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Author Topic: GDC SX3000 - movie freezing randomly Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-15-2018 12:38 PM                        We're seeing a new thing -- it's happened twice now. The movie just stops cold, with the picture frozen as if I had pressed the pause button, but it won't start playing again. The first time it happened, the onscreen controls were completely locked -- the only solution was to power down the whole system and reboot from scratch. Last night, the play/stop/pause buttons were locked, but the "shutdown" button at the bottom WOULD work, so I re-started the software and resumed the movie from where it was. That was a much quicker fix, only took a little over a minute. Very irritating, and I wonder if anyone else has seen this. GDC says it's a pretty rare occurrence.  |  IP: Logged Sam D. Chavez Film God Posts: 2153 From: Martinez, CA USA Registered: Aug 2003 posted 10-15-2018 01:21 PM                       Just a guess, but check the drives. You've probably done this already. We had a case where the drives all checked out fine, low bad sectors etc, nonetheless, one drive would stall and freeze the image. Had one show that ran over 10 minutes long. Finally caught it in the act.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-15-2018 01:59 PM                        The drives all report as OK but that is my first suspicion, too. They're going to pull the logs today and see if anything stands out.  |  IP: Logged Greg Routenburg Expert Film Handler Posts: 178 From: Toronto, ON, Canada Registered: May 2003 posted 10-16-2018 08:03 AM                     I also find that the first order of business when troubleshooting playback issues with the SX-3000 is the reseat the eSATA cable both at the IMS and the storage device. It seems to be a weak point for these servers and often helps resolve most pesky playback issues.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-16-2018 12:29 PM                     The last time this happened they actually told us the PDP-3000 was defective and had us swap it out. But the last time the drives were what was wrong. But it makes me wonder if that PDP-3000 is actually bad. I foreworded you the email from support Mike. Mark  |  IP: Logged Nguyen Jack Film Handler Posts: 93 From: Singapore Registered: Mar 2013 posted 10-17-2018 04:37 AM                     Maybe the CompactFlash Card is problem, i got problem same lasttime.  |  IP: Logged David Meechan Film Handler Posts: 3 From: Raleigh, NC Registered: Aug 2014 posted 11-04-2018 12:56 PM                     I helped open a new theatre back in April, using Barco and GDC. One of our projectors was skipping segments in the playlist, rewinding segments of the feature, and other gremlins. Turned out to be a bad IMB (SX-3000) and once it was replaced, all was well. Now I have a random serial # in amongst all the sequential serial #'s - argh!  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-04-2018 01:08 PM                     Almost all the time it's a hard drive error issue in the PDP-3000, or a cable thats bad. eSATA is somewhat temperamental as it is... I personally don't care much for the drives they use in that thing. They are only 5400 RPM laptop drives... there are some 7200 RPM drives that will work fine and seem more reliable. I've only had to replace SX-3000's because thay lost their certs due to battery failure. Mark  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-04-2018 05:26 PM                     I've had every piece of the SX-3000 system fail...the cable, the PDP, the drives and the IMB itself. Fortunately, that unit is no longer an option, going forward.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-05-2018 06:24 PM                     Not here! In fact three of the first 12 units in this country are still humming away just fine in Wendover, Utah. Hard drives are also still original in two of those three units there. Of the 50 or so units I sold, about half have been exchanged due to the battery issue. My only issue with them are with the stupid Cert batteries! Mark  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-05-2018 10:27 PM                        Beyond this recent movie-freezing issue (which was fixed by reseating everything and a firmware update...at least, it hasn't happened in a month now), ours has been fine. The only exception is those silly hard drives. I still don't understand why, if one drive is failing, the others don't just pick up the slack and light-up an indicator somewhere to replace the failing drive. Isn't that what a RAID is supposed to do??  