I have to make mention that the disk is a 2 terabyte 5900rpm. It doesn't have a lot on it.
It says right now, "HD 184hr 45min - SD 738hr 59min Avail"
I can't get to the HD diagnostics screen right now because it's recording.
The thing that is the big time consumer is the disk check and it's doing two of them in a row at over 10 minutes apiece. That's 20+ minutes right there.
The acquiring signal and downloading the guide part is only a 1/3 of the whole thing and is probably normal.
Again, I don't think it would be unacceptable for this to happen on a weekly basis, especially considering the guide is what, 9 days?
Checking the disk twice a day, in my opinion, is beyond excessive.
I use Ubuntu Linux on my internet PC. It uses EXT4 and has two 2tb disks in it. I leave it powered up all the time, I rarely ever shut it off.
Even so, it's standard for fsck to run like every 30 mounts. I rarely ever reboot so fsck rarely runs on it. It's entirely possible that the thing could go a year without checking the disk so every few months I force a manual check and I've never had any problems. A few months ago a disk began to fail and a huge warning popped up on my screen warning me to immediately backup and remove the disk because it was about to fail.
I've read that the Dish systems use Linux and that the file system on the DVR disks is some version of EXT. I would assume it's EXT3 but I hope it's EXT4 though that's unlikely.
EXT is a very reliable file system that rarely has problems unless there is a hardware problem.
I know this because after having years of bad experiences getting ripped off by Best Buy & Circuit City over Windows problems I got wise to the game and switched to Ubuntu Linux.
I vowed to learn some basics about it because the days of paying people to "fix" my computer had come to an end.
I don't know a lot about Linux but I know enough now that I no longer pay people to do any computer stuff for me. I can put in new disks, new video cards, etc. I can upgrade from an old version of Ubuntu to a new version and not lose any files in the process because I partition my disks. So I do know a little about Linux. Not a lot but enough to get by on my own.
That said, I believe preforming TWO disk checks in a row, per day is far above and beyond excessive and totally unnecessary. ONE dish check a week would be more than enough.
But again, the problem is that it's baked into the system and can not be changed at all. My only option now is to just live with it. It is what it is, as they say..
I guess the best solution is to schedule the checks to happen during the time of day when I'm switched over to my FTA tuner watching C-band. The only problem then would be maybe recordings but I suppose it would know that it can't record during that time frame and would schedule recordings around this down time.
Other than this annoyance, the benefits far outweigh the annoyances.
Oh, and we just had two days of very heavy rain and flooding. I never experienced any rain fade or signal loss even during the worst of the rain. That 1.2m dish for 129 really paid off! Even the smaller 1m dishes for 110 & 119 worked great.
Soon, I'm changing out my 1.2m dish for a 2m dish for my HD stuff. I guess I need to figure out which satellite to aim the 1.2 at. Rain fade is not an issue, at all..
