azbox likes one hard drive but not another??

[Mr Tony]

I swear every receiver I own is possessed

So I decided to hook up a hard drive to my azbox elite. Hooked up a simple 40GB portable. Needed to use both USB plugs to make it work. But it seemed to work. But 40GB is pretty small

So I plugged in my Western Digital 320GB drive. Worked great on the Sonicview and Visionsat. Had to reformat it to Linux. Recorded a few files. Some 4:2:0, some 4:2:2 and one 4:2:0 HD. Did 5 minute "bites" of recordings

Then I tried to play them back. The 4:2:0 SD one played but when I would FF through it when I would hit play again it stayed where it was originally (ie: if I was 1 minute in and hit FF to the 4 minute mark, when I hit play it went back to 1 minute).
The 4:2:2 kept freezing and I couldnt fast forward. Then I hit stop and exited out and the channel I was on was a black screen. I had to reboot the machine to get the channels back.
The 4:2:0 was high bitrate so it stuttered and wouldnt work.

Whats weird is the 320GB drive seems to make the azbox do weird things when playing back recordings. Recordings will show 0:00:00 for time yet it recorded. Or it will make the box need a reboot to show channels again

Yet the 40GB portable drive works fine. Plays the programs fine (except for the HD feed). I know the original azbox I had worked fine with the hard drive. I ended up selling that one when I got the one from Brent636 with the network port shot in it.

Anybody else have issues with specific drives on the azbox?

 

[mr3p]

you mentioned that you reformatted the 320gb drive, was that with the azbox?

 

[Mr Tony]

yes

It was a NFTS before that when hooked to the Visionsat. I formatted it to Linux thru the azbox

 

[AcWxRadar]

Ice,

Yes, the AZBox is very "picky" about the HDD used. Several contributing factors seem to commonthread in discussion. Power demand, read/write speed, disc RPM and total memory size.

I am sure of this, 1 TB is the maximum recommended size and 5400 RPM is preferred over 7200 RPM. Of course, the lowest power consumption is always preferred. The external USB HDDs with their own power supply seem to lean to being more versatile. It sounds like you had to use one USB port for power and one for data?

I was extremely fortunate that when I bought my AZBox, I had another receiver that came with an internal HDD installed from the factory, the AB IPBox. I robbed that HDD out of it to use in the AZBox and it worked great. This was a Samsung HD502HI HDD. I wanted to experiment with a second AZBox and so I ordered a second HDD for it - I stuck with the Samsung brand and found a closely related model in the HD103SI (1 TB). Worked great, so I ordered one more.

I have also used the external USB HDDs and had perfect luck with the Maxtor One Touch 4. This actually had a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750 GB drive inside.

Somewhere out there on the European or UK forums for the AZBox, they have a living list of HDDs that are compatible. I don't recall where I saw it though and you know how hard it is to find something like that again.

RADAR

 

[Mr Tony]

Radar
The external HDD is a Western Digital 320Gb drive that plugs into the wall. I dont know what the RPM is on that...how do you check? Like I say it use to work on my original azbox.
The portable one is an old 40GB drive that has 2 USB cables. One says "power & data" and one says "power". If I plug in the "P&D" one it lights up but wont record. So I just plugged in both (heck there are 2 USB ports on the back of the azbox)

Its just weird that the 320GB wont work right. I formatted it to Linux and it shows that the programs record but playback is a different story. It keeps making the box reboot.
I did plug in the 40GB portable and last night I did record the NBC13 news at 11:00 (my time) and it recorded and played back fine. I also did record some 4:2:2 stuff from the GDMX channels and a sports feed and they all played fine.

 

[AcWxRadar]

Ice,

I don't know why the 320 GB would record, but cause the box to reboot during playback. That is just odd. If anything, I would think it would be the other way around. I just cannot explain that one.

To find the RPM, you would need to research the drives specs by googling the HDD's specs. Sometimes it is written on the HDD chassis, but most often it is not.

RADAR

 

[mr3p]

Iceberg,
Depending upon your plans for the 320gb drive, would it be possible to open up the case and directly install it into the receiver? I suspect that the issues you are experiencing haves to do with a compatibilty of the USB interface of the external hard drive rather than the actual hard drive although the only way to confirm would be to install the drive directly, do a clean format and see what happens.