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 11-06-2018 01:35 AM                     I think I've explained the behavior of Joe Average's RAID here before. The problem we're facing is that the RAID systems being used in cinema playout servers are "simple" office RAID systems. They target on data reliability rather than guaranteed performance. If you want to open that Word document from your network drive, you mostly don't care that you need to wait a second or two extra for it to open. It's more important it's still there. So, a normal RAID system, if one of the disks encounters a reading or writing problem, it will retry to read or write that same block from the disk a few times, every time with a slight delay in between. In many cases, a failing disk will still comply and the RAID array will not push the disk out of the RAID. Only if it triggers a pretty high threshold, the RAID array will finally decide to dump the offending disk. But for any real-time application, some negative impact will already have occurred by then. The reason why this is designed this way is easy to explain: Reliability. You don't want your office RAID array to drop disks too easily, or you may end up with a broken array pretty quickly and gone is all your data on top of it. Now, for real-time applications, that rely on a constant performance from a storage array, those average RAID systems are, if we're being honest, not good enough. There are solutions for this: Many enterprise RAID storage arrays can be configured to ensure a constant throughput. But those systems are pretty expensive and therefore not being used in current cinema playout hardware...  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-06-2018 09:01 AM                     Note, I distinction between Enterprise drives and desktop/laptop drives is that an Enterprise drive should NOT re-read a bad area, it should mark the sector bad and move on since the other drives in the RAID have the data. When this happens, though, you'll get a hiccup in the image because the RAID thought it had the data from the drive that has an issue. In a desktop/laptop drive, that is not the scheme because it cannot presume there are any other drives to back it up...it will re-read to get the information, which in real-time can cause glitches on screen. Generally, when there are glitches on screen...something is up with one or more drives. There are indicators for which drives are having issues (reallocated sectors that are either high are increasing daily, ATA errors, read times that are notably different than the other drives in the RAID since they have to work as a team). I've had them even then still have issues. I've had drives that appear to be okay cause boot-up issues too. I'm a pretty staunch Hitachi (HGST) supporter. I've had some Western Digital (which now owns HGST) cause the odd boot up issues though their current "Gold" series seem to be fine. Seagate...well, they've let me down the most.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-06-2018 09:35 AM                     quote: Mike Blakesley I still don't understand why, if one drive is failing, the others don't just pick up the slack and light-up an indicator somewhere to replace the failing drive. Isn't that what a RAID is supposed to do?? Raid does not necessarily guarantee no read back errors if there are hard drive issues. What it does guarantee is data integrity. Once the bad drive is located and removed and the raid rebuilt minus the bad drive, or with a new replacement, only then will read back errors stop. In a 3-drive RAID 5 you can lose one drive and the data will still remain error free. Loose two drives and you lose all the data because you have lost the redundant data that's been striped across the other drive(s). A 4-drive RAID 5 you can lose up to two drives and still retain all data. The PDP-3000 can accommodate 4 hard drives and it is hardware RAID of some sort. Some really high end hardware raid controllers can automatically insert a hot standby drive in place of a failed drive. But those cards are thousands of dollars by themselves. Agree with Steve about the Enterprise drives. Unfortunately the 2.5" enterprise type hard drives are rather pricey. One would really need to go to SAS type drives to achieve extraordinary reliability. But then they are about double the price or more over Enterprise SATA drives, but SAS may be the last HD's you ever buy for a given unit. I have TMS servers that the OS and APPs are running on SAS drives and many of those are now 7+ years old and still showing no smart errors. Note that you can install a SATA drove in place of an SAS but you can not install a SAS drive in a SATA device because of very slight difference in the connector. Mark  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-06-2018 12:06 PM                     Sorry no...in a RAID-5, 3-drive, 4-drive, whatever drive, only one drive may be lost without loss of data. A RAID-6 allows two drives to be lost without loss of data (typically seen in LMS systems...that and RAID-50, which seem to be more popular with the larger RAIDs). RAID-5 is known for its read-speed and hence it is popular with SMS players where timing is critical. Some RAIDs are better than others. The 3WARE system that Dolby used on the DSS series was good about kicking out a drive causing issues. Note, when a drive fails in a RAID-5...it doesn't rebuild on the remaining drives, it runs on those drives and uses the error correction to create the data that was on the missing drive. That RAID will run slower (loading content on, will really show it). Once the drive is replaced...THEN it rebuilds as the remaining drives provide the information to fill up the new drive (plus its portion of the redundancy storage).  |  IP: Logged

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