My 9200T has needed to be reformatted about 3 times in the last 6 months as it starts getting its knickers in a twist and becomes unreliable; after a reformat it works fine again.
Since most people don’t seem to have this problem I wonder if the drive is damaged in places which leads to the problems!

After reading in another post that ‘The ACE drives don't do any error checking at writing time, it writes the data but doesn't validate it's correct’ I started to wonder whether this might be part of the problem. If the drive has bad sectors which aren’t recognised due to there not being any error checking couldn’t this cause a problem?

Note: I'm using the lastest firmware.

If you're using the original HD it should be all right - I've been using my Humax for over two years now without any problems and without reformatting the disk.

I've no idea what the Humax does about bad sectors occurring during normal operation or formatting - I think that modern hard drives handle that sort of things internally, by mapping unused sectors in their place.

Maybe each time I reformat the drive it detects any new errors and they are mapped out as bad sectors and then the system works fine. Over time more errors occur until the drive causes the system to become unstable and I need to format again!

Note: It still has the original drive installed.

I have a 9200T bought Dec2005 ... its never been reformated.

Its been upto 98% full.

Whatever the explanation for the file system corruption problems I am pretty sure that it won't detect sector errors during a 9200 format; the format is so quick that it can only be writing a new blank file system structure to the disk.

Perhaps you could give a more detailed explanation of "it starts getting its knickers in a twist and becomes unreliable".

That makes sense, but I’m wondering why a reformat makes the system stable again!


A number of things:

1) It will refuse to play certain recordings at all and when this happens it stops showing any image even a live TV feed. I then need to turn it off and on and sometimes power off at the rear before it works, but the errant files are still useless.
2) Certain recordings will stop at a certain point and reboot the system. This is replicable as the system will crash again if I play the same recording from the same point. The only way around this is to skip ahead of the corrupt part of the file.

I’ve lived with 2) for a while and it’s not critical unless I’m recording at the same time which means recording is stopped of course.
1) is a more recent problem and when that starts happening I think it points to a need to reformat quite soon. Last week I lost all the recordings in my library; they just disappeared although the disk space wasn’t released. I was just about to reformat anyway so it wasn’t a disaster.

It’s possible that the Humax O/S is the culprit with regard to what seems to be disk corruption but since my issues seem to be uncommon it started me wondering whether the problem is the drive itself. I could swap out the drive but AV drives aren’t cheap so I’m not sure that I want to throw more money at this unless I can diagnose the problem.
I wonder if I can analyse the drive if I hook it up to my PC and use Seagate’s diagnostic tool – SeaTools. Since Seagate don’t list the ACE drives on their website I’m not clear if they will be supported.

I just looked at the guide for the SeaTools utility and it states:

“Similarly, when a disc drive writes data and encounters a problem, the drive firmware retires the problem sector and activates a replacement before giving successful write status.”

If the ACE drives aren’t testing for errors when writing data they will miss out on this feature which has the potential to lead to data corruption. Has it been confirmed that these drives don’t support error checking? It seems odd to me.

I am inclined to agree that the problem is the drive. Taking it out and doing a full format in a PC to map out any bad sectors may help but in the long term a new drive is probably required to fix things.

The standard is CE_ATA standard. A quick look suggests there is some error checking.

Good find Martin.

My understanding is that the host (the PVR) as a real time streaming device will ignore CRC errors during read and write operations, whether or not they are reported by the drive, as there would be insufficient time and little point in initiatiating a retry. You would be attempting to recover from what would at worst be a visual glitch at the risk of buffer overflow from the constant stream of data waiting to be written.

Likewise, alternate sector mapping would cause unhealthy delays so unless a defect developes in the header area causing positioning failures, the drive will soldier on.

Formatting will simple erase the TOC leaving all the data areas untouched.

The only way to tell if the drive has a serious problem is to attach it to a PC and run some proper diagnostics.

