I placed 8GB USB flash drive into the DashCam USB port. Red light indicating its functionality disappeared after 7 days for one and 1 day for another one. The USB flash drives are not recognized by my computer and cannot playback. Does Model 3 damage USB flash drive or I have faulty flash drives? Thanks
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Model 3: DashCam
- Thread starter Drapond
- Start date
Just installed a 128GB usb the other day for the first time trying out TeslaCam and Sentry. As you probably know TeslaCam will rewrite files over 1 hour of driving that it buffers. If you save a recording it will be 10-1 minute files or about 30mb per camera. And if you have the latest update on your car, TeslaCam will also record from the two side cameras as well so your 1-hr buffer space has grown; and anytime you save driving videos, your saved file folder will be larger than before.
Sentry Mode however, for use when the car is parked, will quickly eat up file space when it records any alert files (and Alarm files I assume--haven't had this happen yet thankfully) and those files it saves do not get overwritten until you delete. Figure 90 mb there as well (30mb x 3...for each camera). The Mode seems to be rather sensitive and triggers easily (physical dashcams, the better ones at least, have a sensitivity setting you can adjust to prevent triggering from wind and road bumps for example). One person on here said he parked his car in a shopping center parking lot for 1.5 hours and had 8 saved files from that time that filled up or nearly filled up his usb drive (forgot the capacity but it was fairly small). Tesla recommends buying the largest capacity you can. Now that we are able to capture not just footage from the front camera but from two side cameras, storage space can go quickly.
Have you tried reformatting your usb drives with FAT32 again? I really think you need to go out and buy a much larger capacity device and plan to check it frequently to delete unnecessary Sentry files that got recorded without you realizing it.
Save your 8GB usb for music where it's a better use.
Sentry Mode however, for use when the car is parked, will quickly eat up file space when it records any alert files (and Alarm files I assume--haven't had this happen yet thankfully) and those files it saves do not get overwritten until you delete. Figure 90 mb there as well (30mb x 3...for each camera). The Mode seems to be rather sensitive and triggers easily (physical dashcams, the better ones at least, have a sensitivity setting you can adjust to prevent triggering from wind and road bumps for example). One person on here said he parked his car in a shopping center parking lot for 1.5 hours and had 8 saved files from that time that filled up or nearly filled up his usb drive (forgot the capacity but it was fairly small). Tesla recommends buying the largest capacity you can. Now that we are able to capture not just footage from the front camera but from two side cameras, storage space can go quickly.
Have you tried reformatting your usb drives with FAT32 again? I really think you need to go out and buy a much larger capacity device and plan to check it frequently to delete unnecessary Sentry files that got recorded without you realizing it.
Save your 8GB usb for music where it's a better use.
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For Sentry Mode, you cannot park backing in to a parking space. If your car's front is facing the road in the parking lot, everyone parked on the same row will walk by the front of your car and you are going to have fun sorting thru all the saved events folders. If you park head in, only the people parked right next to you and open their door on your side will trip the "event". That's useful because if you get a door ding, you will know who did it!
Well actually if you've walked around your car and not seen any damage, unless you want to see who was near your car, no need to think about it just toss the saved folders.
I had been going thru them since I got the update every day. Just to see what could trip the camera. One time I scared myself... I turn it on at night because my car was parked in my driveway facing out. I figured if someone tried to walk toward my house in the middle of the night, it will be caught by the car's front camera. So in the morning after I got to work, I decided to check the flash drive. I saw one event... there was nothing showing on the front camera, so I started checking the driver side camera. I saw someone opened my trunk in the dark! I can't tell who it was only that the trunk was opened by someone.. so I switch to watch the feed from passenger side camera..... it was me leaving the house that morning LOL. I forgot to turn off Sentry Mode before going out to the car.. and first thing I did was to put my bag into the trunk.
So for those who doesn't know.... if you turn on Sentry Mode and do not turn it off remotely before coming back to the car, it will register it as an event and save the 10 min into a folder.
An 8GB drive is far far too small. I'd recommend a flash drive no smaller than 64GB if you're using it for Sentry Mode and the dash cam functionality. I also wouldn't use any old drive you have laying around. A decent 128GB flash drive only costs around $20-22 now and a 256GB around $45-50. Also if it's only a 8GB drive it's likely old and slow (USB 2.0). Better off buying a brand new drive that's USB 3.1 and can handle a faster write speed. The faster the drive and more storage it has the less likely you'll run into any problems.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
The ports on the Tesla are USB2. Any faster key will buy you literally nothing in the car. (it'll read faster on a decently recent PC I guess, but if you already have a big USB2 key laying around there's no issue using it since that's all the car does anyway)
I don’t recall any info regarding whether the ports support a USB 3.0/3.1 data rate, but the front USB ports do support over 2A for charging. USB 2.0 spec for max power provided by the ports is 500mA. Why would the front ports support higher power than USB 2.0 but only provide support for the max 480Mbps USB 2.0 data bus speed?
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I saw a youtube video where someone (maybe i1Tesla) was taking apart his console to try to figure out where he could "hide" his usb drive. In that process he found the front USB ports are powered separately from the data cables. In other words they are not "just" USB 2 ports.
Ah interesting. Even so, if the ports are truly USB 2.0 as far as data transfer is concerned I still think it is advisable to go with a drive with a high write speed. An old 8GB drive that the OP is using likely has a very low write speed and may have trouble keeping up with the constant data from the cameras.
Is that 30mb per minute per camera or for the full 10 minutes per camera?
