My DVR's disk drive is not stopping

[MW390]

Unless I'm missing something here I could swear my DVRs used to spin their disk drives down after a few minutes when I powered it down. Did this change somewhere and if so why? I also checked the power save in the system setupmenu

 

[Jared Twomey]

If you have a new model, they really don't ever really stop. Just cause you turn the receiver off, doesn't really shut it off... its still doing stuff

 

[kstuart]

A hard drive engineer once explained to me that the drives last longer if they run continuously.

Stopping and starting wears them more than just running.

 

[TheKrell]

Indeed. I recently put my 501 in my bedroom, and it's driving me crazy. The disk is usually spinning, even when the receiver is off, at all times of the day and night. But also (once/hour?) the receiver spins it down. I think Dish is trying to kill the drive.

 

[JayStil]

Indeed. I recently put my 501 in my bedroom, and it's driving me crazy. The disk is usually spinning, even when the receiver is off, at all times of the day and night. But also (once/hour?) the receiver spins it down. I think Dish is trying to kill the drive.

You should "upgrade" to a 7100.

Quiet as a mouse, except when downloading the EPG info at 3am.

 

[aegrotatio]

Indeed. I recently put my 501 in my bedroom, and it's driving me crazy. The disk is usually spinning, even when the receiver is off, at all times of the day and night. But also (once/hour?) the receiver spins it down. I think Dish is trying to kill the drive.

I ran into this phenomenon and for me it has an interesting cause.
As you know, when the drive is idle for a period of time, like an hour, it goes to sleep and spins itself down.
The problem is that the drive notifies the operating system that the drive went to sleep.
The operating system, which I think in the DiSH Players is Linux, responds usually by doing something that requires it to write to the disk. Lots of unpredictable system calls in Linux require the disk to spin up which is ironic.
Then the disk spins up. Funny it's usually doing this only to respond to the sleep signal.
Then it spins for about an hour (or whatever the sleep timeout period happens to be).
Then it goes to sleep and it sends the "I'm sleeping" signal.
Drive wakes up...
...this process repeats forever...

On several idle servers I've taken the drive and checked the "SMART" statistics. The drive spin-up/spin-down rate is about the same as the sleep timeout that you set.

Windows does this often, too.

 

[Smith P.]

Then it would be easy to check - take out HDD from DVR and read SMART data.
But I don't recall S-up/S-down counter high enough to support your theory.

 

[MW390]

If you have a new model, they really don't ever really stop. Just cause you turn the receiver off, doesn't really shut it off... its still doing stuff

It used to. It'd start up once in a while during the night

 

[MW390]

A hard drive engineer once explained to me that the drives last longer if they run continuously.

Stopping and starting wears them more than just running.

Maybe 30 years ago but not these days. I turned my PC on and off for 15
years at work and it never died

 

[Jared Twomey]

Maybe 30 years ago but not these days. I turned my PC on and off for 15
years at work and it never died

it is still harder on the drives than just keeping them running. Plus, most people's work pc's aren't reading and writing large video files as often as a dvr is

 

[ewindowman]

I have a 501 that is doing the same thing . I wonder if it is a new software bug .

 

[kstuart]

Maybe 30 years ago but not these days.

30 years ago ?

You mean like this:

I turned my PC on and off for 15
years at work and it never died.

15 years ? You must have had one of these - they don't make them like this any more:

 

[Jeffdbs]

I believe I read somewhere that Dish Network HD-DVR's use about 47 watts on or off. Now take all the HD-DVR's that are running 24 hours and the amount of power to run these DVR's is alot.

 

[Smith P.]

Umm, time is fly ... I recall pushing a cart with those 15" disks; later holding in my hands those bricks, FH form factor [80 MB !!!].

30 years ago ?

You mean like this:

15 years ? You must have had one of these - they don't make them like this any more:

 

[Jim S.]

My 622's disk drive hardly ever makes enough noise to notice. (I don't have it in my bedroom, but I have good hearing and not a lot of other noises in the house.) Are you sure you're not hearing the fan? (Which shouldn't be running that hard most of the time either.)

 

[trumpit]

I believe I read somewhere that Dish Network HD-DVR's use about 47 watts on or off. Now take all the HD-DVR's that are running 24 hours and the amount of power to run these DVR's is alot.

Whoa! I have 722 + 622.
0.047 kW * 2 * 24 hr/day * 30 days/ mo * $0.34 /kWh (marginal rate in Peoples Republic of California) = $23 / mo !

Not only that, but with the progressive income tax I have to earn ~$46 to pay the $23

 

[reddice]

I have a 510 in the bedroom. It is a good receiver but it has the loudest hard drive I have ever heard. When I turn it off after a few minutes it makes a loud click noise and spins down. Then about a minute later it makes a loud spin up sound. The hard drive noise is loud and then it spins down just to spin up again over and over again. I ended up plug-in a cheap power strip that I can just turn off at night and then turn back on when I wake up for the day so I don't keep losing sleep with all the noise it makes. If it is going to keep doing that why can the hard drive just stay spinning up. Since the thing is so noisy I can't wait until I can upgrade to a 622 so the clicking and spinning of the hard drive does not keep me up till 3 AM.

 

[JohnL]

Whoa! I have 722 + 622.
0.047 kW * 2 * 24 hr/day * 30 days/ mo * $0.34 /kWh (marginal rate in Peoples Republic of California) = $23 / mo !

Not only that, but with the progressive income tax I have to earn ~$46 to pay the $23

Trumpit,

34 cents per Kilowatt hour, WHOOAAAAAA. I live in Western NY and we pay about 8.4 to 10 cents per Kilowatt hour.

John

 

[Sileny Jizda]

Ours runs when it's turned "off" all the time. Doesn't bother us much either. I chalk it up to Dish Network. Not much they do really makes any sense.

 

[aegrotatio]

Then it would be easy to check - take out HDD from DVR and read SMART data.
But I don't recall S-up/S-down counter high enough to support your theory.

Yeah, I know, it's a theory, but it happened to me. I had a timeout of 1 hour and in 30 days of uptime on a new hard disk in Linux the SMART data noted about 700 spin up/spin down cycles.

I first noticed this when sitting next to an idle server for long stretch while programming. The server made two audible clicks about once per hour, with a solid hard disk light between clicks, and by 2:00 AM I was determined to figure out what was going on!

On my second hard disk on a Windows XP machine, however, that second drive stays dead until I actually access it.
The system drive, however, doesn't seem to sleep at all.

.