Not that dear at £37.23
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140017

It makes sense to ignore any read/write errors unless you are accessing the file header in which case errors can be critical I suspect. I suppose it depends on the file structure that the Humax uses so this may not be true.
With the moderate bit-rates of Freeview broadcasts and the large buffers on contemporary drives I don’t see why error correction can’t be used when writing to disk.

I’m running the Seagate diagnostic at this moment and it has found 1 error after analysing 60% of the drive. It’s possible that the drive is okay but the drive controller could be on the way out; intermittent faults!
I was surprised by how dusty it is inside the case although the area around the fan was clear so I don’t think the cooling was affected.


The last time I looked which was earlier this year I could have sworn that they were significantly more expensive than standard drives.
It works out a shade under £40 at Ebuyer when you include postage but when I looked this afternoon I came across a few places selling them for around £36 inclusive. The 250GB version is ~£45 inclusive but I think 160GB is enough for my requirements and maybe quieter and cooler as well.

I ran the Seagate utility and it picked up abut 100 errors almost entirely on one part of the drive. I chose not to fix them but booted into Windows and tried to format the drive. It failed at about the 75% level which was where SeaTools picked up the errors. So I ran SeaTools again and let it fix the errors; it reported that it was successful. When I booted back into Windows it still failed to format and hung at the same point.
All this confirms that the drive is faulty and hopefully this explains why I had intermittent problems with the Humax which required a reformat.

I’m going to replace the drive but I do feel wary of replacing it with a similar drive as I think they only come with a 1 year warranty; can someone confirm this? It just feels wrong to pay a premium for a drive with a shorter warranty.

How risky is it to use a standard PATA drive rather than an A/V drive? I’m looking at a modern single platter 160GB drive and would choose one that is known for low noise and heat, probably Samsung.

You should check but I believe that the Seagate drives come with a three year warranty. I think there have been some reports of the Samsungs working but obviously it is more of a gamble.

2MB buffer on the drive and 1.2Mb bitrates don't leave much time for error correction.

There are a number of techniques the drive can use to recover marginal data and with error correction enabled, it can take some seconds before the error is passed to the host system.

I suspect this is one reason a standard drive is not recommended.


A standard drive will have a noticable click when positioning the heads due to rapid acceleration of the positioning mechanism. Drives designed for PVRs soften this acceleration curve to eliminate this noise, although this would reduces performance in a PC.

I currently have a 400GB standard Samsung PC disk in my Hummy. Before I installed it, I connected it to my PC and used someone's (Hitachi's?) disk tools to set the "acoustic management" to minimise noise. The Samsung is a very quiet disk.

"Minimum noise" means "maximum slowness", but I have not had any problems with the disk having insufficient performance to record two and playback one. I DID have that problem occasionally with a 750GB Seagate PC disk that could not manage to record two and playback one when the disk was very-nearly full and the free space was fragmented. Note: Seagate disks do not offer an acoustic management setting, so you do not have a choice of loud/fast or quiet/slow.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

Here's the fellow for all drives that support AAM ...

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/suppor...tm#FeatureTool

Thanks for your replies. I ordered a Seagate ST3160215ACE from Wopple yesterday afternoon and it arrived first thing this morning. It was just under £36 delivered and I chose standard delivery but it still came next day. I’d never heard of them but the price was good and they accept Google Checkout which made for a quick transaction. The 250GB version was less than £10 more but I really don’t need more than 160GB on a PVR.

I didn’t worry about buying a drive with AAM as it’s simply a firmware tweak and I expect that AV drives are tweaked for lower noise and power anyway. I did install it using 4 rubber washers to decouple the drive from the case to a certain degree; hopefully that will lower the noise further. I tested the drive using SeaTools before installation as the Humax seemingly is useless at detecting drive errors. The drive is listed as having a 5 year warranty which is standard for Seagate desktop drives. So far so good.

P.S. It’s dawned on me that the original drive that is failing could possibly be formatted as a 120GB drive and the section with errors not used. I tried manually setting the drive to a lower capacity using SeaTools but the process failed. Anyone want to buy a dodgy hard drive?