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Originally Posted by jrcoxy
I have an RCA DRC8030N DVD recorder/player. I saw your reponses to other owners of these machines on another website. You appear to be quite knowledgeable on these machines.
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 that you had suggested on the other website 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 on the hard drive the picture is getting stuck several times. It'll stick for a second or two. Sometimes it will start back up 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 savvy, 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.
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I know I've explained this somewhere before. I thought it was here, but didn't see it in a site search. Hmmm... anyway...
A DVD recorder is really nothing more than a specialized computer mainboard, the video tuner/capture components, a DVD burner, and in some cases (like this RCA DVD recorder) a hard drive.
Like any other other hard drive, fragmentation eventually sets in. Data is not written sequentially on a hard drive. If you had three programs recorded, about an hour long, data might look like this:
Now if you delete the second recording, and record a two hour show, you'll end up with something like this;
Now record, erase, record, erase, etc -- several times in a row. Beyond that, the very nature of hard disk recording is fragmented. It's not just files broken into a few piece, but sometimes broken into dozen, hundreds or even thousands of pieces. On bigger files -- like videos! -- this can corrupt the data. This is what has happened to you.
Yes, for the anal retentive techie dorks out there, my example is very over-simplified. But for the averge normal person, you probably get the idea now.
On a computer, you run defrag software, either the freebie/junkie one that comes built into Windows, or something better like Diskeeper.
A DVD recorder has no such function, you're out of luck.
The next-best thing to defragging is a full re-format.
The more full a drive becomes, the higher the likelihood that data becomes fragmented. The drive knows that sequential storage is best. But when the only available space is broken up into tiny slivers across your drive, it writes in tiny slivers because that's all it has to work with. In general, try to never fill a DVD recorder more than maybe 2/3rds full.
I've had these same problems, including on this RCA. My solution was to dump would I could to disc, then re-format. You never want to store on a DVD recorder hard drive long-term anyway. Use discs.
I had an important computer hard drive physically get damaged this past summer. It required an expensive recovery from OnTrack services. Why? Because I stupidly kept the drive about 98% full, and the constant wear activity of the internals wore out, as the disc would thrash about to access data. Luckily, I had just defragged it a few weeks before the recovery. Had I not done that, loss would have been far worse (99% recovery!) The damage had been done over long-term fragmented use.
And no, you can't take the hard drive out of the recorder, stick it in a computer, and run defrag software. The drives used in DVD recorders almost always use special custom OS and/or file system, sometimes even with hardware mods. It's not an off-the-shelf drive like a computer has -- it's more proprietary.
Maybe not what you'd hoped on hearing, but I hope it helps you all the same!
