Intermittent Recording Breakup

[brandypuff]

I am running SageTV on an i5-3320m Intel laptop. The recordings are going to an external 4TB 7200 drive on the laptops USB3 port.

I have Silicon Dust OTA and Cable network tuners.

Occasionally, i will get a minute or two of a recording breaking up which will eventually stop and then play OK. I thought it must be a reception issue but today i recorded two identical shows on both OTA and cable channels and the breakup occurs on both recordings which leads me to believe the problem lies in the recording path and not he source inputs.

Does anyone have any idea how i can debug this? It seems like something might be accessing the drive during these times and dragging it down so the recordings become corrupt.

The drive is fairly new.

[AlphaCrew]

If possible I would record to the internal drive of the computer for testing. If problem goes away, that should narrow down the diagnosis to the external drive, cabling and port.