My 1Tb box has progressively become more flaky over the past couple of months: slow-to-respond remote control, delayed reaction to commands, "Channel Scrambled" message, inability to record a channel and play back a previous recording at the same time. Disk was about 2/3 full. Some furious disk access sounds have also been heard.
After several recent recordings had missing minutes (e.g. a one hour recording only had 53 minutes), and another one failed at 38 minutes due to "power failure", I tried a long recording. I recorded the Eurovision Song Contest which eventually lasted 3.5 hours (the BBC added 15 mins on the fly). As it was recording, I noticed that the BBC News Channel ticker tape was very glitchy. Video seemed to momentarily stall and speed up again, almost like an old movie.
The Eurovision recording managed to get truncated from 3.5 hours to 3 hours. Playback was halted at the mid-point by the HDR T2 resetting itself. Subsequent playback seemed okay with some blocking / "No signal" message.
I decided to reformat the disk, reset to defaults and deleted and manually rescanned for channels. So far, the machine has performed perfectly. I imagine that the disk must have had some major fragmentation of files. The programmes lost are not of much value; they'll likely be rebroadcast another time.
What does annoy me is that large disk sizes appear to offer no benefit over smaller ones: what is the point of a 1Tb disk if only half of it can be used, and using any more than half causes progressive failure?
