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Replacing hard disk

M

meridian30

New Member
I think the hard drive in my HDR-1100S is getting flaky, it's 7 years old. I'm happy swapping it over, but can I copy all the recordings across from the old disk to the new one? I have an external drive bay that I can put the two drives into for the copy operation. I know they are encrypted.

Many thanks

David
 
meridian30 said:
I think the hard drive in my HDR-1100S is getting flaky, it's 7 years old. I'm happy swapping it over, but can I copy all the recordings across from the old disk to the new one? I have an external drive bay that I can put the two drives into for the copy operation. I know they are encrypted.
Click to expand...
Can you describe the symptoms of the hard drive problem i.e. what do you mean by flaky?
 
Mostly it's pixellation when replaying recordings. And I bought it in 2017, and in my experience 7 years is a good age for a hard disk, I usually expect them to be going bad after 5 years, so this is partly a precautionary measure while I don't have too many unwatched recordings. I already have a new unused spare 2 Tb drive.

It also occurred to me that I could use the external drive bay, which has a USB interface, to continue to watch the existing recordings, while new recordings go to the new internal drive.

David
 
meridian30 said:
I already have a new unused spare 2 Tb drive.
Click to expand...
Suitable for PVR use? Choose with care.

meridian30 said:
t also occurred to me that I could use the external drive bay, which has a USB interface, to continue to watch the existing recordings, while new recordings go to the new internal drive.
Click to expand...
That is one possibility I advise for HDR-FOX, but I have no idea whether it would work for 1100S.

It is possible your drive isn't actually faulty, it might just need a clean up. I doubt the Humax menus offer anything in the way of a clean up short of the reformat sledge hammer, which obviously requires wanted recordings to be offloaded first.

You could give your HDD a clean up (ie run e2fsck, the Linux equivalent of Windows chkdsk) by connecting it to a system running Linux (don't do it in Windows).
 
I don't do Linux, I'm afraid. And Windows CHKDSK doesn't do any serious clean-up. The spare drive is certified for video use, I've used this model before and had it do 5-6 years before failing, which is good enough. I can extract the dubious drive, stick it in the external drive bay and run some serious tests using HD Sentinel, but my experience of the bathtub curve is that 5 years is a good age for a drive, seven is unusual, so it's time for a replacement, since I have the drive already. Better to be early than late when replacing a drive.
 
meridian30 said:
I don't do Linux, I'm afraid.
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If you want to keep existing recordings, you might find you need to. The key point is that Windows will not understand the HDR-1100S's file system, and could wreck it.

There's no problem with Linux, the interface is GUI (just like WIndows), and you can just download a live Linux to boot from a USB drive/stick without affecting your Windows installation. GParted is a good one, it provides very useful system repair tools and could even rescue data from a dead Windows. Any command-line tools you might need to use can be googled for details, just like you would before using unfamiliar Windows tools.

meridian30 said:
my experience of the bathtub curve is that 5 years is a good age for a drive, seven is unusual
Click to expand...
Are you sure about that? I have three HDR-FOXes dating from 2010-2012 still running their original HDDs. The duty cycle on (correctly chosen) PVR drives is slow and continuous, so is far less stressful than for PC HDDs.
 
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Windows won't change a drive in an external box, I've been down this road before. Nor will it insist on formatting the new drive.
MartinLiddle said:
It won't work on one of the Humax Freesat boxes. As far as I know , the USB port is only useful for software updates..
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The manual says, on page 34 under Troubleshooting:

a) Check if the USB hard drive is connected for recording purpose.

But says nothing else at all about a USB hard drive. They may include a USB thumb drive as a potential recording target, but I doubt it.
 
meridian30 said:
Windows won't change a drive in an external box, I've been down this road before. Nor will it insist on formatting the new drive.

The manual says, on page 34 under Troubleshooting:

a) Check if the USB hard drive is connected for recording purpose.
Click to expand...
I suspect that is a reference to the HB-1100S that should have been deleted in the HDR-1100S manual. Anyway try it and see.
 
meridian30 said:
my experience of the bathtub curve is that 5 years is a good age for a drive, seven is unusual,
Click to expand...
I would beg to differ. I've had loads of drives that have done 70-80 thousand hours and some that had done well over 120000. Most of them were perfectly good when they went in the bin.
Conversely I've had things die at a relatively young age (fewer than 40000, which is < 5 years).
It's just stupid to replace things based on age - drives can die at any time (my 4TB one that died recently was relatively young).
Pixellation could be caused by several things.
 
Final summary - first thank you for all your comments, they've been very instructive. Yesterday I removed the drive and gave it a thorough test with Hard Disk Sentinel, and also checked the SMART data. Although the drtive has been in use for at least 7 years it's only been powered on for 932 days, so less than 3 years. The SMART data shows no sign of problems, no reallocated sectors, no pending sectors and no uncorrectable sectors. So I put it back in the Humax box and it should be OK for another 5 years, I hope.
 
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