Use USB HDD as a capture drive?

[motobarsteward]

I think I already know the answer to this because I am trying and it's not working!

Can you use a USB external HDD as the capture drive in SageTv?

Can anyone give me a definitive answer?

[GKusnick]

You can use any drive, internal, external, or networked. If it's addressable by drive letter or UNC path, you can add it as a recording drive in Sage.

When you say it's not working, what exactly does that mean? What symptoms of non-working-ness are you seeing?

Bear in mind that Sage records to the drive with the most free space, so if your newly added USB drive is much smaller than your other recording drives, it won't actually be selected for recording until those other drives are nearly full.

[motobarsteward]

I've been having historic (read 2 years) problems with SATA drives on the Gigabit raid ports in my GigaByte G33 mobo and EVENT 9 and 51 and general 1 second freezes and lockups. To try to prove that it is the Gigabyte Raid thingy, I've reconnected my 750 sata drive to a USB-SATA converter and plugged it into the usb port on the PC. I then re-mapped the drive to the same letter as the old config and shared it with the same name. I then point the sage server at this drive (full UNC \\DEEPTHOUGHT\SageCap) style. I can play the recorded shows but when I try and watch live TV, it complains that it can't access the drive!



I just spotted that I forgot to select the 'Allow network users to change my files' option in the share properties.

I hang my head in shame and accept that I have no more right to live on gods clean earth than a Squirrel!

[fidget]

For a while, I tried used a Seagate USB drive for holding programming. The only problem that I had was that the drive would spin down and I had an instance where it wasn't spun up in time to receive a recording and I lost it. From that point on, I have stayed with internal drives. I have not tried it with 6.x, so it may not be a problem anymore.