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Teslacam viewer slow (30 seconds) with Samsung SSD T7 500 GB

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I have a Samsung SSD T7 500 GB drive that I use for the Teslacam (2018 Model 3). When launching the viewer, I have 30 seconds of a blank viewer before I can view any clips. I believe I formatted it with the option provided in the Tesla UI. Previously I had a 128 GB Samsung thumb drive, and I don't remember it being this slow.

Has anyone else experienced this? I believe this is one of the drives that others have recommended and have had good luck ith.

The drive is in a Taptes hub:

This is the drive:

Since it takes 30 seconds before I can view anything, I hardly ever review footage.
 
I could try it once without the hub. My drive is basically brand new, I'd be surprised if it had many bad sectors. I did schedule a service appointment for it earlier, and they said that I should really stick to one of their tested drives, and they expected that it was slow because of the amount of videos on it. I did try formatting it again from the car, and videos are quicker, but I still think it could be faster. I have hardware 2.5, maybe that is slower than 3.0 for video playback.
 
I could try it once without the hub. My drive is basically brand new, I'd be surprised if it had many bad sectors. I did schedule a service appointment for it earlier, and they said that I should really stick to one of their tested drives, and they expected that it was slow because of the amount of videos on it. I did try formatting it again from the car, and videos are quicker, but I still think it could be faster. I have hardware 2.5, maybe that is slower than 3.0 for video playback.

That is possible regarding HW 2.5 vs 3.0, but I had HW 3 in my Model S and sometimes playback and scrubbing through the timeline was slow in the Sentry Mode viewer. I had a Samsung EVO 860 SSD with 550 MB/s read/write drive but jumping around the timeline stuttered sometimes. Maybe with the Model 3/Y they give the USB-C and one USB-A port faster bus access because scrubbing the timeline is noticeably faster on the Model Y and it's the same HW 3 as my previous Model S. The Samsung T7 is faster than the EVO 860, but really I wouldn't expect the EVO 860 to be the bottleneck either. I haven't tried the EVO 860 in the Model Y but will test it later today and report back.
 
Just to follow-up, in the past few days I’ve tested the in-car viewer with a 256GB SanDisk High Endurance microSD with bundled MobileMate USB 3 reader, an old Samsung EVO 860 500GB SSD, a Samsung T7 1TB SSD, and a SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD.

For the brief testing they all recorded fine, even the included Tesla 128GB flash drive. With in-car playback they were all very similar too but it seemed the SSDs felt more responsive when scrubbing through timelines and resuming playback at random positions.
 
Maybe it’s the hub. I started using the T7 in our new Model Y and playback of recordings in the viewer is so fast and responsive, noticeably quicker than the provided Tesla 128 GB USB drive.
I have the same problem as the OP. I removed the T7 and plugged the Tesla 128 USB drive and it works so much faster. How did you format your T7? Did you format from the car? I should try again....
 
I formatted the drive in the car. If I remember correctly, it did NOT create the TESLACAM folder, and I had to add that in when I connected the drive to my laptop.

I'll try it once without the hub.

I wonder if it is possible to upgrade a 2018 M3 from USB-A to USB-C, does anyone know if Tesla offers an upgrade path for that?

Update: without the hub made no difference
 
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