My Foxsat PVR is coming up to two years old and I'm on the point of returning it to John Lewis's for repair, before the warranty runs out.

First, I would like to seek the views of forum members.

Where do I begin? I have lost hours, days, even weeks of my life accessing recorded media on this machine, especially whenever I have wanted to copy files to and external hard drive.

The internal hard drive was slow to access, even when it was only half full. The more I filled it, the more it ground to a halt, frequently crashing and forcing me to restart by switching of power at the socket. I couldn't just clear space on the drive, because it took so long to copy and delete.

I got two pieces of advice from Humax. The first was, reset to factory conditions. I did that. No improvement. The second piece of advice was that I must reformat the hard drive. I suspected reformatting would not get to the root of the problem, because the PVR was extremely slow to access any of my three external hard drives (1TB each).

Well, during a week off work, I finally managed to clear most of the files off the internal drive. I was able to do this by copying to a 16GB memory stick, which I would successively copy to my PC, once it was full. Once I'd got down to below 20% of internal drive usage, access was much quicker.

HOWEVER, the machine is still sluggish in accessing the 1TB external drives, including one which is only half full.

At last count, it took me over 90 seconds to access the media list on the half-full external drive. It took 30 to 40 seconds to open or close a folder. It took 45 seconds to enter file manager. It took over 100 seconds to enter edit mode. Then, while attempting to return to normal mode (and operation that has frequently resulted in crash), the machine went into standby.

I gather from other posts to this forum, that other people archive files to external drives. Has anyone had similar problems?

Chris.

How are these drives attached to your HDR?

I attach the external drives to the HDR by the USB either at the back of the machine or at the front (I've used both - it doesn't make any difference).

I just attach one drive at a time. I have in the past attached several drives using a hub. This led to other problems that I shan't go into now, though I may bring it up on another thread.

External copying is painfully slow, but I thought the connection was USB 1 only, so that's inevitable?

I don't know if I'm imagining it, but I disconnected the F-connectors recently and access to the media list seemed far slower.

I'm sure I've read somewhere that the file system on the HDR can't become "fragmented", so that's not the problem.

If access speed was proportional to the amount stored, then surely those folks with 1TB drives would never get to see the media list?!

Cheers,
David.

From the experience with FTP, it looks like the maximum transfer rate is about 3MB/s.

What filing system do the external drives have? If FAT32 then try checking them on your windows PC and possibly also defrag them.

I would also try powering off the HDR for 30 secs to see if that makes any difference (you have probably tried that already).

I rather suspect that the USB ports are USB1 ports and if you have you HDR network connected you could try doing this via FTP (see TP (see http://www.avforums.com/forums/freesat/1391484-foxsat-hdr-ftp-telnet-work) then connect the external drive to a USB2,USB3 or a ESATA port.

My guess is that is proportional to the quantity of files stored and that it indexes by reading each .HMT file so it can display : Channel, Duration, Description, etc.

The ports are usb2.0 they can handle HD 1440 x 1080 at 19 mbps playback with no problems at all and will also playback 1920 x 1080 at 17mbps from my camcorder without any problems.

Thanks for the replies so far.

The most relevant remark seems to be this, from REPASSAC:

"My guess is that is proportional to the quantity of files stored and that it indexes by reading each .HMT file so it can display : Channel, Duration, Description, etc."

Can anybody confirm this?

As I record a lot of radio programmes - many small files - that is what may slow things up.

The problem relates to both internal and external drives.

So I guess that I need to frequently transfer files from the HDR, and maybe I just have to live with slow response of the external drives.

Any suggestions as to how I might speed things up would be most welcome.

Tuning to a currently off air channel speeds up usb transfers. Eg BBC3/4 Cbeebies/CBBC

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...t=speed+up+usb

As not many radio stations adopt the series link feature I'm guessing the individual files are not in series folders and this possibly might cause the slow read speeds of the .hmt files. Maybe if they were constrained in folders the software might be able to carry out a more orderly scan of the drive and thus improve the read perfomance.

Easy way to find out create a folder select all the radio recordings using edit mode and move them there. Moves are near instantaneous, pretty sure you get a move not a copy if transferring files on the same drive.

Thanks for the suggestion.
However, all the radio programmes on my external drive were in a 'radio' folder. This took ages to access and leave, so I took to copying remaining files straight to the header folder, which was quicker.

I should remark that, even after having accessed the external drive, opening and closing folders, even those with few files, can be very slow.

I'd just like to post an appreciation to people who responded to my cry for help.
Since I started regularly copying (to 16G memory stick) radio programmes and deleting them from my Humax drive, the drive has been responding much more quickly.