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IMS2000 and using SSDs, share my experience.

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  • IMS2000 and using SSDs, share my experience.

    Hi All.
    Recently I mentioned using SSD is the way to go as they are getting cheap.

    In eating my own dog food, I tried to qualify this suggestion to make sure I was making a good suggestion. And this is what happened.

    Looking online 2TB SSD, for a respected brand. (In this case the better Samsung unit 870EVO 2TB) cost about $100 aud from China. Took 2 weeks to arrive.
    the only 2TB disk available over the counter left is a Seagate 2TB disk at $130. 870EVO over the counter are $150 aud.
    With 3x 870EVO I attempted to put them into a IMS2000 (NEC unit).
    They didn't even register in the kernel. Like nothing was there. Indicating in a generic sense the IMS2000 may be broken. As I did test the 870EVOs first on a PC.

    I got the disk list from Dolby, and was able to find a Micron unit that is going cheap at the moment at about $160aud. Others on the list went for about $600aud or more typically.
    Again, this was from China and took a few weeks to arrive. But yes, they did detect and one is re-silvering at the moment. I will format a set of three after this re-silver as a test.
    Run them for a few days doing some ingests etc.

    The story here is that.
    Apart from qualified SSD, if you try off-the-shelf units, they may not show up at all. But don't jump to the conclusion the IMS2000 is broken. (Which would be a common path considering no kernel detection)
    Also, I think I am lucky to find the Micron unit super cheap. It's probably EOL.

    Considering these details. I hope others can take note. Maybe stock up on some of the cheap Micron units now.

    I would prefer the IMS2000 would accept any 2TB SSD, as the tech is old and in general, extremely reliable now as it's such an old and proven technology (SATA SSDs are more power efficient and low heat output than ever). They are commodities and I would prefer being able to pick up any old SSD and use it. But you do what you can.

  • #2
    Micron has large plants in Boise, Idaho and Lehigh, Utah to manufacture memory chips. They also sell drives and RAM under the brand name Crucial. So if Crucial drives are marketed in Austrailia, be sure to look at those as well. I have been using them for years and have never had any failures.

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    • #3
      Do you have a link to the latest approved drives list please?

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      • #4
        I was given this link to the live document covering supported disks in Dolby devices.

        https://dolby.box.com/s/vx4ccm1w1wrt...32h104zub162x9

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        • #5
          One more comment...
          Took about the same amount of time to re-silver the SSD against the Hard drives.and to format all 3 SSDs. But then ingesting, the copy then ckecksum.. The checksum runs 4-5 times faster then when 2TB hard drives were in use. The network interface only goes so fast.

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          • #6
            Just looking around for some more 2TB disks for IMS2000. Umm.. its getting difficult to even find the disks on the approved list as... they are all EOL mostly I guess. If you do find them, they are uber expensive.

            I can get these "Transcend SSD225S 2TB 2.5inch SATA SSD" from local dealers. (tho out of stock) Anyone tried them?
            As the "Transcend TS2TSSD452K" are on the list and these are similar.

            I have been using "Seagate BarraCuda 2TB HDD, ST2000LM015" for ages, but they appear to be no longer made either. Been out of stock all year. They have been a little less reliable than the listed ones, but are a small fraction of the price. So I just purchased a few extra. In the end, way ahead.

            The only option in terms of not importing an old bespoke super expensive disk now is "WD WD20SPZX 2TB Blue 2.5" SATA HDD" spinning rust wise. Or the "Transcend SSD225S 2TB 2.5inch SATA SSD" if it works.

            The other issue is that NONE of the disks mentioned are "In-Stock" in Australia. So if I want one tomorrow. You are out of luck. Looks like I am going to have to buy up on hot spares myself. Another costs I don’t need.

