[mythtv-users] WARNING: Samsung F4 owners / warning. Disable smartmontools

[James Courtier-Dutton]

On 4 December 2010 16:42, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Oh great, another HDD vendor off my list.
>>
>> I figure if a vendor would let something like this slip by there's no
>> telling what else they have missed.
>>
>
> This is a little frustrating to me since I have 3 of them. I actually
> saw the problem 2 months ago when running badblocks on one of my
> drives. I thought it was a kernel or hardware problem because it only
> happened on 1 of my two machines the overclocked one with the older
> kernel. Since I am busy and the 4 pass badblocks takes 25+ hours I did
> not reach any conclusion. I am a little relieved now that it was not
> just me and that the problem is much easier to reproduce now. However
> I do have nearly 2TB of my mythtv recordings on one of these drives.
> Hopefully there is no lost data. I have removed any automatic smart
> checks but I am worried that kde or gnome or some other part of the
> system will try to identify the drive. Disabling the cache seems to
> fix the issue but it makes the drive write very slow at least for the
> test in the smartmontools page for this issue.
>

With the myth recordings, they are in MPEG Transport stream format.
The format has various CRC checks in there, so it would be possible to
scan the myth recordings and check if any data is corrupted.
Making such a tool is on my todo list as I do quite a lot of work with
DVB and myth and it is nice to know how good the recording is, ie. if
weather has interfered with the recordings etc.
One could then add a feature to myth of "If the first recording was
corrupted due to weather, reschedule recording of the same program if
it is getting repeated at another time."
You could then also add "repair" tools, that takes two recordings of
the same program, with each corrupted at different points, and patch
them together to get one complete error free recording.