3TB and 4TB Drives. The Danger!

Oh, yeah. I forgot to note - WinXP Pro SP3 working fine with 4K sector size 3 TB drive in GoFlex enclosure.

 

300GB was nice back when we were recording SD and that could hold 200+ hours, but if you record primarily HD, it fills up real fast. 3TB is actually a reasonable number for a HD DVR in my book.

Alas, another problem is that the DVRs weren't designed with that much space in mind. It's not surprising that an MRV'd DVR with a combined playlist is going to get sluggish when those playlists can hold 10x the data originally intended.

 

I wouldn't say that blindly (but I would be glad to see blueprints of FW) at least what I saw: they does employ DB approach for store and update EPG and system info ...

 

That's because XP supports 4k logical sectors for a *secondary* USB drive. Take the drive out of the enclosure and connect it directly to SATA and see what happens. My motherboard thinks a 3TB hard drive is only 800 GB (the capacity overflowed: 3 TB - 2.2 TB = 800 GB).

The drive inside the GoFlex enclosure has physical 512 bytes/sector, yet has 4k logical sectors in order to get around the MBR limit. That's a hardware modification -- you've added a special hard disk controller to get around the limit. How would D* put that inside millions of existing DVRs?

There are also other third-party drivers that let XP support GPT. But that hard drive can't contain the system partition, because that driver can't load until the kernel is loaded.

If people have tried it with an HR2x and it doesn't work, then the OS they have (or the chipset they have) doesn't support it. I don't think they're changing code just to add support to something that's not officially supported.

 

That happens with Tivos. When I increased the size of my Series 1's hard drive from 20 GB to 120 GB, and I had a lot of shows saved on it, it would take 8 seconds to bring up the playlist. Deleting a bunch of shows sped it right back up. Trick play was not affected. But that 54 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM just couldn't process that gigantic database quickly. The same thing happens with the Series 4, but to a lesser extent.

 

My HR24 and my HR34 do not show any signs of speed changes based on the drive being empty or completely full, I've checked, they always work at the same speeds, and that's with 2tb drives. My hr21s slow down a little, which Leeds me to believe that they are just underpowered, since they are slow anyway, even compared to an HR20.

 

I'd bet for 99% of DirecTV subs though, the only reason to have a 3tb drive would be because they have a lot of people recording different things with little overlap, so a failure would only cause everyone to lose a little bit of programing, and not everyone to lose 3tb worth of recordings.

 

You got it backwards:

Code:

 'hdparm -I' knows that this is a native 4k disk:
       Model Number:       ST3000DM001-9YN166
       Logical  Sector size:                   512 bytes
       Physical Sector size:                  4096 bytes
       Logical Sector-0 offset:                  0 bytes
       device size with M = 1024*1024:     2861588 MBytes
       device size with M = 1000*1000:     3000592 MBytes (3000 GB)

Here is good reading about 4K sectors, emulation etc : http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-drives-master-ti/

 

This thread is funny. We have so many ideas, and DirecTV must just laugh all day long because all of our wants in this regard are probably shared by less than10k subs, making all these ideas of how to provide redundancy not worth the time to even consider for them, especially when a workaround exists, which I think rich is taking advantage of to its fullest.

 

About the same for OTA yet they have a product for that.

The problem is a catch-22. The "average consumer" doesn't have a clue about what might happen (many don't even backup their computers). And most won't ever see a hardware failure. But when someone gets hit, even more so now with a "Home Media Server" and likely pending storage increase, it's gonna hurt. Until they get hit they won't know to ask for solutions. And with no official product available to solve it they aren't alerted to the possibilities.

You can bet that nobody at DTV or a retailer is going to tell a customer what will happen if a DVR fails unless they are directly asked about it. They have nothing to "up sell" and they sure don't want to advertise their weaknesses.

Consider if just 1 company, cable, DISH, whatever, starts selling a more resilient device, even as an optional premium product. Then they will be explaining to consumers why they might want it. This will create demand for a product that doesn't currently (officially) exist. Because people like reliable products. Then all the sudden all the competitors will have to offer a more reliable product. Why be the follower? Try leading for a change.

The workaround is a PITA for most.

 

So the fact that everyone in my family has to share the pain is going to make it less?

Sure not the way my family works. I'd be the one getting the mob of "customer" complaints. They can lynch me. :lol:

This is no different than a home computer network. Our server has RAID storage too (and backups).

It's all a no-brainer. These are services that should be as reliable as anything else in the house. Would a similar failure rate be acceptable for a furnace, air conditioner, water heater, stove, refrigerator, freezer, microwave, ...? Those are all more reliable and to top it off one can get a service guy here with parts really quickly and when they are done it's back to full operation. May not even lose food. Lose a freezer full of food because of slow service and it's the same kind of $$ loss.

I know it's just TV. If I lost 2 months worth of a series where the story evolves each episode then I pretty much lost the whole season. Total value is comparable to a freezer full of food. With DTV I know that a failure means that I lose it all regardless of how fast the service.

 

No, I'm (almost) right. I should have made it more clear that the controller is doing the emulation of the 4k logical sectors. The drive is definitely 512 bytes/sector. Do you have the 3 TB version of this drive?

http://www.everythingusb.com/seagate-goflex-desk-external-hard-drive-21441.html

Scroll down to "Breaking the 2TB Limit".

In theory, if such a device exists for eSATA instead of USB, then you might be able to use it. 4k logical sector support has been in Linux for quite a while. But the capacity rollover I described above (with my old motherboard) could still be an issue.

 

You're still not get it right. You just ignoring data what is posted; BTW, I got the data from MY OWN DRIVE.

Please read original SEAGATE docs, not the some user like you posts (if you will re-read his explanation again you could get grasp of 4k native size (and 512e for OS concept) properly) . And lets finish the off-topic posting.

 

Pardon my butting in on this argument, but what you are showing here is a AF drive in 512e mode. That's fine...this is required for a lots of software (like backup/restore programs) that interact with the drive at a sector level and are not 4K sector aware.

But I am unclear about what that has to do with the original issue of MBR vs. GPT. I guess you could have a MBR drive, using 4k logical and physical sectors exceed the 2.2TB limit, but both your hardware and your OS (and any direct disk accessing software) would have to understand 4K sectors. Boot from a "traditional" disk and add a driver and you can avoid some of the hardware (BIOS) issues, and maybe you could run via 512e on the storage only drive.

But 512e is not a good solution for a DVR since you will often have the situation of misaligned file boundaries. If one video file uses 3 emulated 512 sectors inside one 4K sector, and then the next file wants to use the other 5, you'd have to read the entire 4K sector into memory, merge the new data with the old, and then rewrite the entire sector. This is bound to happen since the DVR software, by definition in this example, thinks it is running on a 512 byte sector drive. Now imagine doing this for 5 write and 3 read processes at once and you pretty soon get someplace I don't think you want to be.

Sure, there are plenty of ways to get 4K sector drives to work...but given the parameters of a DVR I think you either want it done via 512 byte emulation in some dedicated hardware (i.e. a USB drive, which is how Dish does it) or you want to do it through native 4K sector support in the OS (which is exactly what DirecTV has done in the HR34).

 

I think you're 100% correct...there would be "official" external drive enclosures. DirecTV has shown that they like nice, predictable, installation configurations. This is not uncommon...most companies want to make things as cookie-cutter as possible - it is the easiest way to scale an operation. There is no way they would ever support "any old" ESATA drive/enclosure.