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Author Topic: Preparing Barco 32B for drive-in off-season Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-30-2013 07:47 AM                        On the topic of space heaters: I would be nervous about using one in an unattended booth, as these can be fire hazards. I would try to get something that is permanently installed for this purpose. Electric baseboard heaters are cheap to install, but are expensive to operate. Not sure what other options exist for a booth-type building, where a full-blown oil or gas boiler would be overkill. Someone here must know, though.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-30-2013 02:16 PM                     Scott: There are through wall gas furnaces that use the outside air for combustion. I had one in my shop back in Illinois and it worked great. The pipe that goes through the wall was a coaxial pipe that was well insulated. The exhaust went out through the center pipe. It's a very safe way to heat with gas or propane. I remember getting mine at Grangers and it was about 400 bucks. Steve G: Almost all my customers shut their systems down at night. Thats about 180 screens worth... Only a few HD failures, no OS drive failures and several NEC power switches. I've seen no more HD failures then had they left the gear running. Only switch failures.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 10-30-2013 03:42 PM                     I firmly agree with Steve that he has the right practice by leaving the servers on. Everything will work great for the first couple of years, but daily powering off will cause more service calls and repair expenses due to additional equipment failures. I would be particularly scared of powering down a GDC daily, as they have only one ordinary off-the-shelf SATA hard drive running their OS. At least with a server such as Dolby that is RAID'ed so if a drive dies upon startup, you aren't down and can simply replace it. Again, don't confuse "haven't had any problems" statistics with new equipment. EVERYTHING as it gets older (including us) has reliability issues moreso as each year passes. Powering off those servers is sort of like kicking an old man repeatedly in the head. He is only going to be able to handle so much of that before he croaks.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 10-31-2013 06:15 AM                     As it so happens...the server that just lost a drive in less than a year's use...a GDC...but that is besides the point...they are using the same drives we use in the other servers. The fact remains, we have more drive failures in servers that power down than those that leave them up.  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 10-31-2013 07:17 AM                        OK. That's all fine. However, a drive is a mechanical beast and it likely will fail someday. For the operator, the balance could be the cost of a service call and a new drive against the electricity and environmental equipment necessary to run the same drive(s) 24/7, just to (maybe) extend their life. I have Doremi servers here, and I'll have no problem being the example of how nightly shutdown affects the equipment, if at all. I will also say that the people I bought my equipment from don't have a problem with the practice. One might suggest they would say this because they'd be the ones I'd call to fix a problem. On the other hand, I've personally known the owner since around 1976, and I doubt he'd run his business that way. My office computers are on all the time, but drive life has nothing to do with that. My booth and POS computers shut down every night. My laptop takes a beating and only runs when I'm using it. I may not see as much of this stuff as some of you guys do, but I've been working with hard drives since you could plug one into an Apple II, and I've never felt I had to treat them special.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-31-2013 08:14 AM                     It's a classic PointOfView issue - think of what Brad and Steve are doing and why they follow the 'no shutdowns-lower drive failures' route. These are RAIDs (GDC system drive being the exception). Under typical operating conditions, I can calculate the added cost by leaving the servers on against a potential higher failure rate of hard discs. Some people weigh energy conservation higher than slightly higher replacement cost for harddiscs. The less technical skilled staff is on site, the less you want equipment failures. Of course, it doesn't make sense to save 3kWh per day on the server if you blow out 50times as much with your heating, HVAC or lighting. It needs to be balanced. Our Sony has a RAID6 and will survive two failing harddiscs. I shut it down daily, even though it only eats very little power. We also have just one show per day on average. There are other Pro/Cons as well - dust built-up, daily boot is good for OS clean state, increased wear out of other components of the server like power supplies, fans, etc. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 10-31-2013 11:07 AM                        quote: Carsten Kurz The less technical skilled staff is on site, the less you want equipment failures. And that part I can fully agree with, since I'm reasonably comfortable with these things. Good points, Carsten.  |  IP: Logged Ken Lackner Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1907 From: Atlanta, GA, USA Registered: Sep 2001 posted 10-31-2013 12:14 PM                     Slightly off-topic, but some questions related to points mentioned in previous posts. quote: Carsten Kurz These are RAIDs (GDC system drive being the exception). I know we've established here and on several other threads that GDC puts the OS on a single HDD rather than on the RAID or even on an SSD. Doesn't Doremi put the OS on a flash drive? Either an SSD on newer models, or an IDE flash module that plugs into the board on older models. What about the Dolby DSS-100? For some reason, I thought it put the OS on an SSD also. quote: Carsten Kurz Our Sony has a RAID6. Which model? For some reason I thought the LMT-200 and 300 used RAID5. I don't know that I ever actually read that anywhere, and maybe I just assumed.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-31-2013 05:21 PM                     LMT200, LMT300 and MCT-S10 (SRX-515) uses RAID6. They use 7 drives, one is already installed as a spare. 4 data, 2 parity, 1 spare - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Ken Lackner Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1907 From: Atlanta, GA, USA Registered: Sep 2001 posted 10-31-2013 06:09 PM                     I've replaced many a drive in the LMT-300. The installed hot spare automatically becomes active and replaces the bad drive as soon as one fails. So what happens if a second one fails before I can get out there to replace the first failed drive? The system continues to run normally and I would just have to replace an additional drive?  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-31-2013 06:30 PM                     The RAID6 allows to lose two regular discs - and then there is still the spare to jump in. So, up to three of the 7 preinstalled drives are allowed to fail with the system still being able to play content. I guess the idea is that Sony initially thought to have many machines installed in large multiplexes with little to no local technical staff to address issues immediately. Our typical nightmare situation. RAID issues would be detected remotely, but then would take a while to get resolved on site. I think that's the reason why they put in more margin. One possible direct technical reason is that after a drive failure the rebuild using he spare drive increases the load on all discs, which consequently increases the risc of additional drive failures even during the rebuild process, which would be fatal for the typical RAID5 systems. A RAID rebuild on traditional RAID5 systems can take a day or more - during that time, the RAID has no redundancy left, an additional drive failure will mean complete data loss. RAID6 offers redundancy even during the rebuild process. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-31-2013 07:32 PM                     Except Brad... I have quite a few GDC's that are now four years old. You also forget that almost all of my GDC's have a spare OS drive right next to the one in thats in use. Slide the server out, open it up and move the two sata cables over to the spare drive and you're back up again. All you have to do is make up your play list. Takes less than 5 minutes. Carsten... I agree on RAID 6. I run that in the data end of my HP server here at home. Mostly photo storage but other important stuff as well on that. Still waiting for a drive faiure and it's probably gonna be a while since they are SAS drives. Mark  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 10-31-2013 08:20 PM                     We're on the same page Mark. I've got servers 5 years old that have yet to lose a drive, so while the typical lifespan of a drive is 3 "reliable" years, certainly some will run longer. I also clone the GDC OS drives before I send them out into the field, but that doesn't make it a good design to rely on a single un-raided drive. I've also seen the SSD OS drives fail. Nothing is guaranteed, but a raid is the best protection we have at the moment. Sony had the right idea with their raid 6 and spare drive. Unfortunately they mucked up too many other things in the design such as a hard limit on the 320 capacity. They seemed to have gotten it right on the 515s though in terms of the raid.  |  IP: Logged Tony Bandiera Jr Film God Posts: 3067 From: Moreland Idaho Registered: Apr 2004 posted 10-31-2013 08:33 PM                     quote: Jack Ondracek However, a drive is a mechanical beast and it likely will fail someday. For the operator, the balance could be the cost of a service call and a new drive against the electricity and environmental equipment necessary to run the same drive(s) 24/7, just to (maybe) extend their life. To save this thread from beating a dead horse, go HERE for the discussion on servers left on or shut down. Bring your popcorn it was a rather interesting discussion.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-01-2013 02:42 PM                     I agree completely on RAID 6, in fact the new generation GDC allows one to use an NAS that IS raid 6 if you want to. Pick your raid on that one so to say, OS is solid state. Some day when I SEE an actual difference in left on vs. left off I might say to leave em on. Some locations rn but one show a night. The amount of power wasted over a three year period however is also considerable and way more than the cost of a replacement HD and taking the 5 min.to move cables over. On servers that have no air intake filtration this will also mean more frequent cleaning out of dust will be necessary.  |  IP: Logged

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