Testing the Limits - Upper USB Drive Sizes

[Washout]

Hi all,
I did a quick search and couldn't see anything specific to this, so here goes:
Now I have my VIN I'm looking to get things ready for delivery and on the list is upgrading the supplied Sentry CAM USB stick (goes in the glove box according to the manual) and I'm thinking of going "to the max" of FAT32 i.e. 2TB, so I'm not constantly having to housekeep the thing.
Also from the manual I think I can have another USB drive in the central forward bin and as I have a fairly large library will likely stick a 1TB drive in there.

Question is before I go buying the Samsung T5 drives (T7 looks to be overkill) from Uncle Jeff, does anyone see an issue with this as a setup (other than the library likely taking an age to get indexed into the car's computer)?

 

[PaulMD]

I've got a 1tb T5, partitioned as 200gb for sentry, rest for music - have around 20k songs on with no issues other than the initial index when plugging in takes around 5 mins, though only ever likely to unplug when looking at teslacam stuff now.

 

[SpareHeadOne]

I use a 256Gb mSATA in an external caddy for Sentry/TeslaCam and I've not had to housekeep it in the 10 months I've owned the car because it automatically overwrites the oldest clips when necessary unless you've specifically saved them.

So unless you think you'll be keeping thousands of clips, I wouldn't bother with anything particularly large as you probably won't need it.

 

[LoudMusic]

I use a 256Gb mSATA in an external caddy for Sentry/TeslaCam and I've not had to housekeep it in the 10 months I've owned the car because it automatically overwrites the oldest clips when necessary unless you've specifically saved them.

So unless you think you'll be keeping thousands of clips, I wouldn't bother with anything particularly large as you probably won't need it.

Same here, but 16 months and 32,000 miles. There's no housekeeping to do. In fact you could probably do with just 16 GB.

 

[Durzel]

Sentry clips are kept indefinitely, as is anything you save manually. The rest (daily driving) is continuously overwritten.

I've got a 500GB SSD that was partitioned 128GB for Sentry/dashcam and the rest for music, and I did get a message a few months ago about storage getting full. This ended up being because I'd never deleted a single Sentry video since I got the car, just watched them when I got in and set off.

Realistically though you're going to want to delete them after a while, because it's broadly pointless keeping them? Sentry is pretty sensitive so if you park in a supermarket you'll probably come back to "incidents" where several people have dared to walk past the front of your car, etc rather than because anything meaningful happened.

You could stick a bigger hard drive in there, but you're only kicking the problem down the road. I've since repartitioned my SSD to be 50/50 and wiped everything that was irrelevant, and figured I'll spent 10 minutes or so every so often going through every clip in the car and wiping them to keep it reasonably maintained.

 

[Washout]

Thanks all, that is most useful to get real world usage experiences.

 

[MrBadger]

imho, no point having too large a large media drive. It doesn't give you anything other than more space to fill with stale saved dashcam videos. Its not like its going to allow longer drives to be recorded, it only saves what you tell it to save. The only benefit that I can see is if you leave the car with sentry mode on for weeks on end without it starting to overwrite the oldest clips.

 

[GRiLLA]

I use a 64Gb USB stick, once a year it fills up and I press the option to reformat it.

 

[coffeedave]

New cars come with at 128GB Tesla memory stick that is more than sufficient for sentry and dashcam usage.

I bought one of these (Samsung Portable SSD https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087DG2BH) prior to getting the car and tbh the real issue is it’s too big. When empty, reviewing sentry mode incidents was quick and easy, but as it’s filled up it’s got slower and slower as it seems to need to read and catalog all the previous sentry incidents before showing the most recent ones. Can wait a minute or more now to review the people that just walked past the car in the supermarket car park.

If I delete all the sentry stuff it goes fast again, so there is definitely such a thing as too big.

 

[thesmokingman]

I'm using a nvme drive in an external enclosure. I was surprised it worked tbh, but it has been very stable and drive speed is ample to say the least.

 

[kelvin 660]

I format my 128GB memory after every time I wash the car, as long as I haven't found any damage on the car. So far, so lucky but if I did find damage I could go back thru the sentry recordings to try and find out when it happened...

 

[SpareHeadOne]

Sentry clips are kept indefinitely, as is anything you save manually. The rest (daily driving) is continuously overwritten.

I've got a 500GB SSD that was partitioned 128GB for Sentry/dashcam and the rest for music, and I did get a message a few months ago about storage getting full. This ended up being because I'd never deleted a single Sentry video since I got the car, just watched them when I got in and set off.

Oh, that's not what it says will happen in the manual for 2021.12.25:

NOTE: As the USB flash drive runs out of available space, the oldest footage in Sentry Clips is deleted to make room for new footage. Once deleted, you are unable to retrieve them. When the flash drive is full, Sentry Mode and Dashcam can no longer save video footage. To prevent the flash drive from getting full, you must regularly move saved videos to another device, and delete them from the flash drive.

Somewhat confused wording, but I expected that to mean it would only keep videos you save yourself, anything else is fair game - with Sentry clips kept as long as possible but not indefinitely. I guess I'll find out if my drive does the same thing at some point.

 

[Wol747]

I wouldn't keep camera videos on the same stick as music - when you format you lose the music. If you format in your PC often the car refuses to acknowledge the USB stick - sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.

 

[Durzel]

Oh, that's not what it says will happen in the manual for 2021.12.25:



Somewhat confused wording, but I expected that to mean it would only keep videos you save yourself, anything else is fair game - with Sentry clips kept as long as possible but not indefinitely. I guess I'll find out if my drive does the same thing at some point.

I didn't let it get as far as being completely full, but I definitely got a message to tell me that it was running out of space. Surely if it takes care of that stuff itself why would it bother informing me?

 

[MrBadger]

It will still run out of space if you accumulate saved dash cam footage. They will never be overwritten unless you manually delete.

I wish there was a quick way to delete multiple clips. Format doesn’t work if you have more than one media drive. I have separate stick for audio and even when I removed that format was not available. Sounds like that’s a legacy of older times when we had to prepare the drives and watch the clips in third party devices.