Shaw Direct HDPVR 630 Owners Discussion Thread

I seem to have stumbled across a significant bug that'll bite a bunch of people if true. Here's how you may be able to reproduce easily:

- Have a series recording set up for all new episodes of something.
- Wait until it records an episode. Let's say that for whatever reason that recording is no good (guide wrong, previous show ran over, breaking news, etc). In my case, the recording was corrupted (list had bogus date & zero minutes).
- No problem, go into your recording options for that series, list upcoming episodes, pick one in the future and choose "Record this episode". The scheduling bar comes up and that showing turns grey to indicate it's going to record (bad color choices, but I digress).
- Back out and go to the "Upcoming Recordings" list. Yep, there it is. So far, so good. But wait a minute.
- The scheduling bar comes up *again*, and the newly selected episode vanishes from the upcoming list. Poof.

I tried going into the DVR options and setting the value for history to 1 day (can't select zero days). That didn't help.

It *appears* as though the problem is specific to viewing the upcoming recordings list. I went into the guide and found the time/channel of the desired upcoming recording, and scheduled it from there. But I *haven't* gone back into the recordings list and so far when I look at the guide that block is still grey.

I'm going to try again with a different recording later, and if I can reproduce I'll have to figure out how to report this.

SSDs are funny beasts. Yes, they do indeed have a limited number of cycles. In fact it's the number of write cycles that's a concern. And when they fail, it's usually with minimal warning and almost always catastrophic. Having gone through it, I can tell you it's sometimes not even obvious you're having a drive failure immediately, since in many cases it'll reveal itself as program crashes at unexpected times.
I always tell people using SSDs on their PCs to make sure they have a *really* good backup process in place. I do a daily full image, and a daily file-based, two separate backup drives (non-SSD). When people ask me what to set up as a backup plan, my question in response is "how many days of recent stuff can you afford to lose?". In my case, less than one, so I have backups of my backups.

In a PVR situation, if you used an SSD and it started to fail, what you'd probably see is you could watch old recordings with no apparent problems, but new recordings would either fail, or *appear* to work but be unwatchable, and the "live-buffering" would just act weird.

As I said, I learned all this the hard way (though I had multiple image backups, so it was more a "lesson" for me than a "disaster"). If you have no backup strategy, or are depending on RAID, you may be in for some nastiness in your future.