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Sentry Mode USB flash drive failure costing me thousands

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Courtesy of member "arcanexvi": Be careful with the temperature tolerances of the drives you use if you live in a market with seasons. I looked at another T5 but nyxed it when I saw it's only rated for 5-35 degrees C (41-95F). In Chicago we regularly get well above and below those temps in a car. Cabin overheat won't even kick in yet at 95.

These USB drives work fine (withstands -25°C to 85°C operating). (No, I am not receiving compensation for the sale of these drives. LOL).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D7Q41PM/?tag=tmc064-20

If you get the "too slow" warning, just erase and re-format.
Except the T5 SSD is rated for 60C operating, which is 140F and within range of cabin overheat. Not something you'd want to leave sitting in the sun in the car while running, but probably safe while tucked away.

The whole point is to get something that doesn't require instructions on what to do when it gets a "too slow" warning.
 
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Sorry, but you're confusing your assumption with fact. There has absolutely been a change in the requirements to TeslaCam, which is the addition of the 4th camera feed. Tesla doesn't publish their actual drive requirements and that obviously leads to confusion. There may also be plenty of bugs in the cam code or with how it determines "too slow", but there's no blanket bug that explains it all.
*Again*, as I stated above, another forum member took the extra cam into account and showed that the typical name brand USB drive has more than enough write speed capability and shouldn’t be speed limited.
 
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*Again*, as I stated above, another forum member took the extra cam into account and showed that the typical name brand USB drive has more than enough write speed capability and shouldn’t be speed limited.
I saw your post and for drives that publish their speed and don't end up being some counterfeit knockoff, those are peak speeds for single stream large block writes and freshly formatted (i.e no write amplification). It may be that Tesla is doing something inefficient so that a higher speed drive than they suggest is required. Some people are making it work though with highly performant drives.
 
I run a technology department - buy this. I won’t even place a link so everyone will know I am not marketing or making money off of it. :)

You WILL need to format it for exFat since NTFS is the norm.

A00B41E1-4D09-41B6-BE1A-5CA72784C5C7.jpeg
 
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I've done a lot of Googling about comprehensive vs. collision coverage in this type of accident. Here's a typical explanation from an insurance company: "Hit-and-run accidents can involve cars, pedestrians, or other property. ... Comprehensive coverage pays for damages to your car because of fire, falling objects, wind, hail, earthquake, explosion, or vandalism. If your car is parked in a parking lot and is hit by another car, collision will provide coverage."

Have you checked with your actual policy, or agent? Collision is for coverage when one is at fault, unless you live in an "at fault" state, where it doesn't matter who is responsible, each owner has to cover the costs themselves. At least in Michigan, one could recover the deductible from the driver who was cited.

A hit and run accident is precisely what comprehensive is for.
 
Courtesy of member "arcanexvi": Be careful with the temperature tolerances of the drives you use if you live in a market with seasons. I looked at another T5 but nyxed it when I saw it's only rated for 5-35 degrees C (41-95F). In Chicago we regularly get well above and below those temps in a car. Cabin overheat won't even kick in yet at 95.

These USB drives work fine (withstands -25°C to 85°C operating). (No, I am not receiving compensation for the sale of these drives. LOL).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D7Q41PM/?tag=tmc064-20

If you get the "too slow" warning, just erase and re-format.
T5 is good up to to 140F. If you have cabin overheat protection on (and you should) with quality window tint you'll never reach those temps inside the car. I live in Austin, and I've never cracked 110 inside the car according to the app and frequent checking. The T5 has been rock solid.
 
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I believe if you look at the posted link you can find the referral codec. Im not saying everyone maybe just a few.
First, you posted: "Remember many people here are selling a product thru Amazon so they can get a share...".

That was a very specific claim.

Now, you've changed to "I believe"...and "maybe just a few".

When you made your original comment in this thread, you implied that many people who were sharing links to USB drives on Amazon were doing so because they were receiving monetary benefit, rather than linking the products because they work for them and were sharing because they want to help others.

