USB corruption for dashcam recording

[JPP]

I got about a week with no errors on my Model 3 before the drive corrupted. I think it was related to a spontaneous MCU reboot today. I have not empirically tried to do MCU reboots while the USB drive is mounted to see if this is a repeatable bug, but I guess if the MCU is writing to the USB drive when you reboot, that might just corrupt the files. I plan to UNmount the drive (press & hold the icon) before any planned MCU reboots.

 

[ONEDVSMOFO]

I have a fix for it! I just carry around 5 usb drives. As soon as one gets corrupted, I pop another one in. Once two or three go corrupt, I bring them in and reformat.

 

[Lloyd]

Mine has been working 10 days without failure!

 

[daniel]

I have a fix for it! I just carry around 5 usb drives. As soon as one gets corrupted, I pop another one in. Once two or three go corrupt, I bring them in and reformat.

Informative. But not worth it for me to have a dashcam. I've gone without one for the half-century I've been driving. I'll do without it for a little bit longer until Tesla fixes the problem.

 

[atownev]

Can I ask why so many of you are using such large USB sticks? The max amount of recording, 1 hr, uses less than 2GB. A 128 gb stick seems much too large

 

[Alby]

Same failure with a brand new drive. Lasted one day.

I tried calling in the evening and it said it would be 40 minutes, so I hung up. Called in the morning when I got to work and they said 10 minutes, but it was really more like 5

Agree that it isn't a super critical issue, but if a lot of people report it, they may prioritize it higher, so it is worth it to report it to a person. I am sure the in car bug reporting gets completely ignored.

 

[daniel]

Same failure with a brand new drive. Lasted one day.

I tried calling in the evening and it said it would be 40 minutes, so I hung up. Called in the morning when I got to work and they said 10 minutes, but it was really more like 5

Agree that it isn't a super critical issue, but if a lot of people report it, they may prioritize it higher, so it is worth it to report it to a person. I am sure the in car bug reporting gets completely ignored.

Of course everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I don't want them to prioritize the USB dashcam issue because it's much more important to work on things like phantom braking or lane-change ping-pong.

I also do not believe that reporting of bugs via the car gets ignored. Tesla, in my experience, is extremely responsive to its owners. This car is a work in progress and I believe that Tesla listens to us and is working as hard as they can to give us the best car they can.

 

[MMBTUS]

Since my grey x appeared, I reformatted another 32Gb Sandisk Ultra Fit and plugged in. That was four days ago and so far it’s still recording normally. More precisely, I still have the red dot on my display.

Takeaways:

I will not remove any flash drive until it fails or I need to access saved videos.

I will pause record first if I can access controls.

Then I’ll pop in a spare reformatted drive to carry on. For now M3 is handling the flash drive write cycles fine unless i pull the drive without pausing.

The 32Gb drives are way larger than the roughly 2Gb occupied by 60 “recent” one min clips. But each save click converts the10 files most recent clips to “save” status so there’s 300 Mb plus with each save. Larger drive gives plenty of room for multiple saves. Otherwise a smaller drive would be fine. But for $10 each for two, and a fit without interference, well worth the price.

 

[Frieda’s Boss]

Can I ask why so many of you are using such large USB sticks? The max amount of recording, 1 hr, uses less than 2GB. A 128 gb stick seems much too large

@atownev my thinking was that having the extra storage space allows me to press the 10min save basically whenever I want and I don’t have to remove the USB drive until I have enough clips to warrant removal. So if 1hr uses 2GB then I can save 40hrs worth of clips...when you say it out loud, I admit it’s a bit overkill

$25 for that USB drive felt like a good deal though!

 

[Trevor B]

Can I ask why so many of you are using such large USB sticks? The max amount of recording, 1 hr, uses less than 2GB. A 128 gb stick seems much too large

Folks are #overcompensating for shortcomings elsewhere, bigger is better ... etc

 

[JoshPA]

Made it a week on a "quality" drive

 

[daniel]

I keep forgetting to pause recording before getting out of the car. I'm going to just pull the drive out and forget about it. If I remember...

 

[TheLocNar]

FWIW, I have a drive formatted with 2 partitions. First partition is for the cam, second is for music. Only the cam partition gets corrupted.

 

[ksb467]

My Win 10 pc automatically asks to fix the corrupted usb drive each time I put it in. That seems to avoid the problem others have. One time I selected NO, and later got the dreaded X.

 

[Need]

Over the weekend, I got a new software update. After that my USB got the "X". Tried reformat and didn't work, so I did a MCU reboot and worked after that so far.

One thing I noticed is that on my X (with MCU 1), I didn't get the "X" on the same software update. Also on the X, it does not create those .rec files. On the 3 (with new MCU), it creates bunch of them from previous version of Version 9 (39). I have not check new version yet to see if "corrupted" USB still happens.

 

[daniel]

My Win 10 pc automatically asks to fix the corrupted usb drive each time I put it in. That seems to avoid the problem others have. One time I selected NO, and later got the dreaded X.

Except that I don't want to have to pull the USB drive every day and I don't want to have to remember to pause the dashcam before I stop the car every time. I want to be able to leave it in the car and forget about it and only pull it out after there's been an incident that I wanted to record and save to my computer.

I want it to be set and forget, and then pull it out when there's a video I want. Or better yet, I want to leave it in and be able to send it wirelessly via my wi-fi to my computer.

"Computer automatically fixes the USB drive every day" is not a solution.

 

[TheCaptain67]

FWIW, I have a drive formatted with 2 partitions. First partition is for the cam, second is for music. Only the cam partition gets corrupted.

Only the Camera partition is being written to.....

 

[animorph]

We had 2 partitions on the USB in our 3. The camera partition conked out quickly and we gave up and left it that way. But today the music partition stopped working. Zero songs. Checked it on the computer, had it repair the TeslaCam partition, deleted the TeslaCam folder, everything worked fine on the computer. But when I plugged it back into the Model 3 it showed two USB's, one blank and one with a blank folder (select by folder came up automatically but no songs were listed). I deleted the TeslaCam partition and that allowed the music partition to work normally. Be careful with two partitions...

 

[dlieu]

i had frequent fsck failures with GPT and 2 partitions (1st for dashcam, second for music). The dashcam partition would fail a lot with fsck files all around, and the music just stops working from time to time (but usually comes back eventually, no FS failures like dashcam's).

FWIW i seem to have much better luck after using "MSDOS" (which i guess is MBR) partition table reformatted with KDE partition manager (which is just a re-skinned GParted, i guess).

At least i haven't had any failures in dashcam partition yet for a few days. Which still may be a coincidence i guess, but usually i had a few dashcam failures in a day before.

sandisk 128Gb partitioned into fat32 32Gb for dashcam followed by the music partition taking the rest of it. Plugged into the right port (just in case, most probably doesn't matter whatsoever).

 

[Lloyd]

Mine has yet to fail. Almost three weeks and never failed.