recording

[ZetaMale]

What is the best, reliable, and stable recording medium for the Azbox Elite?

 

[Crocodile Locke]

That's a really good qustion. I never have luck recording with mine - tried three different usb thumb drives and it seems to hate them all. It always locks up and then reboots. Once I recorded the History Channel with my 320 WD hard drive, but it has never worked again. I've checked all inside connections, tried different firmware and even formatted the application area to no avail.
Iceberg has the same hard drive as I do and he doesn't have any problems recording, so it isn't likely my drive.

I would think something with a fast write speed that wasn't over 1TB would be the way to go. I've always used WD drives in every system I've built and haven't had one fail yet. The current 640GB drive in my PC is the fastest quietest drive I've ever had.

 

[ZetaMale]

That's a really good qustion. I never have luck recording with mine - tried three different usb thumb drives and it seems to hate them all. It always locks up and then reboots. Once I recorded the History Channel with my 320 WD hard drive, but it has never worked again. I've checked all inside connections, tried different firmware and even formatted the application area to no avail.
Iceberg has the same hard drive as I do and he doesn't have any problems recording, so it isn't likely my drive.

I would think something with a fast write speed that wasn't over 1TB would be the way to go. I've always used WD drives in every system I've built and haven't had one fail yet. The current 640GB drive in my PC is the fastest quietest drive I've ever had.

Interesting that you mentioned the WD 320. I bought one at WalMart yesterday and my PC sees the drive but the Azbox doesn't. It's attached to the Azbox via a USB hub where the memory stick is seen by the Azbox but the Azbox doesn't see the drive. The hard drive comes formatted FAT32 so it should work with the Azbox. I have the latest stable firmware installed (3877).

 

[Crocodile Locke]

Interesting that you mentioned the WD 320. I bought one at WalMart yesterday and my PC sees the drive but the Azbox doesn't. It's attached to the Azbox via a USB hub where the memory stick is seen by the Azbox but the Azbox doesn't see the drive. The hard drive comes formatted FAT32 so it should work with the Azbox. I have the latest stable firmware installed (3877).

That is odd. I was running the 3877 firmware for some time myself and while the Azbox wouldn't record to my WD 320, it did see it and I could playback .ts files stored on it with no problem.

Have you tried plugging in the WD 320 direct to the Azbox just in case there is an issue with it and the hub? Like you said, it should work....but then again, we're talking about the Azbox here, so who knows?

 

[ZetaMale]

It turned out to be an issue with the hub. I'm playing back a recording now to see how well this works out. Hopefully, there won't be any more issues concerning recording and playback.

 

[zamar23]

If you look at your PC's Device Manager, each Hard Drive hanging on the Mobo's PCI(e) bus connected IDE, SATA or USB controller, has several settings in Properties - Options (they are called differently depending on OS version): like optimize as Internal or Removable, Synk Data Transfer, DMA, etc. These setting determine how data flow btw the Proc - PC's memory buffer - HD's memory buffer - HD Heads is controlled by the PC and HD controllers. If there is processing speed & data flow mismatch and the memory buffers are not large enough to handle it, the device will register error and hang.

AZBox is in essence a lower end PC. Its obvious, AZBox firmware doesn't handle this data flow control well for some drive models. Are there any similar settings in its UI regarding removable drives that one can change? Just look at your PC Device Manager and compare your HD settings to AZ UI settings choice for hard drives... Try to play with them, or possibly look on the web for extra related FW plugins.