GEOSATpro thumb drive too slow

[toucan-man]

Maybe a dumb question, but you guys are smart.

So I'm watching this feed, and am recording it, but occasionally get the message "Device too slow to record" or something like that. Am using a SanDisk 32GB drive. The feed was high bit rate, see attached. Would this still have been an issue had I been using a regular harddrive? The recording sort of plays, but is botched in too many places to be watchable.

 

[SatelliteAV]

The message is displayed due to the USB drive not being able to support the sustained throughput. You will not have this issue with a hard drive, 2.0 or 3.0 USB controller and external power supply.

 

[KE4EST]

I experimented with some of my thumb drives on the microHD, all doing high bit rate DVB-S2 stuff, just to see what would happen. I found out that the sandisk one was the worst and I have a 16 or 32GB kingston, that works so far just as good as a hard drive, kind of shocked me. It is about 2 weeks old don't know if that makes a difference but it is one of their newer ones. Maybe better guts who knows. Like Brian said though I would not recommend a flash drive though to be reliable all the time. I even recorded a HD show yesterday and watched last night with no problems. That could change today though.

 

[toucan-man]

No problem, all the other HD stuff I've recorded has been handled flawlessly. I want to be prepared, and now I will be. (But it sure is mind blowing to record to such a tiny device.)

 

[KE4EST]

Yeah I remember when I got a 5 Megabyte HD, and I thought that was cool. That thing was big and heavy. Now I can slip several hundred Gigabytes in my shirt pocket.

 

[Magic Static]

I use a Super Talent Pico C drive. very tiny. no problems keeping up with HD recording in the micro.

 

[rv1pop]

I use the SansDisc all the time, the 8 and 16 GB, however, I ,now, always at least double and usually triple format them, to be sure all the bad and marginal sectors are marked. I have only had one failure* and that was before the second format finished. I have never used greater that 16 GB because, for me, that defeats having only a few programs on each separate drive. I have not yet started recording HD, so I have NO knowledge of that.

* I did have one other that stopped recording early, but I may not have double formatted that one. The 500 GB hard drives frequently gave me problems and when they did, I lost all files on the drive - therefore I use the thumbdrives.

 

[Anole]

This doesn't apply to initial recording, but ...
If you transfer a HD show to something like a SD card to play on your phone or tablet ..
Some HD video (certainly OTA recordings) have filler bits to maintain the data rate.

When I've edited 6-8gb hour-long shows, the resultant file is much smaller than can be accounted for by removal of commercials.
They'll actually fit on a DVD (without re-encoding), in their original 1080 format.

The point being, squeezing out unused padding can slightly lower the overall bit rate.



iPhone 4

 

[skysurfer]

This doesn't apply to initial recording, but ... If you transfer a HD show to something like a SD card to play on your phone or tablet .. Some HD video (certainly OTA recordings) have filler bits to maintain the data rate.

you should record the "program" only so you don't end up also recording the stuffing data like you do in a "mux" recording. Does the microHD record the whole mux when it records or does it record a single "program" only?

 

[brentb636]

I use the SansDisc all the time, the 8 and 16 GB, however, I ,now, always at least double and usually triple format them, to be sure all the bad and marginal sectors are marked. I have only had one failure* and that was before the second format finished. I have never used greater that 16 GB because, for me, that defeats having only a few programs on each separate drive. I have not yet started recording HD, so I have NO knowledge of that.

* I did have one other that stopped recording early, but I may not have double formatted that one. The 500 GB hard drives frequently gave me problems and when they did, I lost all files on the drive - therefore I use the thumbdrives.

It turns out that all Sandisk ( and other brands ) are not created equal. I use Sandisk Class 4 uSD cards a lot on Android tablets , as a boot device. The Sandisk Class 4 drives are optimized for "small file" I/O operations, and work well as a boot drive for Android devices. The Class 4 drives DON'T work well in "large file" I/O operations, like recording movies. A freeware program "CrystalDiskMark" can test the SD cards and display their file I/O characteristics. It's surprising to me, that there is such a wide disparity between devices, but there certainly a BIG difference.
Here's a review of one of the faster micro SD cards, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407326,00.asp .

 

[skyscanner4ever]

yeah i had the same problem! Was gonna record costas feed on the halftime show last night when he was picking his nose but my 16 gig said usb speed not fast enough! so i could record the funny feed. lol

the 16 gig was a sny model i bought at walmart for $10. not a bad price, but wont record in hd.

today i bought a 4 gig scandisk thumbdrive from walmart for $6 and it records hd on my receiver.


would buy a big hard drive but i am gonna dump these a bit often on my cpu so i wont need a hard drive.

 

[toucan-man]

yeah i had the same problem! Was gonna record costas feed on the halftime show last night when he was picking his nose but my 16 gig said usb speed not fast enough! so i could record the funny feed. lol
the 16 gig was a sny model i bought at walmart for $10. not a bad price, but wont record in hd.
today i bought a 4 gig scandisk thumbdrive from walmart for $6 and it records hd on my receiver.
would buy a big hard drive but i am gonna dump these a bit often on my cpu so i wont need a hard drive.

I think you'll find that it will record many HD feeds, but not the odd high bit rate sporting event, etc. -- these will choke the SanDisk. Is why I'm going the harddrive route.

 

[Tron]

Thumbdrives are generally slow memory compared to higher speed Class 6 or higher SD cards. I have had problems with thumbdrives in many high speed, high bitrate scenarios that weren't satellite related. The write speed is going to be slower than the read speed, and that's what counts when you're recording. If you can't or don't want to use a hard drive, use a good SD to USB adapter with a fast (Class 6 or higher) SD card.

 

[toucan-man]

Tron, is this (+ some memory) what you had in mind?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006FLENJC/?tag=satell01-20



Harddrives are capacious and cheap, but there is something appealing about a tiny solution. Anyone gone this route with the MicroHD?

 

[squid385]

Best sd card is a class 10, used with a usb flash drive adapter. Also, it is a good idea to test your sd card with a program like h2testw. Some of the chinese sd cards are clones of sandisk, kingston, etc. The clones are all over ebay and some will not have the capacity or speed that is advertized. You can google h2testw and it is a free program.

 

[Tron]

Tron, is this (+ some memory) what you had in mind?

Although I've never used that particular brand, it should work. I've used an SDHC Sandisk reader in conjunction with a Class 6 card without problems. Class 10 would be even better, for example the Sandisk Extreme III series cards. These tend to get a bit pricey though, but I already purchase them for use with my 3D camcorder.

 

[toucan-man]

Can anyone confirm, Merry Christmas, the highest bit rate feed they've thus far successfully recorded with the microHD -- with any type of drive? Would the USB 2.0 port's max speed limit ever be below some of the high bitrate feeds that are occasionally out there?

 

[SatelliteAV]

This thread talks about one of the fattest signals that I have observed for a SCPC channel (around 40 meg including audio and tables. It records and plays back without issue on a USB 2.0 hard drive .
http://www.satelliteguys.us/threads/291672-Feed-Issue

Thumb drives typically have much lower sustained data throughput capacity and will choke on much lower bandwidth feeds.

 

[toucan-man]

Then this unit, Happy New Year, should have no problem at all,

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2688

They're $60 street at the moment, a high price per gigabyte, but convenient.

 

[rv1pop]

Merry Christmas to you also, but unless your miocro has the four extra contacts, you still only have a USB 2.0 connection. While this may be a much faster USB 2.0, you will not get FULL speed. Now that I can do some work again with Sat.TV, I will try to do some testing --- but I need to get more dishes hooked back up and the microHDs updated. Now MOM wants a stove in the kitchen!