Oh NO! My external hard drive failed! What to do now? (report)

[ke4pym]

Well, it did some time ago. I had a Seagate 1.5TB drive attached to a HR24. I should have known. Playback was painful. A lot of artifacting and playback stopping. Then, when live TV started to become a problem, I knew I was really in trouble.

Fast forward about a week and come home to find the HR24 completely frozen. Had to power cycle it. When I did, it came back up on its internal hard drive. OOOH NO! Lost about 100 hours of programming I hadn't watched.

How to deal with this. If there were only a way I could incorporate a RAID solution on to the DVR. Did a little reasearch and found the Guardian MAXimus RAID 1 storage cabinet from a company called NewerTech. Picked one up and a pair of 2TB hard drives (that's another long story) to see if I could make it work.

The cabinet has several ports on it. But I was only interested in the eSATA port. Plug everything in, hook it up to the DVR and boot it away. The DVR wouldn't see it with virgin hard drives. So, I take each drive out, format it on a Windows machine and reassemble it all together. Boot the DVR again. Bingo! It sees the cabinet and 2TB of drive space.

Been running on this setup for about 6 weeks now and so far, everything works like a champ. Now to wait for a drive failure. Supposedly, all that I have to do is swap out the dead drive and the cabinet will rebuild the array on its own. In theory, I shouldn't lose any programming or settings. I'll have to report on that when it happens.

I don't work for NewerTech. I would think any RAID cabinet such as this would work as well. Just wanted to get my experience out in the wild.

 

[Jimbo]

Well, it did some time ago. I had a Seagate 1.5TB drive attached to a HR24. I should have known. Playback was painful. A lot of artifacting and playback stopping. Then, when live TV started to become a problem, I knew I was really in trouble.

Fast forward about a week and come home to find the HR24 completely frozen. Had to power cycle it. When I did, it came back up on its internal hard drive. OOOH NO! Lost about 100 hours of programming I hadn't watched.

How to deal with this. If there were only a way I could incorporate a RAID solution on to the DVR. Did a little reasearch and found the Guardian MAXimus RAID 1 storage cabinet from a company called NewerTech. Picked one up and a pair of 2TB hard drives (that's another long story) to see if I could make it work.

The cabinet has several ports on it. But I was only interested in the eSATA port. Plug everything in, hook it up to the DVR and boot it away. The DVR wouldn't see it with virgin hard drives. So, I take each drive out, format it on a Windows machine and reassemble it all together. Boot the DVR again. Bingo! It sees the cabinet and 2TB of drive space.

Been running on this setup for about 6 weeks now and so far, everything works like a champ. Now to wait for a drive failure. Supposedly, all that I have to do is swap out the dead drive and the cabinet will rebuild the array on its own. In theory, I shouldn't lose any programming or settings. I'll have to report on that when it happens.

I don't work for NewerTech. I would think any RAID cabinet such as this would work as well. Just wanted to get my experience out in the wild.

Unless it ends up ReFormatting the drive when you connect it to the DRV (the second drive), whenever you hook a External drive to the DVR, it automatically reformats so it sees the DVR ....
Don't know if this will happen in your case, but thought I would mention the possibility of it happening so you know ahead of time.

Btw, NEVER store anything you WANT to KEEP on the Hard Drive.

Also, remember, External HD's are NOT supported by D*, unless things have changed since I got my last one.

 

[ke4pym]

Unless it ends up ReFormatting the drive when you connect it to the DRV (the second drive), whenever you hook a External drive to the DVR, it automatically reformats so it sees the DVR ....
Don't know if this will happen in your case, but thought I would mention the possibility of it happening so you know ahead of time.

Btw, NEVER store anything you WANT to KEEP on the Hard Drive.

Also, remember, External HD's are NOT supported by D*, unless things have changed since I got my last one.

That's the beauty of a RAID array, Jimbo. The DVR will never see the "blank" drive. The RAID array will never present that drive to the DVR alone. It will present the array.

There are two options. Plug the new drive in, power up the array and allow it to rebuild and do not turn on the DVR until the array is rebuilt. Or turn on the array, allow it to start the rebuild and turn on the DVR and allow it to come up while the array still rebuilds.

Option #2 is preferred.

I never store anything I want to keep on it. I just don't watch a lot of TV, but want to record a lot of shows for those times I do want to watch a lot of TV. Usually, in the summer. Drives my coworkers crazy at lunch when I tell them not to talk about last night's episode over lunch.

 

[jcrandall]

Sounds expensive

Your method should ensure you almost certanity that you will not lose your recordings though.
Remember if your DVR ever fails and you have to replace the receiver, your drive will be wiped
when you connect it to the new DVR.

Also if there is a data corruption, the DVR will format the drive upon reboot, had that happen once.

So, again, near certanity, perhaps 90% instead of say 50% of having just a basic external drive.