Recording Storage Unavailable

[bigal]

Get this message (for a long time) when recording a scheduled program.
The program still gets recorded without problems.
Just curious if anyone has noticed it too.

Rec Stor Unavailable.jpg (6.48 KiB) Viewed 1159 times

[Space]

Is your recording storage on an external or internal drive?

[bigal]

It's an internal, Kingston, ssd with 60+GB free.
The drive seldom has more than two/three episodes of the Big Bang Theory on it before they get wiped - so five or six GB.

[Space]

I'm not familiar with that message, but by the phrasing of it, it sounds like WMC is unable to access the folder that you have configured for "Recorded TV". However, I suppose it could also be just worded unclearly and means that WMC thinks there is low disk space available for it's future recordings.

If the message means that the drive/folder is not available, then I was thinking it was due to the drive being put in to "sleep" mode, like many external hard drives are set to do. But since it is an internal SSD, I think this is much less likely.

Note that if it is related to WMC thinking that there is not much free disk space available for it's recordings, it has nothing to do with the actual free space on drive.
When you configure WMC to use a drive for "Recorded TV", you also specify how much disk space you want it to use. So if you have, for example, a drive with 100GB free space, but only tell WMC to use 40GB, then when WMC uses up those 40GB for recordings, it will complain that there is no more disk space (even though there may be 60GB of free space on the drive).

Another thing is that 60GB is not very much space at all as far as WMC recordings go, depending on the bitrate of recordings, that is enough space for only 6-10 hours of recordings (at least on my system). It may just be that the algorithm that WMC uses to calculate how much space will be needed in the next 48 hours is thinking it needs more than it actually does. WMC puts a warning indicator on any upcoming recording within the next 48 hours that it thinks it will be unable to record due to low disk space. Perhaps these warning indicators are linked to that system tray message (I never see that message as I use my WMC with a remote control, so rarely even look at the desktop).

Perhaps someone else who uses mouse and keyboard on their WMC system more often has seen this message and understands what it means, but you can check the upcoming list of programs that are scheduled to record within WMC when you see this message and see if it corresponds with the yellow triangle exclamation indicator that will indicate "there will not be enough disk space to record this program" (or a similarly worded message).

[bigal]

Going with the disk space theory, I cloned the drive to a 1TB ssd (expanding the available space for the volume from 100GB to 1TB) and the 'unavailable' message was no longer displayed.
Looks like it may be as you surmised; maybe it is reckoning the capacity is not sufficient for 16 days of recording.
That may explain why 'on-the-fly' recordings never showed the message.
Cheers.

[Space]

It only gives the warning if it doesn't think there will be enough free space to record 48 hours of recordings.

Also, remember that you have to tell WMC to use the extra space, you can't just increase the size of the storage drive alone.