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[imeric]

I just ran out of space on the drive specified as a second location  drive (no warnings from MC). And I still have 1.4 TB available out of 3TB on my main TV Recording drive.
Recordings started on that second drive since 9 September...

This drive should only be used when the first one runs out of space....

Again some sort of warning or flag would be nice...Logs aren't enough.

[Yaobing]

The intention of the second drive is not as a backup of the first when the first runs out.  It's intended to be used for load balance when you have large number of recordings going on at the same time.  Therefore MC always uses the second drive whenever the first is already in use.  If you have four recordings going on simultaneously, two are on first drive, and the other two on the second.  If this is not what you want, you probably should not use the second drive.

[imeric]

I see.  Still it should ensure there's enough space on the drive before using it for recordings.  I would also prefer that it would use the second drive as a backup or have the option to choose between those 2 options (load balance or space).

But again some sort of proactive warning message on HD running out of space would be nice no matter what someone chooses as an option.

[Yaobing]

As I said before, a message box is a terrible idea for TV recordings as most of them happen without being attended by a user.  You are not there to read the messages.  So the warnings will still just go into "TV Logs".  Unlike Help > Logging log, the "TV Logs" are intended to be read by users.  Disk space management should be a user responsibility.

[RoderickGI]

I've mentioned it before here and here (2015!), but Hard Disk Sentinel will monitor your hard drive space, and send you email messages when a disk is getting low in space, plus popup on-screen messages. That is a great solution that avoids running out of space on any disk, with the right settings.

Or you could just use disk spanning software to make two disks a JBOD set, and save all recordings to that set. But I don't like to use that sort of software solution myself, because if they fail it can be messy to get them back. A full backup is the only real solution in such cases.

Or it is just time to splash out on a 10TB or 12TB drive for TV recordings, and hopefully never worry about space again, for as little as US$330.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100167523%2050001306%20601192404%20600376738&Manufactory=1306

[imeric]

I've mentioned it before here and here (2015!)

I also told you before that I'm not interested in a third party software to handle this task as I believe MC can do it.  Buy extra hard drive space on top of my 3 TB is not necessary as long as MC stops recordings and I don't end up with a 200GB TV show. (I haven't had one of these recently so looks like this is resolved.)

It doesn't have to be a pop-up maybe a progress bar in theater view or the OSD would do the job.  This feature was present in the former TV software I was using and found it extremely useful as I would do the cleanup if required then and no recordings were missed. You also had the option to choose between load balancing or space.

[RoderickGI]

As you wish. But HD Sentinel does more for me than just inform me when my recording drive is getting low in space. It will tell me if a hard drive is less than 100% healthy, and allows me to check all drives periodically to see how they are going. This is important to me as the HTPC drives are now five years old, and could be starting to have issues, particularly the Recording drive which is constantly used, while the others are mostly worked much less.

I have a 3TB recording drive and I am still considering a 10TB drive so that I can leave a longer time between cleanup maintenance events.

Anyway, I guess this is a feature request then. I'll leave that to JRiver.


Failing having this feature, and knowing that objects can be placed on the Theatre View background via skin edits, I'm wondering if a simple Free vs Total space object could be placed into Theatre View for the drives selected for TV recordings. Just something like ;

"450GB of 3000Gb Free"

You could probably do that yourself using just Windows tools and components.

Maybe even format it to change colour to red if there is less than 10% free space, something like the bar chart HD Sentinel presents. See image.

[imeric]

It doesn’t have to be a progress bar just showing GB used vs Free would be sufficient. Probably easier to implement...Thx for your help!!

[JimH]

While I sympathize with your wish to have MC notify you of low disk use, it's really more properly the job of the OS to do that.  I believe that Windows does that.