First time Vero 4k+ user and a complete noob when it comes to anything Kodi. I’ve finally parted ways with my old WDTV Live boxes cause they just handle any of the newer files. I’m really loving the 4K+.
My first of many questions is:
When I turn off my Vizio 4K TV, I assume that the Vero box stays on (no red light), but I notice that my external hard drive that is connected to the Vero box still is powered on. I would like the Vero box to go into some kind of standby or off and shutdown the external hard drive also. Then when I turn my TV on, I would like to be able to turn on Vero box with remote which would also power the external drive back on too.
I’ve looked at the different options under the “POWER” menu option, but not sure which one to use.
The Vero is designed to be always on. When you shut off the TV, the drive should spin down after a period of inactivity.
There is a Standby mode where the Vero goes into a semi-hibernate mode. That’s Suspend in the Power menu.
The Power menu options do this:
Exit = Stop Kodi. It will restart after 10 seconds
Power Off = Power off the Vero. You must unplug it from mains and plug it back in to turn it on again.
Suspend = Hibernate
Reboot = Reboot the system
Shutdown TImer = Shutdown (poweroff) after a set time.
My recommendation would be to leave the Vero on. If the drive is not spinning down after 10 or so minutes then it’s because something i s still accessing it. If you post logs we should be able to help you find the cause of that.
Vero is designed to run 24/7 there is no “real” standby mode but @sam_nazarko implemented a suspend mode that will switch off HDMI signal and put CPU into power-saving. That Suspend mode you can either manually activate via the power menu or you can have it automatically activated when you switch off the TV (to be configured in the CEC setting of the Vero). When in Suspend mode the LED goes from blue to red.
The sleeping of the USB disk is another topic. This should normally happen automatically if no files are accessed over some time via hdparm.
So if your disk doesn’t go to sleep there are two possibilities:
There are still files access on it
Your Harddisk Enclosure doesn’t support the standby signal.
Thanks everyone for the quick replys. I have a Seagate 3tb drive hooked up to it right now. Tomorrow I’ll try my WD Mybook and see what happens. I selected the standby option and the red light is on but the blue light on the hard drive still has its blue light on after 15 minutes. The drive doesn’t seem to be spinning (no noise) but still has power to it. I’ll try the other drive tomorrow and let everyone know what happens.
All drives do not stop spinning in “Suspend”. I’ve tried “Remove Safely” to unmount drives, but since all drives are A/C powered they still spin. I’ve spent hours today reading thru the different posts here and it seems like this problem has been unresolved for many years.
The main reason I want the drives to completely shut down is not only for the life of the drive, but as everyone knows if for whatever reason there is a power loss and the drives are still being accessed from Vero, the drive can be corrupted and data loss will happen. This has happened to me with the WD TV Live boxes, accidentally unplugging the drive before shutting down the WD box.
Since I’m new to the Vero 4k+, is there a reason why it always has to be connected (other than updates). The WD box was perfect in that sense you could turn it off and on with the remote. The only option for now is shutting down the Vero and repowering it each time. Not optimal, but at least I know I won’t lose terabytes of movies.
I’m open to all suggestions and any help is greatly appreciated.
As for the WD Mybook you should be able to set that with the WD Utilities app.
It is highly doubtful that the drives spinning or not will have any bearing on their life span. The little bit of wear from the continuous spinning is generally equal to or less than the wear they get from spinning up or down. This should not be a concern.
As for the corruption this should not be a concern either as long as you are only storing media on them and you are using a journaling file system (NTFS or ext4). You should expect data loss at some point as no drive is going to live forever. If you want to prevent data loss there is no other option than to have backups.
Every time I buy a new drive, I format it to NTFS and wipe out all preloaded software on the drive. I’ll check WD and Seagate websites for software. I do agree that all hard drives at some point are going to fail and I have an external drive with my most important movie collections (the ones you can’t find and download anymore). But I have had hard drives become unreadable and corrupt by disconnecting them the wrong way with the WD TV boxes.
As for being a complete beginner and noob to OSMC and Vero, I have no idea how to run commands and check logs or anything else. Are there some tutorials or videos I can watch to learn how this is done?
I can’t speak to whatever issues you had with the WD TV as I have never played with one. What I can tell you definitively is that with spinning rust hard drives if they are not being written to or have files the are being held open there is zero chance for corruption if it loses power. There is nothing with the file system to get corrupted at that point and the heads are designed so they will always park before the disk spins down even without power. File corruption can occur if the drive loses power when it is written to. If you are using NTFS and are just writing media files to it then this again should not be a big deal. When the drive comes back online it should see the journal is in a broken state and it will just undo the partially written files and it’s happy again. Worst case you have to chkdsk the drive. Where the real issues would come in if you were running something more advanced like an operating system or a database. They have a tendency to hold open lots of things and are often not too keen when their files get messed up. That is not what you are using it for so I would not bother being concerned with this happening.
Well well well, this might be (partly) true for a Windows OS but we know from reports that Linux (Vero) has sometimes problems with recovery of failed NTFS partitions
With all that said. If I have a hard drive connected to Vero and want to disconnect so I can connect to my PC and add movies, would you recommend just unmounting drive or completely shutting down Vero?
Also, does Vero have to be shutdown or suspended before connecting a hard drive or USB Flash drive to it?
If you are only going to using the drive on the Vero, it’s highly suggested that you format the drive to EXT4. It will perform better and less chance of problems since it’s a native Linux filesystem.
I still have my 2 WD TV boxes hooked up to other TV’s, so I’ll probably I’ll keep the drives that I use between Vero and the WD TV boxes as NTFS. I’m buying a new WD 8tb My Book for only my 4k movies that I will only use with Vero, so I probably format to Ext4 as you suggest. Thanks
I guess I was giving Linux too much credit. It is true for Windows and having to manually chkdsk has been rare for a very long time. On those failed partitions did Windows have any problems fixing them?
It’s funny, a couple of the drives I was able to recover and reformat and hook back up to the WD box with no problems. Just very time consuming running recovery software and copying recovered files. But I had one WD 2tb drive that after I ran chkdsk and fixed drive, it was only recognized on my PC but the WD TV box would never recognize it again. I finally copied all the files over to another drive so I could use it with the WD box.