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            • #7
              WD Red SSDs work perfectly well in IMS2000s. If you drill down into the storage diagnostics, they do provoke a nag/warning, as so:

              image.png

              But it's not visible from any of the pages that a typical end user is likely to look at. We've installed WD Reds on out of warranty IMS2000s that have needed a replacement RAID set for many years: the screenshot above was taken from one that has been running these drives since April 2021, in a multiplex use case (as in, the drives are actively being read from and written to for around 12 hours a day, seven days a week). No failures so far that I'm aware of.​

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              • #8
                Have a Transcend SSD225S 2TB 2.5inch SATA SSD coming my way, will drop into a test IMS2000 and see how it goes. Will report back.
                This thread proving to be great for those dealing with ageing IMS2000....

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                • #9
                  When it comes to SSD, I think TBW (TeraByte written) is an important parameter to consider. Cheaper units have very low TBW - they're designed for an OS and regular use where there is very little writing activity every day.

                  A cinema server in a busy venue gets content constantly ingested and deleted and it would be easy to get to the TBW declared by the manufacturer in a short-ish time.

                  As a reference, a 2TB BX500 Crucial has a declared TBW of 720TB while the Samsung 870 EVO is rated 1200TBW.

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                  • #10
                    FYI, if you've ever dealt with Dell servers...if you use non-Dell drives (even drives of the same make/model), in OSA, the program will still flag them with a warning but will accurately report them as fully functional. This is sort of like Leo's point above with using the WD-Red drives in the IMS2000. If you are good with ignoring the warning (that only shows if you go looking for it), you should be fine.

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                    • #11
                      I can confirm that I received a "Have a Transcend SSD225S 2TB 2.5inch SATA SSD" SSD (From local current dealers) at a reasonable price. It replaced a 2TB typical drive without incident.

                      The IMS2000 Storage diagnostic page displays the following for the drive.

                      image.png

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                      • #12
                        The warnings for the WD Reds seem to have been provoked by the SMART bad sector (which obviously a SSD won't have, because it doesn't have sectors in the traditional sense) and CRC error counts. They show as zero in both cases, but for the WD Reds, the Dolby software reads that as indicating a problem. My best guess is that those fields simply don't exist in the WD Reds, and when the IMS2000 tries to retrieve the values for them, it gets an "error: no such field" response from the drive; whereas on the Transcend drives, the fields do exist, but with a permanent raw value of zero.

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                        • #13
                          I remember reading some place that Dolby had updated the issues that a IMS2000 finds on non-standard drive so they didn't cause so many false positives. Especially now as so many people are using. well, whatever they can find that works. It's not within Dolby's interest to test new drives for deprecated products. But I suppose they have a responsibility to allow them to continue to operate when drives they did test against are mostly no longer readily available.

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                          • #14
                            Which they're doing, because the IMS2000 will continue to operate with unapproved drives, albeit with false alarm warnings in at least some cases.

                            This is the SMART parameter readout for a WD Red SSD:

                            image.png

                            There is no parameter named "reallocated sector count." This is parameter 05, which is present, but is named "reassigned block count" for this drive (which obviously makes more sense for a SSD). I don't know if CrystalDiskInfo is doing this, or if the different field name is coming from the drive itself: if the latter, that could explain why the IMS2000 believes that the parameter doesn't exist, period. But the CRC error count is ID C7 on both the HDDs and SDDs I've just looked at the SMART parameters of. According to Wikipedia, this one is not an important indicator for predicting imminent drive failure (05 is).

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                            • #15
                              This feels very similar to the constant cat and mouse of printer suppliers v.s. third-party inkt-cartridge manufacturers... Recently, Synology also started doing something similar, certain features are now locked if you're not using their much more expensive, "approved" drives.

                              For some disks, mostly old ones, there are tools out there that allow you to edit certain aspects of the firmware of the drive, including drive identification stuff like serials. Editing the firmware this way will probably void the warranty on the drive, but I've seen people using those tools to get drives going on abandoned hardware, like first generation Xbox consoles.

                              I'd say the only concern for Dolby here is that the SATA controller can correctly communicate with the drive and that the Linux driver is sufficiently up-to-date, it's all software RAID anyway. One concern I'd have with SSDs is if the OS correctly recognizes them as SSD and implements TRIM correctly. Not supporting TRIM will lead to terrible performance rather quickly, once the SSDs have been filled up.

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