If 30mb for 10 minutes per camera, then it would be 5.4GB per 10 hours of continuous recording on three cameras during Sentry mode assuming worst case scenario parked in an open, high activity area.
If 30mb per 1 minutes that would be 54GB for 10 hours. I might need to upgrade my 32GB stick or would be great if Tesla added some auto-deleting feature after 48H or some time after sentry is disabled.
Sorry, should have said apx 30mb per each camera’s 1-minute file in the saved Sentry folders (usually 10 minutes of files but sometimes more if some were truncated due to mid start or pause stop I guess).
Pulled my USB a few minutes ago to put up this screen capture. On a Mac with a 128GB USB stick. Turned off Sentry on phone app before going out to the car but forgot to hit pause before removing stick (oh no) so figure that messed up some files. However upon randomly examining my videos I see different kinds of corruption and not sure if from my USB or still issues with the dashcam app... Tesla hasn’t pushed out this update to many owners yet so still working on it.
These are not all the files from today but representative to give you an idea. Recent clips would be the TeslaCam 1-hr buffer I believe (correct if wrong). Saved clips are from my parked Sentry Mode. I didn’t save any files today from driving.
One of the weird things we noticed looking at the info recorded on the files was the time stamp. The files under RecentClips were from when the car was parked outside last night, Sun. 3/3. They are labeled as 3/4 however, and from 8:46pm to 9:45pm (1 hour buffer). The hour is likely true given the footage. But the date is definitely off.
I did drive the car this morning but guess I hadn't turned on TeslaCam recording when driving or I would have thought the buffer would have today's driving on it. Confused and not sure I remember what I did this morning when I got in the car.
Now the SavedClips are from Sentry Mode during parking this morning, 3/4, from 10:19am to 10:29am (right before I left to go to the grocery store) and then from 10:49am to 10:59am (while I was in the grocery store and returned to the car). I do remember activating Sentry Mode on my phone when I was going to go in the store. I parked a distance from the store so guessing nothing was triggered while I was in the store shopping. This date/time stamp seems fine to me.
I'm going to see about reformatting the drive and trying again tomorrow and seeing how the date/time stamp is and if the corruption issues I saw are gone.
I did drive the car this morning but guess I hadn't turned on TeslaCam recording when driving or I would have thought the buffer would have today's driving on it. Confused and not sure I remember what I did this morning when I got in the car.
Now the SavedClips are from Sentry Mode during parking this morning, 3/4, from 10:19am to 10:29am (right before I left to go to the grocery store) and then from 10:49am to 10:59am (while I was in the grocery store and returned to the car). I do remember activating Sentry Mode on my phone when I was going to go in the store. I parked a distance from the store so guessing nothing was triggered while I was in the store shopping. This date/time stamp seems fine to me.
I'm going to see about reformatting the drive and trying again tomorrow and seeing how the date/time stamp is and if the corruption issues I saw are gone.
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The date and time are GMT. So 3/4 4:47AM (GMT) is 3/3 8:47PM (PST) in your RecentClips folder. BTW, I think there is something wrong with your driver side (left) camera. Lots of the saved clips are Zero byte size?
As for the GMT stamping, you are referring to the Date Modified then? I did think those "future dates" were very strange. The file name time stamps are locally accurate and do then correspond to the Date Modified if GMT. Where does the setting to display GMT come from, because I see current local time always used on my Mac files on my computer?
As for the left repeater in the last SavedClips folder, yes we are watching for things like this. A short time earlier in the previous folder the file sizes looked fine, however in that folder both left and right repeater side cameras had video corruption (you can see from the half green screen in the snap shot image). Curious what today's recordings show.
Other things we noticed: Sunday night in an earlier test only the left camera image would at times get very bright, and then as the car changed direction the image would go to a more nighttime view. Not sure if this was due to street lights I might have been under and the camera trying to adjust for the light exposure. We did notice flickering store lit signage (neon or LED source?) on night footage and when parked at night in front of our garage door which has LED wall lights mounted to the side we saw some weird visual aberation recorded.
I did reformat the flashdrive and reinstalled it last night. I'm keeping detailed notes on my phone of dates and times and what I'm doing to check against tonight. Today when I went out I also saved video a few times while driving and have the car in SM now. Believe it will get triggered to save some files as the lawn crew is out today.
Curious what others who have this update are seeing.
As for the left repeater in the last SavedClips folder, yes we are watching for things like this. A short time earlier in the previous folder the file sizes looked fine, however in that folder both left and right repeater side cameras had video corruption (you can see from the half green screen in the snap shot image). Curious what today's recordings show.
Other things we noticed: Sunday night in an earlier test only the left camera image would at times get very bright, and then as the car changed direction the image would go to a more nighttime view. Not sure if this was due to street lights I might have been under and the camera trying to adjust for the light exposure. We did notice flickering store lit signage (neon or LED source?) on night footage and when parked at night in front of our garage door which has LED wall lights mounted to the side we saw some weird visual aberation recorded.
I did reformat the flashdrive and reinstalled it last night. I'm keeping detailed notes on my phone of dates and times and what I'm doing to check against tonight. Today when I went out I also saved video a few times while driving and have the car in SM now. Believe it will get triggered to save some files as the lawn crew is out today.
Curious what others who have this update are seeing.
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Yeah the Date Modified is in GMT. I am not sure about the file name... it seems like a hybrid of something. I don't think you could change timestamp of the clips to different time zone than GMT. You just have to subtract 8 hours yourself!
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