MASTER THREAD: USB drives that work with Sentry and TeslaCam

[Trekboy]

FYI this is what I've been using since August and have had zero problems. 128GB and no partitions.

 

[MrABRanch]

Thanks for the feedback. How long were you using it till the adapter failed? At the moment I've been using the Rocketek adapter with a Samsung PRO Endurance 128GB card since mid-July. This setup has been solid but it just started getting super cold here. Will see if it lasts. Thankfully the adapter is under $10 if it does indeed fail.

It didn't last long a few weeks, it wasn't that cold yet either. Amazon just sent a new one without waiting to receive the old one, which they don't normally do, makes me think it happens a lot.

New one worked last night in low 20's temp (live in a Condo - car can get very cold) - I'll update if there is any more failures!

 

[dandrewk]

About to order, and can't decide between these two:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B984HJ...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NY23WB...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Which should I get?

 

[brianman]

About to order, and can't decide between these two:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B984HJ...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NY23WB...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Which should I get?

Buy both. Do exhaustive testing with video and keep a journal. Report back your results to the forum.

 

[RC2785]

About to order, and can't decide between these two:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B984HJ...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NY23WB...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Which should I get?

I've had the Samsung 32 gb one for a while now and have had no issue. I've heard mixed responses about the 64 gb or higher samsung cards and how it works for some people on their Tesla and how it doesn't for others, something about not being able to format to fat32

 

[FrederickBound]

I review the captures via Win 10 PC using:

1) 3 view Tesla Cam Viewer in a browser (by TMC member here)
2) VLC
3) Win 10 Media Player.

This has been my second Samsung FIT only larger capacity & this has been first time I've gotten the green captures.

Wondering if SSD drive would solve this or will a trip to service center.

I had a name brand drive (Kingston) work and then stop working in the car while it is fine in the computer. I used a Microcenter drive which worked and then stopped working in the car while working fine in the computer. I dropped off my car the other day and the service tech had a Microcenter drive which he said they all used. It wouldn't work in my car. I have another drive I just bought, a 256GB Sandisk with USB3.0 and it won't work in the loaner car!!!

All of these drives are formatted FAT32 and have a Teslacam directory in the root.

This is pretty much par for the course with Tesla. Is there any part of the car or service or support that is not Beta?

 

[FrederickBound]

To be fair to Tesla I dont think you can really blame them for this. There are two parameters that can make a drive fail, neither of which are controlled by Tesla. The first is sustained write speed. Most flash drive makers WAY overstate this; you are better off measuring this yourself. If you dont have a fast enough drive, then it will fail fast and the car will tell you.

I mentioned this to the tech when I dropped off my car with them the other day. Telling us a 4 MB/s write spec without stating the conditions is pointless. The write speed of a drive varies with the manner in which the data is written. I use a program called FlashBench which measures write and read speeds with many block sizes. The write speed can vary from over 20 MB/s with 16 MB blocks to less than 1 MB/s at a 1 kB block size. So which number should I focus on? The data sheet says 5 MB/s.

The second parameter is worst-case latency, and is far harder to quantify. Basically, flash drives have internal housekeeping they have to do from time to time (including thermal throttling). This can result in the drive "pausing" data writes for some period of time. During this time the car has to buffer the incoming video in memory until the drive starts accepting writes again. These drive pauses are all over the place; some drives use lots of short pauses, others use fewer but longer pauses. But regardless, if the internal videos buffers in the car fill up while the drive is paused, then video is going to get lost, since the car has no place to store it. It's this second (and very unpredictable) parameter that makes so many drives fail, since often it will not show up initially (for example, until the drive has to handle wear leveling and/or block reclamation).

Ideally, Tesla would run some sort of test on a drive to validate it, but this test cannot easily detect pause issues, since the car has no way to know how to trigger such a pause, or how long it would have to test the drive before such a pause occurred (it might be weeks).

Those with long-ish memories may recall hard drives had a similar problem years ago. At that time they would occasionally pause to do thermal recalibration (as they heated up from a power-up). This was fine until people started streaming video, which needed sustained read performance, and the pauses would glitch the video. Makers worked around this with a new generation of drives that did continuous thermal adjustments to avoid the long pauses.

This is not a problem unique to the Tesla dash cam. Every video camera has to do the same things Tesla is doing. It's not rocket science. In fact there are ratings intended to deal with this problem, Class and UHS. So why doesn't Tesla specify one of these ratings for this??? The industry had dealt with this problem in recording videos. Why doesn't Tesla get on board?

