What format is used on external Wally drives

[H2Guy]

I had an external HDD fail on my Wally receiver. I took the drive and installed it on my PC, ran diagnostic on it, ran a surface test 100% pass.

I fully erased the drive but for some reason the Wally does not seem to see it on either of the USB ports, unplug, power, nothing seems to work.

Does anyone know how the drive is formatted: Fat, Fat32, exFat, NTFS, EXT (1/2) or what. I can see activity on the drive when its plugged in though. Is there a menu on the Wally you can force a format?

 

[Tampa8]

I had an external HDD fail on my Wally receiver. I took the drive and installed it on my PC, ran diagnostic on it, ran a surface test 100% pass.

I fully erased the drive but for some reason the Wally does not seem to see it on either of the USB ports, unplug, power, nothing seems to work.

Does anyone know how the drive is formatted: Fat, Fat32, exFat, NTFS, EXT (1/2) or what. I can see activity on the drive when its plugged in though. Is there a menu on the Wally you can force a format?

You need to try a different external drive and see if that works. If not it may be a Wally problem.

 

[Bobby]

I would format the drive as a Fat32 on your PC. Then plug it in to the Wally and see if it asks for a format.

 

[bookworm370]

EXT3 format (A Linux format) But if you format it to anything else the receiver will auto-format it to EXT3 itself.

 

[H2Guy]

Thanks all, to confirm bookworm370 it is in fact EXT3. I tried to figure out what it was from the original Seagate SHDD notebook drive but unfortunately this was the cause of the fault. It is currently failing Seagate short test diagnostics and preventing it from mounting properly with the Wally. The Seagate SHDD worked well for a good period of time but now is done. I wonder why the Wally is so fussy about the external USB drive. On my 922's I use large USB external flash drives and they work well but the Wally doesn't like them for some reason.

For now I am using an old Western Digital 2TB backup HDD enclosure which was reformatted to EXT3 before plugging it in. It was quickly acknowledged and configured for use. Big and bulky but it works.

Considering how may cheap used Intel SSD server drives that are available I wish I could use one of those using a sata to USB adapter/cable.

 

[navychop]

You’d buy a USED SSD?

 

[KAB]

Thanks all, to confirm bookworm370 it is in fact EXT3. I tried to figure out what it was from the original Seagate SHDD notebook drive but unfortunately this was the cause of the fault. It is currently failing Seagate short test diagnostics and preventing it from mounting properly with the Wally. The Seagate SHDD worked well for a good period of time but now is done. I wonder why the Wally is so fussy about the external USB drive. On my 922's I use large USB external flash drives and they work well but the Wally doesn't like them for some reason.

For now I am using an old Western Digital 2TB backup HDD enclosure which was reformatted to EXT3 before plugging it in. It was quickly acknowledged and configured for use. Big and bulky but it works.

Considering how may cheap used Intel SSD server drives that are available I wish I could use one of those using a sata to USB adapter/cable.

You should not be using thumb drives to begin with, and not Dish Approved!

 

[bookworm370]

Considering how may cheap used Intel SSD server drives that are available I wish I could use one of those using a sata to USB adapter/cable.

I wouldn't do that. The Hopper and Wally do not support the Trim command required for SSDs to prevent them from corruption. WIthout Trim the SSD controller has no idea what blocks are used or not.

 

[tjboston5676]

I dont have anything to add, just figured I'd get first comment of the year lol

 

[H2Guy]

Interesting info, back a number of years ago Seagate embarked on speeding up Hard Disk Drives and created SHDD's which was an interesting combination of a HDD with a memory cache buffer. This gave the drive a major speed boost with having to deal with TRIM or AHCI. I have a number of these drives left over from upgrading older laptops to SSD technologies.

On another note Intel makes a number of Enterprise SSD and when used in that environment TRIM is not used nor needed. The nice thing about these drives is that when they reach a certain POH (power on hour) number they are swapped out. Many of these drives pop up on ebay for nearly nothing and are far superior then other SSD drives. I might play with trying to use one of these drives in a Wally with a USB enclosure. The pro would be low power and heat and lets face it I don't consider anything I record critical. lol

 

[Foxbat]

We ran into an issue with some Intel and Toshiba SSDs where they stopped writing after 32,767 hours of operation. Someone used a signed 16-but integer for something and when it went negative, so did the functionality of the drive.

Fortunately, the OEMs released a Firmware Update that restored the drive’s functionality.

 

[H2Guy]

I am experimenting with a Intel DC3510 1.6TB Enterprise drive in a SYBA 2.5 externally powered enclosure with a Wally, so far so good. Noticable difference in response with anything that has to do with DVR functions. Lets see how it lasts so far it beats the crap out of old HDD's. I will let it run for a few weeks then pull it and run it through some Intel Enterprise SSD test tools to see if running it as a DVR drive has caused any issues with it.

 

[H2Guy]

So far so good (knock on wood) I pulled the drive and ran some the Intel SSD Enterprise drive tests, 100% healthy. I did beat it up and recorded about 40 hours of content before taking it out of service and testing. No error's of any kind. I put it back online and will continue. I plan on filling it to capacity then trying the testing again.

I think if I can do that and run the test again with a clear bill of health on the drive I think I will move on to doing the same with one of my 922's.

 

[navychop]

Nice to have the time.


Actually, thank you for the plan.