Safe way to shutdown PXI-RT system that does logging? Hard drive failure

[TunaFish]

Hi all,

I have a pxie-8135 RT controller that has been running for about a year now. Everything is fine until one day we rebooted the system and found out there is a hard drive failure. (The controller has be rebooted countless times before and everything is fine).

The controller fail to recognize the hard drive anymore. I don't know what caused this problem, but I presume that it might be that we were continuously logging and writting files into the controller, and when we shutdown, it might have corrupted some files in the hard drive. I cannot say for sure this is the cause, but what I am asking is if there is a safe way to shutdown the RT controller when we have continuous logging/file write going on. Does the controller ends it's last loop when we press the power button or does it just stop everything?

[DonhJoe]

Hi TunaFish, When formatting the PXI, I recommend using the "Reliance" file system since it is more robust for data logging applications in case of a power issue or any other situation that could just shutdown the PXI. (see: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/54F470CCF153945C86257711004F4248 ). In regards to the safe way to shut down the controller, a couple of ideas come to my mind. If the system has a user interface, the data logging can be stopped correctly by using a boolean control and after that, you can turn off the controller using the power button. If the system does not have a UI I would suggest using a digital I/O line to read the state of a physical button and then programmatically stop the logging before turning off the controller with the power button. Regards!