If you have proof of people posting links to USB drives on Amazon and receiving monetary benefit from purchases of those drives, then it's your obligation to support your allegation by identifying those members and the links.

It's not readers' obligation to dig down through hundreds of posts to uncover them.

Frankly, I believe your claim is baseless. As someone who has provided such a link, I find your allegation insulting.
 
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First, you posted: "Remember many people here are selling a product thru Amazon so they can get a share...".

That was a very specific claim.

Now, you've changed to "I believe"...and "maybe just a few".

When you made your original comment in this thread, you implied that many people who were sharing links to USB drives on Amazon were doing so because they were receiving monetary benefit, rather than linking the products because they work for them and were sharing because they want to help others.

If you have proof of people posting links to USB drives on Amazon and receiving monetary benefit from purchases of those drives, then it's your obligation to support your allegation by identifying those members and the links.

It's not readers' obligation to dig down through hundreds of posts to uncover them.

Frankly, I believe your claim is baseless. As someone who has provided such a link, I find your allegation insulting.
I can only speculate, but I suspect it might have to do with the affiliate tag in the link you posted. That's not your affiliate tag though, it appears to be one auto applied to Amazon links by TMC.
 
Remember many people here are selling a product thru Amazon so they can get a share I've tried 5 different USB and 4 have crashed and you can feel how hot they get I think I will go with a SSD after your story looks like it will be a good investment.

That was 3rd USB drive that failed just before the collision. I think I'm going to switch to SSD, too. The discussion here has been very useful. And, yes, I agree it's a software bug. My first one failed IMMEDIATELY after a software update last summer and that's when other people started complaining about the same problem. Whatever the bug is, it seems like people with SSD's are running into it less frequently.
 
CONCLUSION TO "COSTING ME THOUSANDS" incident: I started this thread on 10/12 when my wife parked her car at the post office. When she came out people were yelling that an old man in a white pick-up had hit her car and took off. No one got the license and when we checked the Sentry USB disk we discovered that it had stopped recording 10 minutes earlier with the "USB write speed too slow" message. Here's what's happened since then:

We discovered this was considered a "collision" for insurance purposes. Comprehensive only covers "acts of God" or terrorism - things other than being hit by another car, whether you're in it or not. This is GEICO, by the way, but I checked several other insurance companies, too. Some people say their insurance would cover it under "comprehensive". I envy them since we have $2,500 deductible. An article says that Tesla is now saving a few days of Sentry and Dashcam footage but apparently that was a misunderstanding. I asked Tesla about it to be sure but haven't heard back yet. The post office doesn't have cameras in the parking lot and there are no other businesses nearby so no chance to find the guy.

The left-side passenger door is dented and scraped, the driver's door has paint damage with very minor denting. Got an estimate from Amato's in San Diego, which has been repairing Tesla's since 2013 and is VERY highly rated. Their operation is very impressive. The back door has to be replaced but the front door is repairable. Both doors and the back fender on that side have to be repainted. Anyway, looks like they can do it for less than $4,000. I've decide to leave insurance out it. I haven't had a claim in over 30 years (and that was a parking lot incident, too) and we want to keep our record clean. With so many stories of Tesla's insurance rates rising I don't want to give them any excuse to raise our rates. Not sure this was the right decision but oh, well. For a couple of days I was obsessing over "if only the damned Sentry mode had worked I wouldn't be paying anything" but I think most Tesla owners accept that we're part of a grand experiment and have to take the bad with the good. Love my Tesla.

One other thing - we found out they had back doors in stock but front doors are hard to get so we were lucky there. In ten days I'll have my car back.
 
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The following is from Knightshade who posted this on another thread about this subject:

“All the various issues have been reported by folks using USB sticks, and SD cards, and SSDs to varying degrees since dashcam became a thing. Fewer reports from SSD owners likely because there simply ARE fewer SSD owners- but they too have reporting corrupt video files, problems recording, etc. And likewise you get folks who tell us "I just used some rando cheap 32GB stick I had in a drawer and it works perfectly"

With a 4th camera added the car is recording at a whole 2 Mb/s... significantly slower than any decent USB key (or SD card or SSD) can handle.

