Ethernet speed

    "Well,i never thought about old cables."

    Neither did I to my shame. Its a Seagate powered backup hub - 6TB HDD. LibreElec will live on a 128GB SSD.

    I did run across something which said that the Pi can only deliver 1.2A over all the USB ports, no idea how accurate that is but since the Seagate comes with two USB ports I'll be popping the keyboard dongle and the Haupage in there.

    The 1.2A cap on the USB ports is true and comes from the official sources .

    If the Seagate it's self-powered than it's fine ,it doesn't suck any juice from the RPi4 .Here's are my recommendations:

    1) Update the RPi4 bootloader (there where quit a few things USB related in the changelogs)

    2) Disable Wifi and Bluetooth if you are not using them

    3) If the Seagate is FAT32 or NTFS that might cause the corruption because those filesystem aren't playing nice with Linux.You might consider switching to EXT4 (at least to test if corruption occur with that too).

    I can now confirm the problem was the cable - new Cat6 cable and no packet loss.

    "1) Update the RPi4 bootloader (there where quit a few things USB related in the changelogs)"

    LibreElec tells me bootloader & t'other one (can't remember the name) are both up to date and I believe it

    "2) Disable Wifi and Bluetooth if you are not using them"

    Does never enabling them count <G> - never enable Bluetooth and always disable WiFi

    "3) If the Seagate is FAT32 or NTFS that might cause the corruption because those filesystem aren't playing nice with Linux.You might consider switching to EXT4 (at least to test if corruption occur with that too)."

    I've posted separately about this. Ext4 isn't really a possibility - simply from a viewpoint of backing up and copying / moving files using Windows (I'll see what the speed is like over the network now with the Cat6 cable). I've been running NTFS since 2018 on the Pi3s and that Seagate is OK. My current theory is the first time I had a duff socket in the extension lead which meant LibreElec/Pi4 tried to power the 6TB HDD, ignored the SSD with LibreElec on it and went to try and reformat the HDD but couldn't power it. The second time is baffling me but might have been flipping the power switches in the wrong order.

    Pretty much all the stuff I can find on the web says use ExFat not NTFS for USB drives but no evidence to support the opinion.