I had a Click Of Death for Christmas

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I had a Click Of Death for Christmas

(6 posts)

tellboy

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The Seagate Pipeline HD series of drives from Seagate are now catalogued and supplied as Video 3.5 HDD which more accurately defines their optimum purpose.
They can be used in a PC of course but it is really the drive of choice for Personal Video recorders (PVR).
I have just fitted this 1TB Drive (Jan 2014) to A Humax Fox T2 recorder having been quoted £150 for a factory repair (yes just out of the 2 year warranty). It cost £53 for the 1TB.
With a Philips screwdriver with a magnetic tip to lift out the loose screws holding the cage and fan it took about 5 minutes.
Only the tiny fan connector was awkward to get at. The drive is in the cage with soft resilient mounts.
Powering up the Humax the drive was recognised as needing formatting for use. Contrary to reports I had read where this takes hours to format it was about 3 minutes and as all the scheduled recordings were still in place it soon started recording.
What a relief not having to pack and ship the Humax off for repair.
How do you know if you need a new drive anyway ?
If the Storage Option on the Menu is always greyed out and cant be selected (make sure no recordings are taking place as that has the same effect ) or if you are hearing the "Click of Death" (Google It) or if you can manage a reboot and then access the Storage there is a hard drive test utility which reports an error code 5 that formatting alone does not cure.

Here is the Data Sheet Information
Optimised for high-definition consumer DVR applications
* Low power, quiet hard drives fine tuned for consistent, dependable delivery
of multiple high-definition video streams with capacities from 250GB to 4TB
* Designed to meet Energy Star and other strict consumer power consumption
standards
* Quiet drive operation to enhance customer viewing and listening experiences
* Easy-to-manage multi-room video delivery of up to 16 simultaneous
HD streams
* Qualified for operating temperatures up to 75°C to meet the rigours of the
consumer electronics set-top box market
* 24×7 operational profile to meet the always-on demands of the DVR market

| Sat 11 Jan 2014 14:35:24 #1 |
MontysEvilTwin

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Formatting is rapid as it will do a 'quick format': a 'full format' would take several hours, how long depends on the size of the disk.
The disk you have fitted is probably advanced format. If it is, for best performance, it needs to be aligned and the HDR-FOX T2 won't necessarily do this: I believe that the Linux kernel the software is based upon is does not have AF disk support built in. The Seagate drives are supposed to have firmware which mitigates misalignment, but long term the lifespan of the disk may be affected.

Admins: this should be in the HDR forum.

| Sat 11 Jan 2014 16:56:23 #2 |
tellboy

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Thanks for the reply

| Sat 11 Jan 2014 19:36:21 #3 |
tellboy

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You will need to explain it a bit simpler than that for me to understand.
What is misalignment..?
How would you align it .?
Why would the disk life be at risk ?
The disk is 1TB
Step by step instructions would be appreciated
Thanks

| Sat 11 Jan 2014 19:37:20 #4 |
MontysEvilTwin

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2TB disk installation A section in this site describes the advanced disk format with references, plus lots of other relevant information. In essence, the sectors are 4KB rather than 512 bytes. For the best performance, the filesystem blocks have to be aligned with the disk sectors, if not aligned each time a block is accessed, two sectors have to be written to on the physical disk. This makes the disk do more work than necessary for each read/write operation. The HDR-FOX T2 creates 3 partitions on the disk. To ensure alignment, the number of the start sector on each partition has to be divisible by 8.
First I would check the part number of your new disk, to see if it is AF. If so, the easiest way to find out if your disk is aligned already is to install the custom firmware and run the 4Kalign diagnostic. Don't be daunted, it is not as complicated as it may seem and the disk will still work if not aligned.

| Sat 11 Jan 2014 21:42:37 #5 |
tellboy

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Thanks.
The Seagate Video disk has an AF logo.
I will read up the reference you suggest.

| Tue 14 Jan 2014 9:56:31 #6 |