 

[Beano_face]

good post guys

iceberg, what fw you using?

i could never get my az to work properly with my 500 gig seagate usb external harddrive

gave up and decided to put in an internal drive. went with a hitachi 500 gig 7200rpm. I remember reading somewhere az didnt like 1tb drives.

I started with 5020 fw but it would only record and playback about 30% of the HD channels. I tried a bunch of fw's(4295, 4717, 5020, kgd4890, kgd4295) and settled on kgd4295. it will record and playback the most HD channels for me, about 80 - 90% of them. but some people report 5020, and kgd4890 will record everything fine for them... those 2 dont work well for me at all.

im thinking certain harddrives work better than others, mabey the model of az matters too??

 

[Mr Tony]

I'm using 5020 on my azbox elite (the original model)

Its just weird that the old seagate 40GB portable drive works fine. It plays dang near everything. Plays 4:2:0 great, 4:2:2 flawlessly and most HD fine. Have done some test recordings of the big 4 letter sports network and its subsidies (SEC network games as example) and they played fine for the 1/2 dozen 10-15 minute tests I did

But that 320GB Western Digital just dont like it. Its an older drive...3 years old at least.

 

[Mr Tony]

well I give up on that bigger drive

Last night I tried (again) with the azbox. Reformatted it to linux and tried a few recordings
-First one was a 4:2:0 sports feed and it played fine
-then I tried to record one of the 4:2:2 feeds on G16 and when I brought up the list after recording it didnt even show in the list
-tried another 4:2:2 feed (this one sports) and it didnt even show up in the list either (like it didnt even record)
-tried a HD feed and it recorded but stuttered
-tried another HD feed and the azbox crashed (had to reboot)

The weird part....all of the above I tried on the 40GB drive and worked fine...all played flawlessly

so its gotta be the drive

 

[caseyman]

looks like a usb controller issue in the hdd enclosure. i have 1.5 TB hdd split in 990MB and 500 MB, ext2, have no problem yet. az does not like ntfs. azbox elite, f/w 4980

 

[Mr Tony]

The HDD works on 2 other models (Visionsat and Sonicview) with no issues

 

[mr3p]

while anything is possible, its still more likely to be the USB controller inside the external enclosure rather than the actual hard drive even if it works with a different receiver or computer.

 

[Mr Tony]

since I'm not computer savvy in a nutshell I should try a different external drive? If so I'd have to buy one as all I have is the 320GB and the 40GB portable (oh and some 8GB thumb drives)

 

[mr3p]

The only other thing you might try is a different Azbox firmware ver. If you're not using 5301, I'd try that first. If you've tried that or it doesn't work, I guess a safe thing to do would be to purchase an external drive from a vendor (online or local) which will let you return for a full refund if its not compatible or has any issues.

 

[Mr Tony]

I guess I can try the newest sowftare. The stuff I have in mine is 5020 which is from August. ALso I had 2 of these until December and I know for a fact the drive worked in the other Azbox. Both same model. I wonder if the whole "blown out ethernet port" has something to do with it? (but then again the 40GB drive works fine so maybe not)

 

[mr3p]

I would have speculated the blown ethernet port was a factor too but the fact that the 40gb drive works makes me think its something else. Another thing you might try is formatting a partition smaller than 320gb and see if that works. Start with 50GB and see what happens.

 

[Mr Tony]

well now I truly give up

Went to wally world and found a portable HDD for like 40 bucks (320GB). Brought it home and hooked it up. Worked fine.
4:2:0 records and plays fine
4:2:2 in most cases record and play fine
HD is hit and miss. A couple high bitrate feeds choked

So for grins I hooked up the HDD from hell (the WD 320GB). Was set in Fat32 so I reformatted it to linux. Now it works fine. Just like the other drives. So I dont know what to think. I hooked up the external one and will work with it a little more. The portable went back

But I've got 2 other questions but I'll on a different thread for that

 

[Mr Tony]

Well the 320GB drive was hooked up yesterday and recorded a bunch of stuff...mainly some college basketball games. Just bits and pieces of it to see if it would record and play back.
HD feeds most of them wouldn't
SD feeds played fine

so I **think** they're playing nice now

 

[caseyman]

seems like software issue