Dahua 5216 w/4TB Seagate HD excessive rebooting time

[jneub]

I have 2 Dahua 4216 NVRs installed at my business. The first NVR has a 4TB Seagate video hard drive while the 2nd has a 2TB Seagate video HD. The 2nd NVR has fewer cameras, thus the smaller HD. The NVRs have performed flawlessly for over a month. This past week I backed the frame rate down from 20 FPS to 10 FPS to increase storage ability. I also changed the http port number from 80 to 8501. This was done so we could test accessing the cameras over the internet (The owner wants to see them from home.). When we changed the port number on both NVRs, they both rebooted. The 2nd NVR with the smaller HD came right back up. But the NVR with the 4TB HD would not come back up. After a hard reset failed to help, I pulled the HD and the NVR worked perfectly. I reinstalled the HD and again it would not come up. I could ping it but It would not show anything on the monitor screen and was not accessible over the intranet. I left in alone and came back in the next day to find it working normally. It seems it just took a long time to reboot. I assume this is because of the larger HD?

Anyway, the unit worked fine for 5 days but I came in today to find the NVR again not showing anything on the monitor, unavailable via intranet but pingable. I have manually restarted the NVR 25 minutes ago and it still is not coming up. The questions I am throwing out there for those more experienced than myself (which should be just about everyone) is it normal for a NVR with a large, full HD to take 30 minutes or more to reboot? And do you think I have a problem with the NVR, the HD or something else? I checked the firmware for the 2nd NVR because it is presently the only one I can get into and it was bought at the same time as the 1st NVR and the firmware is showing as 3.200.0000.3.R with a date of 07-11-2014. Is this the most recent firmware for the unit? If it matters, I am running 16 Dahua IP cameras on NVR 1, recording on motion detect only, 24/7.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

 

[alastairstevenson]

No specific ideas but some questions / thoughts:
Does the unit have a log that you could inspect when it's next up and running? May be a clue in there.
On most Linux, and even embedded Linux, an unclean shutdown (not that you suggested that for the first time, but perhaps for the second time) would trigger a 'file system consistency check' which would run exclusively and could take 10s of minutes depending on volume size. Evidence of this should appear in the log, if it happened.
OK, so no GUI access, but do they provide telnet or SSH access, which may be active even if the full application isn't running. If so, the system log could maybe be accessed with something like 'dmesg' to give a clue as to what happened. The exact command may vary - and could be checked on the working example.

 

[jneub]

If I pull the HD I am able to get to the system normally. I checked the logs and starting this morning around 2:30 am the system would shutdown and then try and reboot unsuccessfully with an "Abnormal Reboot" message. This happened every 3 minutes until I pulled the hard drive. I swapped out the 4TB HD for a 2TB HD and it is working fine. But I do not suspect the 4TB HD to be defective. I suspect the OS cannot handle a 4TB HD, even though the specs say it will support up to 8TB and 2 hard drives. Checking the user manual, there is a list of compatible hard drives and my 4TB HD is not on there and there is not a single 4TB HD in the list. There are several 2 TB and 3TB hard drives listed. So, without anything else to check, I suspect the HD is getting full and the NVR cannot deal with it because of it's size. I will try one of the listed 3TB HD and see if I have any success. Thanks for helping.

 

[alastairstevenson]

Sounds like you are on to something. Especially if you think this is the first time the disc is becoming full.
Just out of interest - are the WDC 'Purple' surveillance drives in the compatibility list?
I have a couple of these (4TB and 3TB) in my Hikvision NVR and it's been perfectly happy with them. Though You'd expect a Seagate Video/Surveillance drive to be a safe choice.

 

[jneub]

Can you give me a specific model number? I will be happy to check. There are a lot of WD drives listed.

 

[alastairstevenson]

They are WD30PURX and WD40PURX.

 

[jneub]

Neither of them are listed. The closest to them are WD10EURX and WD10EUCX. If I understand correctly, the WDC Purple drives are fairly new (out less than a year?) so they may be too new to be in the manual. I can send you the manual in PDF if you want it.

 

[Daybreak]

Howdy,
I have a Q-See 8116-3 which is a branded Dahua DH-NVR5416-16P, with the factory WD30PURX 3TB drive, and 3 WD40PURX 4TB drives. All working smoothly, and the system re-boot time is a total of about 1 minute.

 

[vector18]

I have seen this in the past and I always replace the HDD and it's fine after that. You might take that hdd and test it in something else and it may or may not work, but there is something in
there that the NVR is not liking. So far, in 3 years, I have replaced 2 hdd's that not out network access and once I replaced the hdd, have not looked back. There was only one NVR out of every single one of my customers, that the network and hdmi display crashed, so I replaced the hdd, but a week later, the same thing happened. I ended up tossing the NVR in the garbage and replacing it. That customer has been happy ever since. If you look in the log, all you really see if when it rebooted. The one I replaced was rebooting like every 3 minutes all night all day.

 

[alastairstevenson]

I can send you the manual in PDF if you want it.

Thanks for the offer - but no need.

If you have a system that you can connect the disc to - it may be interesting to query the disc for its SMART detail and see if there are any values of concern in there. Especially any that figure in Seagates warranty terms.

 

[jneub]

Just as an update, I pulled the 4TB HD and connected it to my laptop where I could run some disk diagnostics. Everything checked out fine. I did a data wipe, replaced it and it is working again now. But I wonder why happens in 3-4 weeks when it gets close to full. I guess I will see if the vendor will replace the HD even though it seems to be working and see what happens. But I do still suspect it is a firmware issue or something in the NVR. As mentioned in the OP, I have 2 identical NVRs so I have switched out the HDs to see if the other NVR chokes when the drive gets full. That way I should know if it is a NVR or HD issue. But just to double check, if the a 4TB HD is full or near full, it still shouldn't take more than a few minutes for a reboot?