Shaw Gateway: Adding External Drives

[jorton]

Originally Posted by amosnov

*** WARNING *** I can confirm the Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 supports 3TB drives but Shaw Gateway does not. Despite that, this is still a success story. To see 3TB you must create GPT partitions which I did at the start. Unfortunately GPT is only recognized by 64bit systems. The Shaw Gateway would not recognize the drive as GPT. I erased the GPT partition and restored with MBR which only supports up to 2TB. This time the Gateway recognized the drive and formatted in about 10mins. I checked the Recording Space and all is very well (other than losing 1TB of my 3TB drive).

My gear:
1x Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 RAID enclosure in RAID 1 mode
2x Hitachi Deskstar 0S03208 3TB SATA3 7200RPM

Notes:
- Do not use drives greater than 2TB for Shaw Gateway expander unless you are happy with a big chunk of inaccessible drive space.

From what I have read the only units to date that are successfully getting 6TB are the Lacie 4Big 6TB units with raid 0 (not JBOD). They have 4x1.5TB drives in them and cost a pretty penny. Since they are only 1.5TB drives you may be correct on the 2TB drive size limit.

I am confused how an enclosure like the Lacie can present a massive 6TB drive to the Gateway, and format like that, but with your dual 3TB Raid 0 presenting as 6TB drive as well is only showing as 4TB??? Maybe you really are seeing 6T? There isn't anywhere you can actually see the size of the external drive attached in the Gateway menu or the Installer menu.

Maybe some Raid guru will chime in

[PittsyCalgary]

Originally Posted by PittsyCalgary

I'd be interested in others experiences with external drives on the gateway. I purchased the same enclosure as W. Smith indicated above (MediaSonic HUR1-SU3S2), but installed two Hitachi 3 TB drives (7200rpm) with RAID-0 and spanning.

The format took an hour +, but everything seemed to come up fine and I've been recording and watching lots of shows over the past 10 days.

I have had two times where my external drive "disappeared". There were no messages from the Gateway or Portal. You only realize it is missing when you see the recording space used jump from 5% to 50% and a bunch of the shows disappear.

In order to fix it I've had to reboot the Gateway with the enclosure powered off. When the portals are back up, I power on the drive enclosure and it reappears with all recordings in place.

If anyone else can share their experiences, I'd potentially be interested in moving to an alternate, more stable solution before I get this thing packed with recordings.

As mentioned by a previous poster, "sleep modes" need to be avoided. The only reference I see with respect to that for my enclosure is if I synch the power on to the host. I have that feature disabled.

I'm glad to see the thread is active again.

Amosnov's post has me thinking. I have the same Hitachi 3 TB drives and MediaSonic enclosure. The gateway represents free space as a % vs raw capacity, so I wasn't sure what the system was seeing from my 2x 3 TB drives. I did a quick calculation at the time and felt I have getting about 5.5TB from my two drives.

I did not attach them to any PC before I connected them to the Gateway. The format took an hour or more.

Next time I disconnect it, I'll have to confirm what capacity I am getting in case I did it wrong previously.

I'm hoping Amosnov can weigh in on my bigger problem. Once or twice per week, my external disk disappears without warning or message. The shows on it disappear from the recording list and my recordings all go to the internal drive (which reached 100% pretty quickly right now).

The only fix I've found is to power down the gateway and hard drive, reboot the gateway, then when it is fully booted, restart the hard drive. Everything comes back without incident, but this is getting to be a real pain. If I don't check it every couple of days, I'm worried that it will auto-disconnect, my internal drive will fill up, and I will miss recordings.

Any similar experiences with other drives would be very useful to know about.

Thanks.

[jorton]

Originally Posted by amosnov

*** WARNING *** I can confirm the Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 supports 3TB drives but Shaw Gateway does not

Not trying to disagree but it looks like mattryyc in this thread is using a single drive enclosure with a 3TB drive in it on the Gateway without any problems, so it seems to be supported at least in his case,

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/show...31&postcount=1

I only have 2TB drives on hand so I can't test this.

