In February 2012 the disk on my Humax 9200T failed and I lost the recordings. I reported it here: http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1631210 The disk was a 500GB disk but the same applies to other disks. I rebuilt the disk expecting it to fail again within days or weeks as, sooner or later, I would write the file system to a faulty block, and it would all go wrong again. I am somewhat surprised to find that, 10 months later, I haven't (yet!) had another failure.

The problem was caused by the disk having more faulty blocks than the disk hardware could cope with. The Humax operating system cannot mark faulty blocks as faulty, nor take faulty blocks out of use. The disk comes with some spare hardware blocks which are switched in to replace faulty blocks, but once these are used up, faulty blocks cannot be replaced - they just stay on the disk. A part of the file system had been written to faulty blocks and eventually it all failed.

I think the reason it hasn't yet failed again is that the filesystem uses only a very small area of the disk compared with the area used for recordings, so the chance of the file system being written to a faulty block is presumably quite small.

I have some had minor glitches - corrupted text in the descriptions of recordings - but nothing too serious.

Sod's Law says that it will no doubt fail now I have reported it is OK!

Interesting report, thank you. As you say the critical parts of the file system only uses a small part of the disk however they will be the areas accessed far more frequently than other parts of the disk so I would have expected the probability of a failure in the critical areas for the file system to be higher. It does seem to me that the more modern disks intended for use in PVRs have more error checking of the data when read, compared to the earlier disk designs used in the 9200 and I wonder if the change is due to file system problems.

Interesting - I've had several years trouble free use of my 9200 (On s/w 15, soon got rid of 21) but yesterday everything had gone and the then active recording had the "fault" icon and nothing would record. I should have, but couldn't be bothered, taken it out and recovered all my data. I just did a format and it's working again but what do you think? Further failures imminent?

I bought a Seagate ST3250820ACE a while back while they were available. I fear that I am shortly going to have to install it!

Members views and opinions and options/causes would be appreciated.

No real way of telling for sure other than attaching the drive to a PC and running the manufacturers diagnostics. The empirical way is having formatted it wait and see what happens next. If file system problems develop quickly then the most likely explanation is that the disk is on the way out.

Yes, thanks Martin. I've already decided that that's the route I'm taking! If it goes again soon then it will get replaced. It's a pity that I can't fit a second cloned drive in it like I do with my PCs and do regular back-ups. I'd unfortunately got an awful lot of recordings on it - normally we only have a few. Now I've got to look out for "Sleepless in Seattle" again - SWMBO wants to see it again.

I find it curious that all my reservations are still there - I would have thought that they would have gone with the format.

Reservations are held in flash RAM not on disk.

I thought I would list the "minor glitches" I am getting

1 Play bar wrong. When playing, say, a 2h 15 recording, which shows as 2h 15m in the list of recordings, the play-bar (press PLAY) sometimes starts off OK showing 2h 15m, but later shows a shorter time, say 1h 59m. When it gets to 1h 59m, the play bar stops increasing, but the recording continues to play to the end of the 2h 15m. Stopping and starting it again usually shows the correct 2h 15m. I don't know if there is any significance of the 1h 59m being similar to the 2h chase play buffer. IT also happens with 1h recording which show a reduced time. Once a very short recording (only about 30 secs long as I had stopped it as I decided I didn't want it) showed as the full 1h the program was scheduled. "play" time too short is the most common glitch - 20 or 30 times or more.

2 Lock up. The Humax suddenly locks up with a dark screen and needs a power off - power on to restart it. 3 or 4 times in 10 months.

3 Picture breakup. Occasional picture breakup for about 1 second when playing a recording. It looks like interference but is presumably playing a bad block. 6 or 8 times.

4 Corruption of a character in a program title or description in the Program list or Info display. 3 times

5 Series link fails to record. When a series link is set, it sometimes stops recording episodes (not soaps). I am not sure whether this is the Humax or the broadcasters not doing series link properly. 3 or 4 times.

6 Free space? I suspect I might get more problems when I only have 10% free space - I try to keep at least 20% (100 GB) free.

7 Don't release bad blocks. One recovered recording from the original failure had a lot (5 or 6 times over 10 minutes) of breakup. I trimmed the recording to keep the broken up bit which I set to don't delete. It looks like these are bad blocks - there is no sense in releasing them for re-use.

I don't know what is causing the bad blocks but if it is foreign matter (dust or magnetic film broken off the disk surface) then I guess it will just get worse and worse. When I tested the disk with the Seagate utilities, if I understood the results correctly, it was reporting "249 instances of BAD LBA" which I took to be 249 bad blocks.

I noticed this on my 9200 a couple of nights ago on a 1h 30m recorded programme, my time-bar showed, and stuck at, 1h 04m maximum so I don't think the 2h buffer has anything to do with it. Like you, stopping and re-starting the playback resulted in the time-bar showing the correct recorded programme length.

I've experienced this several times over the last year or so. I also had a example this week (I can't remember for certain which programme it was unfortunately but I remember having to watch adverts so it possibly was I'm a Celebrity...) ). The programme was about 90m in duration but the Time Bar displayed a duration of 34m. I was able to continue viewing the full programme but was not able to use FF or Skip after the 34m point.

Colin

This is a commonly reported problem. Sometimes all subsequent programmes in the Series don't record but most often it is just a single programme that is missed. I estimate about one recording in 200 is missed which is typical of other makes of PVR I have used. I record most programmes on 1 to 3 other PVRs simultaneously and usually all the other PVRs record the subject programme successfully.

Colin

I knew I had spoken too soon as the 9200T is now playing up rather badly.

90% of recordings work OK and playback is almost always OK. But it sometimes hangs on playback and I get a black screen which needs a power OFF / ON to reset.

But I am seeing more frequent problems recording. The programme sometimes appears twice in the list of recordings, often with the wrong programme name and channel name. It sometimes misses the start of recordings. The sound is often garbled for the first few seconds of a recording.

It has served me well over many years but I have today consigned it to the bin. I am thinking of a Humax HDR FOX-T1 or T2 Freeview + in preference to the DTR-D1010 as I just want something very similar to the 9200T.

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

The HDR-FOX T2 is a very good box with significant improvements over the 9200 and I don't think you would be disappointed if you purchased one. The DTR-D1010 is a more recent design and has more Internet based catch up services but is more restricted in its functionality. My advice is to get the HDR-FOX T2.

What Martin says!
We got an HDR-FOX late last year and our 9200 is now just a backup for the odd occasion we just can't avoid 3 or 4 concurrent recordings (EVERYTHING worth recording seems to start at 9pm - grrr).
The HDR is frankly a much better box plus you get HD, and if you add the custom firmware with selected packages it is simply brilliant.