On 16 March 2017 at 11:19, Bob Goodwin <bobgoodwin@fastmail.us> wrote:

Yes, I have been buying WD 1TB drives, 7200 rpm, sometimes Seagate when the price is right. I don't have a specific need for this one, it was an old TV device that they had not provided a return label for, told my daughter to toss it and she thought I might want the hard drive. It took considerable effort to get to it, even some loss of blood on sharp edges. The drive was in a separate housing with a fan. The device was one of five, from the spare bedroom I believe, probably had little use.

Imight put Fedora 26 alpha on it when it's available.

Experiences like this are invaluable when you encounter problems on an important system.    Upgrading firmware is outside most user's comfort zone, but after you have done it a few times you will feel comfortable backing up a drive on a key system and upgrading firmware.   Learning to do a flash update using linux could come in handy someday.

I was interested to see that the drive was formatted with linux XFS.   XFS never worked well on 32-bit Intel linux because it was written for RISC and used deeply nested function calls with long argument lists, but DVR's often used PPC or MIPS SoC processors and XFS is well suited to DVR workloads.
 
--
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia