Using Seagate FreeAgent Pro drives with Moxi DVRs
The Moxi DVR is great. Really, really great. It took almost a decade, but a company finally came out with a UI better than that of my Series 1 TiVo.
One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive. I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit. It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go. Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning. When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options. Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”. If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.
The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up. The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive. See the flags on the hard drive by typing:
sdparm -a /dev/sdX
where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)
To clear the flag, type:
sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX
The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.
Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.
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March 29th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
April 9th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Joshua,
Just wanted to say that Im glad my writeup helped with your problem even though I wasn’t the person who initially figured out what was going on and the fix - I still appreciate the link!
Yea, I’m pretty terrible with keeping up on my blog lately
January 21st, 2009 at 12:13 pm