Video Recording Issues

My Tesla software was upgraded a month or two ago and one of the new features I got was Sentry Mode. When this mode is activated, the car will monitor its surroundings while parked. If a threat is detected, such as someone leaning on the car, attempting to break in, keying it, pulling a hit-and-run in a parking lot, etc., the car will start recording video using its cameras, as well as display a warning on the large screen. If that doesn't deter the offender, the car will eventually start blasting classical music. It's sort of a car alarm on steroids.

I've been turning Sentry Mode on pretty much whenever I park my car outside my house now and, occasionally, when I get back in, I will see an alert telling me some sentry events have been recorded. When I get home, I plug the USB drive into my computer to see what happened.

This is how I noticed that my cameras seem to be malfunctioning. The recorded video is often glitchy and corrupted.

Here's an example from my front camera:

This doesn't only happen to the front camera. I've also seen it happen from the left camera.

And here is another issue I've seen with the left camera. The picture degrades over the course of the 1 minute recording:

Sometimes, the recording from the left camera is simply an empty file.

At this point, I'm not sure if the issue is with the camera or something related to the video recording process. Autopilot, which uses the cameras, seems unaffected. I've tried two different USB drives for the recording media and the problems do not go away.

A discussion at Tesla Motors Club seems to point to the problem being related to the USB drive the files are stored on. One person said he got rid of the problems by using a drive with a metal housing and he thought it might be related to better heat dissipation. I can't say I've noticed if my drive is hot when I take it out, but it's possible.

It's also possible the quality of the USB drive is an issue. Drives that have a faster write response time might not have problems. I've been using cheap USB drives I received for free as promotions from somewhere or another, so who knows what their quality is. I ordered one that the poster at TMC said worked, a device from SanDisk, which is a reputable company. We'll see how that works.

In the meantime, I've scheduled a service appointment for June 1, so if the new USB drive doesn't fix the problem, we'll see what Tesla says.