzer (or purported to be, anyway). It is in a "micro" package though - I wonder if heat build-up has anything to do with it?
 
Black Hole said:
I see I can pick up a 60GB Kingston SSD for £27
Click to expand...
I had to change one of those this morning because I got a nasty warning about impending disk failure. Only 5500 hours old as well and not had that much wear'n'tear as far as I know. Hope the other machines don't suffer the same fate otherwise I'm going to be a bit narked.
SMART reported:
231 SSD_Life_Left 0x0013 001 001 010 Pre-fail Always FAILING NOW 1
Before it was:
231 SSD_Life_Left 0x0013 098 098 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
Everything else looked happy.
 
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