NASLite Network Attached Storage

Is there any chance we could get the option to specify fragment size in a future release?

My mpegs saved to the NASLite-2 box are randomly corrupted. System load is nonexistent (2%) and network is gigabit, so I don't think either of those are an issue.

My PVR software, SageTV, seems to like 64K fragments. Other people on the SageTV forums are reporting the same problem, but only with NASLite-2, and they think it may be related to fragment size. This problem doesn't happen sending to NTFS drives with 64k fragments.

Thx if you guys can help.

That's the forst I hear of such problem. What do you mean when you say "My mpegs saved to the NASLite-2 box are randomly corrupted."?

Just for comment. I have been storing /streaming .mpg files using NASLite v1.5 thru v2.02 for over a year. No corruption - no problems. That is a total of about 130 gb of mpg's. TV mpg's were recorded using GB-PVR. Movies mpg's were created with various ripping programs. NASLite has caused no problems, and performed flawlessly.

Hi Tony. SageTV saves mpeg2 files to the NAS. When you go to play them back, sometimes they play perfectly fine. Sometimes the video will freeze for a second or 2 and then continue. Sometimes the video will suddenly start playing at 1/2 or 2x speed and stay that way for several seconds.

Jumping ahead or back in the video 3 minutes (this is a 1-button press thing in SageTV) is unreliable. You can be right at the start of the show, try to jump forward 3 minutes, and it goes right to the end of the show.

I was thinking it might be a strange new SageTV problem, so I copied the videos that were messed up to my desktop and opened them with MPEG2VCR, and observed the same behaviour. It looks like some form of corruption has been introduced to the mpeg file.

SageTV is far from perfect, but I have never seen this behaviour before in 3 years of use with a winXP storage server.

Here is one thread on the SageTV forums where someone else describes having the same problem with high-def shows. Mine are not high-def:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthr ... ht=naslite

I should add that SageTV developers specifically recommend using 64K clusters on the storage drives, so maybe it is something specific to SageTV.

Thx for the input Grumpa. I'm sure lots of people are using NAS for this type of function, but maybe environment is slightly different. Do you know what record quality (in terms of GB/hr) you are using?

I have approx. 1.4 Terabytes of disk in my NASLite-2 USB machine, and my HTPC records up to 4 shows simultaneously, each streaming 3-5 GB/hr. Right now I am experiencing these problems just recording 2 at once.

We seem to have very different recording profiles. My NASLite servers are 1tb and .5tb. My recording profile is DVD quality, with one .mpg generatied at a time - no overlaping transactions to either server. Good luck with the problem.

Recording multiple streams simultaneously to a single drive will always result in fragmentation regardless of the cluster size. The 64K cluster may help with NTFS, but is likely not going to make a difference with ext3. Here are some things for you to try:

1. Record one stream per drive at any given time.
2. Install more RAM so buffering accomodates multiple streams better.
3. Try disabling the stats generation and see if disabling SMART probe has effect on recording.
4. Check for any IRQ conflicts in the syslog page.

Other than that, things should be as expected...

Thanks for the suggestions Tony. I'll give them a try and let you know what happens.

I tried all the suggestions Tony. There were no IRQ conflicts, I brought the system up to 1gig of RAM from 512, and tried 1 stream per drive. Still experienced the problems.

I've gone back to an XP machine for now, and everything is working as it should now. I'll try NASLite-2 again when I can throw another machine together. Thanks for your help.

Testyturtle,

I am also using SageTV and I only use the NASLite server storing imported videos while I record from the TV cards to a SageTV server local disk.

I tried over the weekend to recreate your issue by recording a few shows (3 at DVD Standard Play) on NASlite but couldn't on my 100mbit LAN. Everything worked as expected.

Nevertheless, I used to have some similar problems a few months ago as follows:

When recording more than one show concurrently to a local (non-Naslite) NTFS disk with 64K formatting I would get the same problems you stated.
I had this disk for 18months and it was very fragmented.
Solution: Transfer all shows to another disk, delete them and copy them back. Now all files were not fragmented on the disk and new recordings where perfect.

While I had the above issue, I researched around and found out that:

SageTV instructs your capture card driver to place the captured video in a particular file. With some capture cards (Hauppauge?) if the drive is very busy or doing heavy seeks(as is the case when files on it are fragmented), the capture card cannot wait and discards frames thus producing a corrupted mpg file.

Now, if you take the above and extrapolate it to the Naslite network environment, you can get delays, either on the server end or on the network. My experience showed that unless you have IRQ or drive related problems, the server should be more than OK.

I had network connectivity problems from my WinXP box when I was using Java 1.5.x. with SageTV. As you are properly aware, Java 1.5 has a lot of issues with memory leaks, runaway handle creation etc.
SageTV have recommended moving to version 1.4...12. It was affecting the stability of NIC drivers in particular.

In my case, it was screwing my WinXP networking within a few minutes of booting up.

As soon as I rolled back to 1.4.2.12 the whole thing is rock solid.

It may be worth checking to see which version of JAVA you are using as a first step.

I just couldn't go back to relying on anything other than NASlite for storage. No hungs, no reboots - it just runs....

Hi ALucas. Thx for the Sage info. There is definitely some stuff in there I hadn't heard before.

I would not be surprised if my troubles with NASLite-2 are in fact SageTV's fault, since very few people report trouble with NASLite-2. The list of problems i've had in the past with SageTV is very long, but I still think it is the best solution out there for a PVR. When it works right, it is unbeatable.

Anyway thx again for all your info. I'm definitely going to give NASLite-2 another try, I just need to make sure it isn't in a critical role (if my storage server goes down, nobody in the house can watch TV, and bad moods develop all around me).

Note that what I said is that it could be a bad Java or a peculiar capture card driver not SageTV.

To make everybody happy in my home, I record everything to a local disk and then move the shows I want to keep to NASlite. This way there is no corruption. My Naslite server now holds almost 2TB of Data. Pretty soon I will have to add more disks....

I have the same issue of corrupt mpegs with SageTV and don't use NASLite (YET). So, I think this has more to do with SageTV and not NASLite. Have not checked the amount of fragmenting on my NTFS drives lately. My java is j2re1.4.2_06. I have just gotten into the habit of using VideoReDo Plus to fix any videos that cause problems.

Do not want to make this a mpeg/sagetv troubleshooting thread. Just pointing out that I don't think this is a NASLite issue.

-- Scott

Hi spike. I agree it must be somehow related to SageTV, but the funny thing is I have never had a single corrupt mpeg file in 3 yrs of using XP as my network storage machine. I have read in several places that the ext3 filesystem is superior to NTFS, so it's hard to know exactly what is going on.

I actually find ALucas' workaround a little unusual. Wouldn't you rather just record directly to your NAS, instead of recording locally then having to move everything over? Maybe he's ripping commercials and/or encoding to mpeg4 or something at the same time, then it makes a little more sense.

anyway, like you say we're getting way off topic here so i'll stop it.

When I get another NASLite-2 machine setup, I will post any more results I get with SageTV in case it can help someone on here.

I just wanted to follow up to clear NASLite-2 of any lingering blame in the problem I described above. After running my network storage server on XP for about a week, corrupt MPEG's started appearing on THAT machine, then today it started randomly rebooting. After changing out several components with no luck and digging around on the web, it looks like my athlon xp cpu has finally decided to retire.