NS2 stumbling with recording live TV

[Fuddyduddy]

Hello

I've not so far installed firmware ver. 16.1. Since I hadn't been having any problems with ver. 16.0, I was quite content to continue running that (in keeping with the wise old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it").

Now however a problem has developed but I've no way of knowing if just installing ver. 16.1 will fix it. It seems to be linked with the usb hard drive I've had plugged-into my NS2 (front socket) for some time now, to store backups (using Cron scheduler) of some of the NS2's more critical files. Recently I've begun to notice that the usb drive's LED has started continually blinking rhythmically, instead of remaining lit and only blinking for so long as the drive is being accessed. This suggests to me that the NS2 is trying to write-to or read-from the drive and failing to, and instead just cycling continuously.

At much the same time as noticing this I began having problems with recording live TV to the NS2; twenty minutes or so into a film long freezes started occurring, more and more frequently until becoming unwatchable. There's still plenty of room on both the NS2's and the external drive.

I'm wondering if you can please advise me what steps I might take to problem-shoot this, in what order?

Thanks in advance.

Regards

[raidsm]

Just curious, how do you record live TV to the NS2?

[Fuddyduddy]

My program of choice is DVBViewer, with its spin-off "recording service" (which is a media server). I have this installed on the HTPC in our viewing-room, for both viewing and recording broadcast TV; recordings are streamed to the NS2 over our LAN.

[Fuddyduddy]

Hello again!

I've been doing some digging around and on the WD Community website there are a lot of posts from users who've had the "blinking light" syndrome with their WD usb external drives. Most of them have had to scrap the drives, and some have lost valued data; however, that aside (because it's not been my experience (yet!)) there seems to be a consensus that a major cause of problems with these drives is insufficient power.

I imagine that that could well be the case when one is - like mine - connected to a NS2 and therefore is drawing its power from that over the usb connection. But I'm only speculating.

Anyone who knows about these things care to comment?

Edit
Forgot to mention that my drive is a WD Elements 1TB

[fvdw]

Difficult to advise, what happens with usb drive if you plug it into another pc? Does it then work normal? If not the drive has a problem. If it works fine on another pc then the power supply of the usb port of the nwsp2 may be border line for this usb drive. When getting older drives may consume more power, certainly to spin up.
What file system do you have on the usb disk? If we know that you could run a file system check program to find out if the disk has problems.

[raidsm]

maybe try to plug the drive on the NS2 through a USB powered hub if you have one?

As it's a WD element , I think the drive has only a usb port and doesn't have the standard SATA port which make it impossible to remove from the case and test it on a sata to usb adapter (other than the one usually found on this kind of disk) to look for some errors and smart information...

[Fuddyduddy]

Hi fvdw

Yes, I did switch the WD usb drive to another computer. As a result I've concluded (provisionally) that there's nothing wrong with it and that the "coincidence" I thought I had noted between its flashing and the faults I was getting when recording to the NS2 was exactly that - pure coincidence, not cause and effect. (The file system is NTFS).

So now I'm concentrating on the NS2. To test that I have to record something long enough for faults to show themselves, and had to wait 'til last night for any film I could bear to sit through. Its programmed recording duration was from 0003 to 0215 but this morning I find that only 54 minutes has been recorded.

I'm investigating as to possible causes (and shall view the recording later to see if it has freezes). But at the moment the finger of suspicion is pointing at the NS2.

@raidsm

I think my testing it by connecting it to a PC will have had the same outcome (reported above) as your suggested test, but thanks for the suggestion. Yes you're right that the WD Elements has no other connection than usb. Posters on the WD website had resorted to opening-up the case by brute force in order to try to retrieve their data off the disk!

[Fuddyduddy]

Have somehow managed to delete my (truncated) guinea-pig recording, and will now have to find another bearable film to record.

Watch this space!