For the past couple of months I've been using an old 4GB USB drive (yeah I know it's small) for the dashcam feature and it's been working well.
Then, after the recent update to also capture footage from the side cameras, I noticed that I keep seeing an X icon for my dash cam. I tried taking it out, reformatting, and plugging back in, and it would work for a day, then same thing would happen.
I started to notice that the drive was always totally filled up when I removed it, and the timestamp of the files was always from the day I had reformatted the drive, with nothing recent showing up. It was as if once the drive filled it, it just stopped writing to it, instead of deleting the older footage and overwriting with newer footage.
Then I finally stumbled upon the 3rd post here:
USB corruption for dashcam recording
and it reminded me that:
1) the dash cam needs to store approximately 1 hour of most recent footage before deleting old video
2) hour long video footage loop requires approx. 1.8 GB of free space
3) if space is not available, an X icon appears (I had previously thought X mean disk is corrupt since that's what everyone else kept saying)
then I realized what was the problem. Before the update, my 4GB drive worked ok since it was enough to handle at least the 1.8GB required for the hour loop. But after the update, there are now 3 cameras being recorded, so now I needed at least 3x1.8GB = 5.4GB for an hour loop. But my drive was only 4GB so was too small.
So I found an 8GB drive laying around and am trying it now, and so far have not seen any problems.
So anyway, just wanted to share my experience in case others have problems, since the cause was not clear to me at first. If in the future they decided to record from even more cameras, then the minimum size (num_cameras x 1.8GB) will go up as well.
Then, after the recent update to also capture footage from the side cameras, I noticed that I keep seeing an X icon for my dash cam. I tried taking it out, reformatting, and plugging back in, and it would work for a day, then same thing would happen.
I started to notice that the drive was always totally filled up when I removed it, and the timestamp of the files was always from the day I had reformatted the drive, with nothing recent showing up. It was as if once the drive filled it, it just stopped writing to it, instead of deleting the older footage and overwriting with newer footage.
Then I finally stumbled upon the 3rd post here:
USB corruption for dashcam recording
and it reminded me that:
1) the dash cam needs to store approximately 1 hour of most recent footage before deleting old video
2) hour long video footage loop requires approx. 1.8 GB of free space
3) if space is not available, an X icon appears (I had previously thought X mean disk is corrupt since that's what everyone else kept saying)
then I realized what was the problem. Before the update, my 4GB drive worked ok since it was enough to handle at least the 1.8GB required for the hour loop. But after the update, there are now 3 cameras being recorded, so now I needed at least 3x1.8GB = 5.4GB for an hour loop. But my drive was only 4GB so was too small.
So I found an 8GB drive laying around and am trying it now, and so far have not seen any problems.
So anyway, just wanted to share my experience in case others have problems, since the cause was not clear to me at first. If in the future they decided to record from even more cameras, then the minimum size (num_cameras x 1.8GB) will go up as well.