And even cheap flash media is rated for ~1000 full write cycles which means you're looking at roughly 5-10 yearsof use for a 128GB-256GB recording device before you hit that limit.

The issues folks keep having are software issues, not hardware.”
 
CONCLUSION TO "COSTING ME THOUSANDS" incident: I started this thread on 10/12 when my wife parked her car at the post office. When she came out people were yelling that an old man in a white pick-up had hit her car and took off. No one got the license and when we checked the Sentry USB disk we discovered that it had stopped recording 10 minutes earlier with the "USB write speed too slow" message. Here's what's happened since then:

We discovered this was considered a "collision" for insurance purposes. Comprehensive only covers "acts of God" or terrorism - things other than being hit by another car, whether you're in it or not. This is GEICO, by the way, but I checked several other insurance companies, too. Some people say their insurance would cover it under "comprehensive". I envy them since we have $2,500 deductible. An article says that Tesla is now saving a few days of Sentry and Dashcam footage but apparently that was a misunderstanding. I asked Tesla about it to be sure but haven't heard back yet. The post office doesn't have cameras in the parking lot and there are no other businesses nearby so no chance to find the guy.

The left-side passenger door is dented and scraped, the driver's door has paint damage with very minor denting. Got an estimate from Amato's in San Diego, which has been repairing Tesla's since 2013 and is VERY highly rated. Their operation is very impressive. The back door has to be replaced but the front door is repairable. Both doors and the back fender on that side have to be repainted. Anyway, looks like they can do it for less than $4,000. I've decide to leave insurance out it. I haven't had a claim in over 30 years (and that was a parking lot incident, too) and we want to keep our record clean. With so many stories of Tesla's insurance rates rising I don't want to give them any excuse to raise our rates. Not sure this was the right decision but oh, well. For a couple of days I was obsessing over "if only the damned Sentry mode had worked I wouldn't be paying anything" but I think most Tesla owners accept that we're part of a grand experiment and have to take the bad with the good. Love my Tesla.

One other thing - we found out they had back doors in stock but front doors are hard to get so we were lucky there. In ten days I'll have my car back.
Amato's typically does Ferraris and Lambos...you sure you want to go there? I thought you'd take it to a Tesla service center and they could do the repair?

I guess if you are not paying for the repair it doesn't matter but that place has notoriously high prices :D
 
Here’s what I’d suggest...buy the USB drive mentioned in post #84 (which has the same specs as the drive I linked plus the added feature of a metal case).

Use it for 29 days. If it fails during that time, then return it to Amazon and buy the SSD drive that folks have recommended.

If the USB drive works, you save substantial money.
 
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Here’s what I’d suggest...buy the USB drive mentioned in post #84 (which has the same specs as the drive I linked plus the added feature of a metal case).

Use it for 29 days. If it fails during that time, then return it to Amazon and buy the SSD drive that folks have recommended.

If the USB drive works, then you have saved substantial money.

I had the Samsung MUF with 265GB and it recently failed after 3 months. I have the SSD now :D
 
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Amato's typically does Ferraris and Lambos...you sure you want to go there? I thought you'd take it to a Tesla service center and they could do the repair?

I guess if you are not paying for the repair it doesn't matter but that place has notoriously high prices :D

I talked to the nearest Tesla Service Center first and they said they don't do body work (I think some of them do). I had read on forums that Tesla Service Centers are expensive. I don't have any experience with them so don't know if that's true. Amato's, as you said, does a LOT of high-end cars and has a great reputation. I decided to get the best possible repair and they've worked with me to bring the cost down. Also, they're getting it done in 10 days and I need the car for a trip in a few weeks. The price seemed reasonable for all the work and re-painting they have to do.
 
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