I spent about an hour with SanDisk support today. They were able to replicate the problem and it is related to the amount of storage left on the phone. When I started, I had about 340MB available and that equaled to about 33 seconds. I deleted some apps so I had about 840MB and that allowed me to record up to 6 minutes but it did stop again.
I’m a software developer so I can kind of guess what is happening. As you surmised, it is most likely using phone storage (a cache?) during the recording and when it stops, immediately transfers the video to the drive.
I wouldn’t have a problem with this behavior as long as I was aware that this was a limitation. I purchased this because it said you could record directly to the iXpand drive. At 128GB, that is a lot of video. Unfortunately, with the current limitation, I am in the same position as I was before the drive. I have to delete apps whenever I want to record lots of video.
One other abnormality I noticed. When the app reaches the memory limit, it stops recording but the ticker continues so it appears that it is still recording. This is obviously a bug and needs to be fixed. You would think that there should be a way to flush the cache to the drive during recording so it doesn’t run out of phone storage space. If I were writing the app, I would check to see what my free space on the phone and then make sure that I picked a cache amount that was less than the available space and then continue to flush the cache to the drive as I was recording. This would require a couple of threads and I’m not sure if the OS is multithreaded or not. I would hope it is, but there may be a limitation there also.
Support said they were going to escalate this issue and inform me of any solution they came up with. I’m going to mark this as answered, but I will try to update this thread if they come up with a different solution.
