Dashcam stops working mid-drive, USB hot to the touch

[Chewy13]

Did a few searches, and didn't find anything relevant to what I'm experiencing.

Yesterday I drove from MA to CT, and twice I noticed that my dashcam icon went to a red X. Prior to that, everything was fine. This was all one long drive, no stops (about 3.5 hours).

Anyways, HVAC was set between 69-71, and it's the Tesla included factory USB flash drive.

I'm in a 2023 MYLR, pre-HW4. My "fix", was while driving, unplugging the flash drive and plugging it back in. Both times when unplugging the flash drive, the flash drive housing was noticeable warm (hot?) to the touch. Not hot enough that I couldn't hold it, but definitely hot enough that I'm thinking it could be part of the issue. With no other user interaction, the dashcam went back to recording.

Has anyone else noticed their flash drives hot to the touch, or have similar experiences (and potential remedies)?

My next thought is to format the drive. I don't even know if the SC would entertain replacing the flash drive, but I guess that could also be an option.

 

[Tronguy]

Not sure what your problem is, but there is one thing: Over time, what with Sentry mode which, to my knowledge, never deletes clips, the USB stick is going to get fuller and fuller. The problem with that is that a near-full USB stick has the non-full portions of the flash RAM in there being overwritten again and again while the dash cam is running. Since flash RAM cells have a limited lifetime, all USB sticks have a form of something called, "leveling" where data on overused sectors gets swapped into sectors that aren't used so much. This theoretically happens in the background - but if one is continually saving stuff to the USB stick, this makes things rougher for the hardware.

The algorithms that do the leveling and such are highly proprietary to the USB stick manufacturer.

If I were you, I'd make a point, next chance you get, to wipe all the Sentry clips; that, or format the USB stick into the appropriate format (I'm pretty sure it isn't NTFS, for example).

The bad news: If some sectors got used too much, the USB stick might be toast. Don't know if you're aware, but there were a bunch of Tesla computers with a flash RAM on it being used as a local hard drive. That part was fine: But the developers had turned on a logging function that kept on beating on the (relatively small) portion of the flash RAM that wasn't the OS and the program data, resulting in failure of the chip and the computer.

Replacing the computer was hundreds of bucks. If memory serves, some enterprising soul with the right tools and flash RAM testing hardware stated up a cottage industry where people would send him the busted computer; he'd desolder and remove the offending chip; using his test hardware, save the data off the chip; take a new chip, and put said data onto the new chip; then solder the new chip to the computer, all for a lot less than the cost of a new computer. (Probably about 15 minutes of work, I'd guess.) And then send the computer back to the owner.

Once Tesla got wind of what was happening they turned off the logging or did something else that stopped the early death issues, and that's the last I heard of it.

But stuff like this really does happen to USB sticks. They don't have an infinite life time.

 

[Chewy13]

Not sure what your problem is, but there is one thing: Over time, what with Sentry mode which, to my knowledge, never deletes clips, the USB stick is going to get fuller and fuller. The problem with that is that a near-full USB stick has the non-full portions of the flash RAM in there being overwritten again and again while the dash cam is running. Since flash RAM cells have a limited lifetime, all USB sticks have a form of something called, "leveling" where data on overused sectors gets swapped into sectors that aren't used so much. This theoretically happens in the background - but if one is continually saving stuff to the USB stick, this makes things rougher for the hardware.

The algorithms that do the leveling and such are highly proprietary to the USB stick manufacturer.

If I were you, I'd make a point, next chance you get, to wipe all the Sentry clips; that, or format the USB stick into the appropriate format (I'm pretty sure it isn't NTFS, for example).

The bad news: If some sectors got used too much, the USB stick might be toast. Don't know if you're aware, but there were a bunch of Tesla computers with a flash RAM on it being used as a local hard drive. That part was fine: But the developers had turned on a logging function that kept on beating on the (relatively small) portion of the flash RAM that wasn't the OS and the program data, resulting in failure of the chip and the computer.

Replacing the computer was hundreds of bucks. If memory serves, some enterprising soul with the right tools and flash RAM testing hardware stated up a cottage industry where people would send him the busted computer; he'd desolder and remove the offending chip; using his test hardware, save the data off the chip; take a new chip, and put said data onto the new chip; then solder the new chip to the computer, all for a lot less than the cost of a new computer. (Probably about 15 minutes of work, I'd guess.) And then send the computer back to the owner.

Once Tesla got wind of what was happening they turned off the logging or did something else that stopped the early death issues, and that's the last I heard of it.

But stuff like this really does happen to USB sticks. They don't have an infinite life time.

Oh very familiar with read/write cycles with solid state chips, and gear designed for “high endurance” recording.
It’s a good point though, I haven’t checked to see how many saved dashcams, or Sentry recordings I have. I can’t imagine it’s more than 50% of the capacity, but I’ll flip thru them to see if there’s anything worth saving and blow away the partition/format it.

The flash drive is new since May, and has seen only 10,000 miles of driving.

 

[laservet]

I initially had an endurance sandisk sd card, 1tb, and it initially worked (in the center console, 2020 car). Immediately after one software update it wouldn't recognize it as available, and the format would fail after trying to format in the car. Card worked fine in a computer, and currently is holding a zillion photos in my digital SLR camera so I assume it was a software issue.

I replaced it with a USB thumb drive and it worked well for a couple of years. Then intermittent failure, said there was a new sentry recording but would hang when I tried to view it. Not long before it wouldn't work and all and wouldn't format in the car. The thumb drive was really hot when plugged in after it started failing. Not hot enough to start a fire, but in a closed console who knows.

I just replaced it with a high temp tolerant made for being in the car sd card, works perfectly. Maybe it's just something I need to replace periodically, and I'm perfectly fine with that, memory is dirt cheap.