Also looks like w.smith has had some issues (although different than your's) with that same enclosure and green drives but hasn't posted an update recently.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/show...18&postcount=5

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/show...18&postcount=6

[amosnov]

jorton,

Good catch, looks like there are enclosures working with the gateway supporting full 3TB drives. I saw this note on the Vantec Nexstar MX dual enclosure page, "*More than 2TB can now be recognized under JBOD and RAID 0 mode". The Vantec manual seems pretty dated and claims only up to 2TB drives. For the Medasonic enclosure page states "All Brand of 3.5" SATA / 2 up to 3000GB per drive" BUT in the manual p11 it states "For 3TB Hard drive, users must format in GPT Partitions and use Windows Vista or Windows 7 in 64bit. I assume Vantec is doing something special for full 3TB drive to work with the gateway. I would love to know what that is.

[amosnov]

Originally Posted by PittsyCalgary

I'm glad to see the thread is active again.

I'm hoping Amosnov can weigh in on my bigger problem. Once or twice per week, my external disk disappears without warning or message. The shows on it disappear from the recording list and my recordings all go to the internal drive (which reached 100% pretty quickly right now).

Any similar experiences with other drives would be very useful to know about.

Thanks.

I'm only two days in with my expander. I'll keep an eye on % used to be sure my expander is not bein dropped. Have you tried disable, the Sync mode and/or Smart Fan mode switches, is your expander overheating? I don't know if the switches will help with your issue but it may be worth a try to disable auto-sleep and/or fan speed reduction.

[jorton]

Been using a Vantec Nexstar MX in Raid 0 with two Western Digital Green 2.0TB "EARS" drives for the past 24 hours with no problems with all the usual tests like recording 6 HD streams at once, checking playback, stoping playback on one TV and resuming on another etc....

There are a couple tricks that you have to follow to use the enclosure though,

1. Use the switch settings on the PCB in the case itself not the manual that as someone else stated is quite dated. I set mine to Raid 0.
2. When pushing the reset button you need to have power on the unit for it to take and trigger the build of the raid. I had the case appart with power on and hit reset then shut off and then it built the Raid 0 when I powered it back on. The Gateway will format the Raid 0 with it's own file system so no need to preformat with GPT etc... in Windows, cause that's for windows

Before connecting up the Nexstar MX the internal drive showed 30% (500GB). After connecting and formatting the recording space showed as 3% (4.5TB). This math seems to work out correctly. (30% of 500GB is 150GB, 150GB / 4500GB = 3.333% rounded to 3% as shown on the Arris UI)


Warning - Do the next two notes at your own risk!

The chipset on the MX is a Silicon Image 5723. If you happen to not get an enclosure without the latest Silicon Image firmware I have read that you should update to 1.1596. The enclosure I received was 1.1596. There is a process to update using Silicon Image Steelvine software if you Google it. This was recommended but don't know if it's necessary as I couldn't test this.

The two WD 2.0T "EARS" drives have both had the wdidle3 (command "wdidle3 /d") utility run on them to disable all parking on the drives. ( I had previously had issues with running these drives in a Raid 5 enclosure so this was recommended by several users, although it didn't seem to help with that enclosure) If you google "TIVO" and "WDIDLE3" you will find a few links to people using this utility setting up the drives for TIVO DVR use.

[Reboot]

Originally Posted by jorton

The two WD 2.0T "EARS" drives have both had the wdidle3 (command "wdidle3 /d") utility run on them to disable all parking on the drives. ( I had previously had issues with running these drives in a Raid 5 enclosure so this was recommended by several users, although it didn't seem to help with that enclosure)

Hi Jorton, as I have an enclosure on order and have 2x2TB WD EARS hard drives on hand I went to the WD site to look into the wdidle command you mentioned, this is what it says:

File Name: wdidle3_1_05.zip
File Size: 170 KB
Version: N/A
Publish Date: 4/2010

Important! If a pop-up blocker is installed, you may need to disable it in order to download the software.
Description

This firmware modifies the behavior of the drive to wait longer before positioning the heads in their park position and turning off unnecessary electronics. This utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.

CAUTION: Do not attempt to run this software on any hard drives other than what is listed above. Please make sure that the computer system is not turned off during the firmware upgrade. Doing so may damage the hard drive beyond repair and your data may be lost.

I could not find anything along these lines pertaining to EARS drives?

[jorton]

Originally Posted by Reboot

Hi Jorton, as I have an enclosure on order and have 2x2TB WD EARS hard drives on hand I went to the WD site to look into the wdidle command you mentioned, this is what it says:
I could not find anything along these lines pertaining to EARS drives?

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/...p/15731/page/2

(about half way down page...)

Originally Posted by bill_s WD community manager 
Sorry, but our agent didn't know that this policy was just changed. Current WDIDLE3 works with the RE and GP drives listed below.

RE Drives - WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0

GP Drives - WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS

WDIDLE3
http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...id=113&lang=en

[Reboot]

Originally Posted by Reboot

I could not find anything along these lines pertaining to EARS drives?

Hi again Jorton, I did a google search and found the discussion forum on using this software on EARS drives , I wonder if it would pose warranty issues using unsupported software?

[jorton]

I don't think it would void the warranty if they have staff telling you to use it and they are posting the utility on their site to use.

I did say use at your own risk

[Reboot]

Originally Posted by jorton

I did say use at your own risk

Yes you did . I like the idea, reading the forum (still haven't found the link in the message you provided (link is cropped and would not load the page ).

Appreciate your information, I have a couple of days to study up and decide before I proceed. It would be nice if WD would update their site with the new applicability.

[Reboot]

Sent you a PM

[jorton]

Originally Posted by jorton

Been using a Vantec Nexstar MX in Raid 0 with two Western Digital Green 2.0TB "EARS" drives for the past 24 hours with no problems with all the usual tests like recording 6 HD streams at once, checking playback, stoping playback on one TV and resuming on another etc....

There are a couple tricks that you have to follow to use the enclosure though,

1. Use the switch settings on the PCB in the case itself not the manual that as someone else stated is quite dated. I set mine to Raid 0.
2. When pushing the reset button you need to have power on the unit for it to take and trigger the build of the raid. I had the case appart with power on and hit reset then shut off and then it built the Raid 0 when I powered it back on. The Gateway will format the Raid 0 with it's own file system so no need to preformat with GPT etc... in Windows, cause that's for windows

Before connecting up the Nexstar MX the internal drive showed 30% (500GB). After connecting and formatting the recording space showed as 3% (4.5TB). This math seems to work out correctly. (30% of 500GB is 150GB, 150GB / 4500GB = 3.333% rounded to 3% as shown on the Arris UI)


Warning - Do the next two notes at your own risk!

The chipset on the MX is a Silicon Image 5723. If you happen to not get an enclosure without the latest Silicon Image firmware I have read that you should update to 1.1596. The enclosure I received was 1.1596. There is a process to update using Silicon Image Steelvine software if you Google it. This was recommended but don't know if it's necessary as I couldn't test this.

The two WD 2.0T "EARS" drives have both had the wdidle3 (command "wdidle3 /d") utility run on them to disable all parking on the drives. ( I had previously had issues with running these drives in a Raid 5 enclosure so this was recommended by several users, although it didn't seem to help with that enclosure) If you google "TIVO" and "WDIDLE3" you will find a few links to people using this utility setting up the drives for TIVO DVR use.

Switched out my two WD20EARS drives I had temporarily in the Vantec Nexstar MX enclosure for AV-GP WD20EURS drives and all is well. The AV-GP are meant more for 24/7 DVR use,

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=150

I had no issues with the WD20EARS drives for 5 days in Raid 0, just have another use for them.

[roopster77]

So to confirm, the gateway can handle up to 6 TB and the drive bay can handle up to 3 TB per drive, if the newer version is used... This would be the maximum allowable for the gateway right? right? huh?

[jorton]

Here is a summary of the enclosures posted in this forum to date,

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8067076/Shaw...ureDetails.htm

Best viewed in Explorer/Firefox, the grid lines aren't showing when I publish from Excel 2010 in Chrome, it still works just harder to read.

Please post if you have a working configuration. I will try to keep this up to date as people add new configurations or update their current.

------------------------------------------------------------

What I can see from the results so far is that there may or may not be an issue with the Mediasonic NHUR1-SU3S2 going to sleep/offline. There were several types of drives used in this unit and two of three had the issue where it went off line and the Gateway had to be reset.