 

[FrederickBound]

Except

1. There has been a notable surge of this issue with the V10 SW update
2. It has happened with all types of devices (thumb drives, SD/Micro SD with USB adapters, and to a lesser extent SSDs) from a wide range of manufacturers.
3. Tesla has communicated NO specification recommendations for what works best or "minimum requirements" (at least that I have ever seen)

Go back through this thread and read the posts from @Knightshade - he has done an excellent job of spelling out a lot of good info on this.

The in car manual does specify a minimum write speed of 4 MB/s, whatever that means. The write speed varies with several parameters and they need to be specified. See my other post on this.

 

[MrABRanch]

About to order, and can't decide between these two:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B984HJ...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NY23WB...olid=2XUWJBFW4IJST&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Which should I get?

Either will do the job, I had both, returned the Samsung (thinking it had faulted - it hadn't) and now using the Sandisk, benefit of Sandisk much cheaper but much less warranty, if you want the 5 year warranty and probably a better drive overall go for the Samsung, that would be my guess and was my choice initially.

 

[drtimhill]

I mentioned this to the tech when I dropped off my car with them the other day. Telling us a 4 MB/s write spec without stating the conditions is pointless. The write speed of a drive varies with the manner in which the data is written. I use a program called FlashBench which measures write and read speeds with many block sizes. The write speed can vary from over 20 MB/s with 16 MB blocks to less than 1 MB/s at a 1 kB block size. So which number should I focus on? The data sheet says 5 MB/s.



This is not a problem unique to the Tesla dash cam. Every video camera has to do the same things Tesla is doing. It's not rocket science. In fact there are ratings intended to deal with this problem, Class and UHS. So why doesn't Tesla specify one of these ratings for this??? The industry had dealt with this problem in recording videos. Why doesn't Tesla get on board?

I agree, and mentioned that if Tesla do have special needs they should probably at the least specify a “recommended drives” list of ones they have tested. Not perfect, but it would remove the guesswork. I was pointing out that (a) it will never work with ALL drives (despite others assertions) since there are stricter requirement than a normal “copy a file on demand” computer need, and (b) unlike other systems (including dedicated dash cams) the Tesla computer has to deal with other more mission-critical tasks which makes the balancing act more difficult.

I have no proof, as I have no access to the Tesla software stack, but I bet that Dashcam is pretty low in the priority list of the cars subsystems; if the car needs to worry about steering/safety etc, than dash am will get a back seat and this may cause the buffering issues that we are seeing. In that case any fixes may be probabilistic; they will reduce the incidence of this fault, but never entirely eliminate it.

I personally have never seen this issue even with a cheap USB sandisk drive (though I recently switched to an SSD for unrelated reasons). My car is HW3, and I wonder if the faster CPU in HW3 has indeed reduced the probability of seeing this, and if the issue shows up more on older HW versions. But this is speculation on my part.

 

[Jimbo435]

Guess I'll throw in my 2 cents.
I used this Sandisk for the longest time. (I have a mac)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EZ0X55C/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It seemed to work fine, caught a cougar on video that ran across the road.
But then it showed an error, It was full, so I erased it, re-installed, error went away.
Then something happened, and I tried to view it. Dead. Completely.
So I've bought a new one. Camera icon did not come on when I plugged it in last night.
I'll update when i've checked it again this morning.

 

[nonameleft1]

I used two different drives. One is a USB stick another is marco SD card. Both failed after a few weeks. I guess, the problem is not the drive but TeslaCam. For example I noticed my USB drive usually failed after I got into car at home or after work. These are the locations I don't have sentry Cam on. My guess is when I turn off car TeslaCam at location without sentrycam such as home that disconnect power to the USB and sudden loss of connection killed drives.

 

[dandrewk]

I used two different drives. One is a USB stick another is marco SD card. Both failed after a few weeks. I guess, the problem is not the drive but TeslaCam. For example I noticed my USB drive usually failed after I got into car at home or after work. These are the locations I don't have sentry Cam on. My guess is when I turn off car TeslaCam at location without sentrycam such as home that disconnect power to the USB and sudden loss of connection killed drives.

From reading this thread, USB stick drives are bound to fail. They are not designed for the massive read/write speeds and cycles that dash cams require. SD cards are designed for such operations and will be faster and more durable.

That said, not all SD cards are equal. There are a few that seem to work well, so reading the posts will point you in the right direction.

 

[Knightshade]

From reading this thread, USB stick drives are bound to fail. They are not designed for the massive read/write speeds and cycles that dash cams require. SD cards are designed for such operations and will be faster and more durable.

Read more of it

For one, there's effectively no reads happening with the dash cam.

