IMS2000 and using SSDs, share my experience.

[Marco Giustini]

Quite some time ago, at a training course, Doremi told us that dealing with SMART parameters was a nightmare as different manufacturers used different fields and even the same fields might have different meaning.
I remember getting some errors on the drives on a 2K4 (that was ages ago) and Doremi told us the drives were all defective. We got new drives and got the same error and... Doremi told us all the drives were defective ?

Turned out the HDD manufacturer was using a field (can't remember which one) in an unusual way so the Doremi SW was flagging an error. And I'd imagine this might change with different versions of HDD Firmware as well.

[Philip Jones]

What's the procedure for swapping out the original HDDs for SSDs in the IMS2000? Obviously the content will be lost, but do lose show builds and automation configs as well? Is there a way to back these up?

Will the RAID automatically build with the larger capacity if using 2tb SSDs?

[Steve Guttag]

If you are swapping size for size, you could swap a drive at a time, wait for the rebuild and then do the next drive...if you didn't want to lose content. However due to the speed at which the RAID rebuilds, you would be better served to get an external USB3 large drive and move the content off and then ingest it back on. If you are going to change the storage size then, no, you will lose the content (or more precisely, it will still be on the old drives). SPLs/Schedules and such should still be retained as they are on the OS drive but the content that made them will not be there.

The IMS servers are pretty good about their backups and having those backups such that if you change EITHER the OS drive or RAID, it can rebuild and get you back to where you were. As many people have experienced with the bad batch of IMS3000 OS drives...after changing them, backup manager will ask if you want to restore from the latest back up. Furthermore, Backup Manager shows the previous automated backups plus any manually generated ones.

Yes, you can, if you know you are going to be changing drives, make a fresh backup, first. Backups on the server itself can only be accessed with "root" privileges (which seems excessive to me). They are in the opt/backup directory...because Linux.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've never been a fan of the /opt directory, but this directory goes as far back as the AT&T UNIX System V days. The directory was dedicated for the installation of "add-on software packages", essentially all third party software not part of the O.S. The idea of putting backups there is probably something Doremi dreamed up.

[Carsten Kurz]

Well it's not a bad idea to do it that way at least with the automated backups. A backup on opt is better than no backup on a shiny USB-Stick.