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There are front USB ports besides the two for the phones?
Something maybe worth mentioning is that flash memory can be a bit of a problem when used for loop recording of video where lots of small files are written then over-written and/or deleted by the device.
Flash has a limited number of read/write cycles and deleting or erasing the files either by the recording device or by you trying to free up space or deleting old recordings can cause the USB drive to become corrupt or fail completely. I think a lot of people think that memory chips are completely reliable and can handle unlimited reads/writes, but it's just not true.
So, it is much better to clear a USB card by formatting it and it needs to be a full format not a quick format.
If you want to use a USB drive for recording your Model 3 cameras and you've used that drive before, make sure you do a full format of it first.
I would also recommend using the quality brands and not some cheap giveaway memory stick you got in a goody bag somewhere. There's a lot of really bad quality memory out there which turns up as either fake brand names or in cheap promotional merch. It's often several generations out of date and is slow and/or will look like it has more space available then it actually has.
Probably worth re-formatting your drive every month or so to clear it out completely and get all the space back, especially if you're regularly deleting files on it yourself.
Hope that helps.
As another stated, purchasing the fastest flash storage (high end microSD cards seem to have more consistently marked specifications than USB sticks as they are often used in video cameras while USB sticks are not but as someone else pointed out the core technology in USB and microSD is usually the same) will likely yield longer life.
It would be great if we could correlate corruption issues with speed/size/brand of flash storage, better yet if Tesla improved their software to warn if media wasn't performing up to par.
For now I am using a separate Ultra high speed 64GB USB drive (FAT32) for TeslaCam than for my mp3s. I suspect I will bump into problems, as Tesla's ability to see files on my mp3 USB drive is also far from consistent (at least it doesn't corrupt it; it just sometimes doesn't see any music there).
No, it really won't.
The USB ports in the car are 2.0. The cameras are writing at a whole 1.5 MB/sec.
Literally ANY USB storage you can buy new today is massively faster than needed for this application, and speed has no relation to endurance here anyway.
Except the media has nothing to do with any of the problems.
Even folks running super high end cards or SSDs have the same types of issues.
Because again literally ANY flash storage is tons faster than needed for this use.
The problems are software issues, not hardware issues.
Well, again, the speed makes 0 difference for the camera stuff. You'd be better off with a slower, larger, drive if concerned about life of the device.
A 128GB USB key will take twice as long to go through its # of rated write cycles than a 64GB one... at the amounts of data the tesla stuff writes you'd need probably 5-10 years to use up the # of rated writes on even a cheap 128GB drive in typical usage. (I've run the exact math in previous posts if you care to look for it)
Just another question from a newbie on TeslaCam fascinated by the myriad stories of failure and remediation here ....
Has anyone experienced TeslaCam state changing from working to not working *without* having ever removed the USB flash device from their car?
No, it really won't.
The USB ports in the car are 2.0. The cameras are writing at a whole 1.5 MB/sec.
Literally ANY USB storage you can buy new today is massively faster than needed for this application, and speed has no relation to endurance here anyway.
For saving the files sure.. but when viewing them back if you're reading them from the drive you want a fast read speed and for that the faster the better so there isn't much lag.
What lag?
The file itself is made up of video that uses 0.5MB of data for each second of video. So 2 MB/sec if you're using a program that reads all 4 videos at once.
The crappiest USB keys can read several times faster than that....so unless you're watching at 10x speed there won't be any lag when viewing even on slow keys.
So for viewing a "faster" drive gets you nothing at all.
The only time it'd matter is if you had a large amount of videos you want to copy from the key to a PC for archive purposes.
Even then you're usually talking about a few minutes total difference for anything but massive amounts of data
I've tried formatting 2 different 256G USB jump drives to FAT32 and adding the "TeslaCam" folder. No luck. I get an error message after inserting saying, "USB drive is not accessible by Dashcam. Reformat the drive to a supported format". 2020 Model 3 Performance. Anyone having/had this issue?
That's interesting. I have a pretty fast ssd and sometimes when I move the playhead later in the video in the ios app that I use to view them. It takes a few seconds to refresh the frame. I assumed that was a lag caused by reading from the ssd but I suppose it could be other things.
Have you confirmed they're actually formatted FAT32? Windows, for example, can't actually do that on a 256GB drive without 3rd party software.
I replaced my year-old micro SD card with an SSD and came back to this thread to make sure I was formatting everything correctly.
- Google "FAT32 formatter" for the OS you are using. Download and install it.
- Format the flash drive as FAT32.
- Create a folder called "TelsaCam" on the drive.