And the write speeds needed are not massive in the slightest for the Tesla version.

As to cycles- flash memory is flash memory.

Cheap SDcards and cheap USB sticks are functionally the same thing.

The more expensive endurance type flashis "better" in the sense they'll last ~20-30 years instead of 5-10 for the amount of data Tesla writes, but that's about it.

There's bunches of threads at this point- and folks have had issues with USB keys, SDcards, SSDs....basically every possible bit of HW.

Because it's a software problem, not a hardware one.

 

[dandrewk]

Read more of it

For one, there's effectively no reads happening with the dash cam.

And the write speeds needed are not massive in the slightest for the Tesla version.

As to cycles- flash memory is flash memory.

Cheap SDcards and cheap USB sticks are functionally the same thing.

The more expensive endurance type flashis "better" in the sense they'll last ~20-30 years instead of 5-10 for the amount of data Tesla writes, but that's about it.

There's bunches of threads at this point- and folks have had issues with USB keys, SDcards, SSDs....basically every possible bit of HW.

Because it's a software problem, not a hardware one.

I have read it, and it sure seems there are greater issues with USB stick drives.

I'm not doubting you, but why do some SD cards work well, where others do not? If it were a software problem, wouldn't it be universal?

 

[Kevy Baby]

I have read it, and it sure seems there are greater issues with USB stick drives.

Most likely because USB Sticks are much cheaper and are more likely to be in more cars. I speculate that the failure percentage of sticks is about the same percentage of failure for SD and SSD.

I'm not doubting you, but why do some SD cards work well, where others do not?

Because its most likely a SW issue (see below)

If it were a software problem, wouldn't it be universal?

Having a bug in the software doesn't mean that ALL drives are doomed to fail, just that it is most likely the biggest contributing factor. If all drives failed, it would be an easier problem to diagnose and fix. Intermittent problems (be it in software, electrical, mechanical) are the hardest to diagnose and fix.

But because the only universal detail is the car's software, that is what points to that as the culprit.

 

[jdw]

But because the only universal detail is the car's software, that is what points to that as the culprit.

So, when experiencing apparently random failures, the culprit is likely to be the non-random universal software and not the random USB devices being used?

I'll grant that Tesla's software may have issues working with some devices, but the pattern (a drive works with TeslaCam for some time and then stops working and then works fine again once reformatted or with a different drive) points to an issue with the drive. That failed drive might be "fine" by some measure, but it is clearly not "fine" for use with TeslaCam.

 

[V__2]

Can someone with "working on computer but slow for Tesla" USB drive perform a full erase of the drive using CCleaner as described in Using CCleaner's Drive Wiper and try again in the Tesla?

 

[Knightshade]

So, when experiencing apparently random failures, the culprit is likely to be the non-random universal software and not the random USB devices being used?

Yes. Just like often when there's an OS update on your phone, SOME people with that same phone have issues, and others don't. Often different folks having different issues.

We saw it with teslacam and the 0 byte repeater files- bunch of folks having it with various storage devices, but nothing consistent HW wise. Largely fixed, eventually, via software updates.

Ditto the "why is some of my video green/pixelated" which also hit, seemingly randomly, folks with various storage devices, but nothing consistent HW wise. Largely fixed, eventually, via software updates.

No reason to suspect the "too slow" business randomly hitting folks with various storage devices, not consistently, won't likewise be fixed with software updates.

 

[FrederickBound]

I agree, and mentioned that if Tesla do have special needs they should probably at the least specify a “recommended drives” list of ones they have tested. Not perfect, but it would remove the guesswork. I was pointing out that (a) it will never work with ALL drives (despite others assertions) since there are stricter requirement than a normal “copy a file on demand” computer need, and (b) unlike other systems (including dedicated dash cams) the Tesla computer has to deal with other more mission-critical tasks which makes the balancing act more difficult.

I have no proof, as I have no access to the Tesla software stack, but I bet that Dashcam is pretty low in the priority list of the cars subsystems; if the car needs to worry about steering/safety etc, than dash am will get a back seat and this may cause the buffering issues that we are seeing. In that case any fixes may be probabilistic; they will reduce the incidence of this fault, but never entirely eliminate it.

I personally have never seen this issue even with a cheap USB sandisk drive (though I recently switched to an SSD for unrelated reasons). My car is HW3, and I wonder if the faster CPU in HW3 has indeed reduced the probability of seeing this, and if the issue shows up more on older HW versions. But this is speculation on my part.

Yes, I'm sure the dashcam is a low priority. Much higher is the whoopee cushion.