[mythtv-users] 3TB...poof

[Jan Ceuleers]

On 18/03/2019 03:42, Craig Treleaven wrote:
> I’ve had multiple failures of the volume that Myth stores recordings on.
>  I’ve had no other failures.  I know that’s not a statistical sample but
> Myth has something to  do with it.

Others have commented that MythTV cannot be the cause of filesystem
corruption and they were right. For an application to be able to corrupt
a filesystem it would need to write to the raw device (i.e. straight to
the disk or to the partition), which it would only be able to do if it
had root privileges.

You might be observing a correlation between MythTV and fs corruption,
but correlation is not causation. The correlation might come from the
fact that MythTV is a heavy user of disk space, meaning that if a disk
is iffy it is more likely than other applications (which use less disk
space) to notice.

> The failures have been with different sizes of drives and from different
> vendors.  Note that after the failure, the drive enclosure is usually no
> longer usable (one exception).  Ie if I put a known-good drive in the
> enclosure, it is not readable.  As I said earlier, the damaged drive is
> also unreadable in a known-good enclosure.  The failed enclosures are
> from different vendors and include Firewire 400, USB 2 and USB 3 methods
> of connection.

OK, so we're talking about external drives. Don't use external drives if
you value reliability. They're just not made for 24x7 operation and they
introduce 2 additional failure modes, namely the external cabling (which
in the case of internal drives is of course also needed but less likely
to be touched/wiggled, or, seeing as they are inside the enclosure,
subject to interference), and the need for another power supply.

A 2.5" drive will fit inside most enclosures, and it will be more
reliable than an external drive.

In other words my money is on a hardware issue. Either the power supply
of your external drive, or an issue involving cabling (including a
physical issue or possibly EM interference).

HTH, Jan