digitalFAQ.com Forum - RCA DRC8030N formatting issues

Quote:

Originally Posted by jrcoxy

You appear to be the expert on these machines. I found this website when I started having trouble. I apparently had a corrupt recording on the hard drive that I couldn't get into. It didn't affect any other recordings. I did the formatting of the drive and the corrupt recording went away. All was well for a while but now I'm having some other problems. On essentially all of my recordings the picture is getting stuck several times. It'll stick for a second or two. Sometimes it starts where it left off other times it'll skip those few seconds. Should I format again? Or is this a sign that it's going bad for good?

I am not very tech saavy, so any real complicated suggestions will fly right over me.

It doesn't appear that anyone makes this type of unit anymore. I really don't want to have to copy to disks. It was really nice being able to store recordings on the hard drive.

Thanks for any help or advice you can give.

Yes, this is a great unit for recording top-quality sources (cable, satellite). It's hard to replace. I understand wanting to fix it. Mine is a great unit.

Hard drives write in a method that leads to fragmentation. If you think of hard drive data storage like an egg carton, and your data is eggs, know that new data is not necessarily written side-by-side, even if it's the same file.

RECORDING #1 could be spots 3,6,7,11, and 12 in the carton.
RECORDING #2 is using spots 2,4,5, and 10.
RECORDING #3 is small and might just use part of spot 1.
RECORDING #4 could using the rest of 1 and part of spot 8.
.... and that example was mostly using WHOLE spots. Imagine when data is using only portions of spots! And then you have 1,000+ spots!

After a while, the drive gets confused from this fragmentation. On a computer, we have defrag software. On a DVD recorder, we're just out of luck. The more full the drive becomes, the worse the problem.

So yes, if you're starting to get corrupted data (likely from having too full a drive), then reformat is the only fix, I'm sad to report.

Anything you want to keep really does need to be archived to DVD+R media. And use good discs, Verbatim DVD+R are suggested. You can find the best prices on them at http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

In the future, try to keep the drive at least 75% free, never fill it up.

I had the same problem with my RCA the one time I let it record unattended for about 3 months. I recorded an old show on daily re-runs. One night, it ran out of space. When I went back to dump to DVD, a few of the recordings were corrupted.

Hope that was easy enough to understand, even for a non-tech. :)