USB on PVR

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Rikkitic

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#96567 31-Jan-2012 10:54

As usual I'm not sure where this question belongs. My setup is a mix of homebrew home theatre, satellite TV and other things so apologies if I am in the wrong place.

I use satellite and UHF STBs with PVRs and I use USB enclosures to record films onto old IDE drives I happen to have lying around. This works pretty well except for one thing. I purposely have everything running from a single power point so I can shut everything down when I go to bed at night. The problem is when I turn it back on. Apparently the external drive that's plugged into the satellite STB is taking too long to spin up, which causes the STB to freeze on bootup.

Does anyone know a solution for this? I was using a flash drive on the other STB for awhile but it also caused bootup problems and eventually died. Not sure why. It was a Toshiba (reputable brand?) and should have lasted longer than a few months. Would a sata drive work better for this (faster spin-up?) and did I just have bad luck with the flash drive or am I getting voltage surges or something when the unit first comes on? Naturally I would prefer to just be able to leave everything plugged in and on one switch all the time but at the moment I have to keep turning the drives on and off separately. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

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gzt

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#575302 31-Jan-2012 13:41

does it work ok if you provide power to the drive before you power the rest of the system?

Rikkitic

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#575361 31-Jan-2012 15:07

Thanks for the response. Haven't tried that yet but I'll check the next time I power up and let you know (someone's watching TV right now).

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JimmyH

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#575506 31-Jan-2012 18:53

That was my thought. Plug a power strip with individually switched sockets into the power point. They are pretty inexpensive, and you can get 4 or six outlet models. Then you can still turn everything off at the one power point at night, but can power the drive up before you power the STB up.

Rikkitic

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#575799 1-Feb-2012 11:51

This morning I turned on the drive before applying power to the STB and everything worked as it should. This suggests to me that the problem is indeed linked to the amount of time it takes the drive to spin up and register itself, which was what I originally assumed was happening. So would a faster drive and a different technology, like SATA, avoid this? When I was using a flash drive on the UHF STB it worked fine initially, although the drive did develop problems later and this also prevented the STB from booting. I don't know if this was in any way related to the problem I am having with the USB enclosure, or whether it was just another example of the kind of coincidence that seems to occur all too frequently with these kinds of things.

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gzt

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#575819 1-Feb-2012 12:25

Rikkitic: So would a faster drive and a different technology, like SATA, avoid this?

S.M.A.R.T status monitoring tools report spin up time. You could use that to see if other drives in your collection provide better performance. My guess is the smaller the drive platter size, the faster the spin up.

Rikkitic

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#580487 12-Feb-2012 13:47

When I find an answer to a question I have posted, I like to post an update as a courtesy to others. Not sure if this qualifies as a solution exactly, but while playing around with another enclosure I discovered that one works fine on one STB while the other works fine on the other STB. If I reverse them, neither works. In other words, one specific enclosure will cause no problems with one specific STB during power-up, but will cause the other STB to hang. The drives don't seem to make any difference. So I 'fixed' my problem by swapping the drives in order to change which enclosure is used with which STB. This was necessary because one STB only works with FAT32 drives and I only have one drive formatted for that box.

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