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Author Topic: Source for replacement DSS100 and DSP100 PSUs Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-25-2017 08:58 PM                        Agreed with pretty much everything that others have said. Desktop-grade disks will work fine until they hit a read error, at which point the RAID controller will kick the drive out of the RAID and will probably keep doing so even if you reconstitute the array manually. Essentially, they are fine for temporary use, but not what you would want in a cinema server (or any other real time system) permanently. This has nothing to do with data rate--it has to do with how the RAID controller behaves when it fails a disk, and that almost always involves a period of I/O disruption. Note that non-Dolby servers use software RAID implementations and not all of those work this way. Linux's md RAID implementation does not have this issue, for example. Less importantly, enterprise-grade SATA disks have a lower nonrecoverable error rate (typically 1 in 10^15 bits read) than desktop disks (typically 1 in 10^14 bits read). "NAS" disks are normally desktop disks with different firmware and have the higher error rate. Agreed that Hitachi (owned by Western Digital, but apparently made in different plants) is currently the leader in mechanical disk reliability. The "Ultrastar" line is the one to get for cinema servers.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 01-26-2017 06:26 AM                     I do not believe the DSS100 is restricted on drives...particularly with current software for it (4.7). It is only restricted on drive size. Early RAID cards would not support 1TB drives, later (and every one I've tried) do support the 1TB drives. I've never tried a 2TB drive in a DSS100. At present, all of the DSS100s I service are in backup duties.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-26-2017 11:14 AM                        quote: Scott Norwood "NAS" disks are normally desktop disks with different firmware and have the higher error rate. Given that they're typically 20% more expensive than their desktop-branded equivalents, I find it unimpressive and a bit of a scam if the hardware is no better. I find it hard to believe that the R & D costs on the firmware can account for the difference. Thanks for everyone's comments. I guess I must have been lucky with the desktop drive I currently have in a DSS200. It was bought as an emergency measure from a local Fry's following a complete failure (of a Dolby OEM-supplied one). I did buy a NAS-grade one shortly afterwards and have kept it in the supplies cabinet as a spare ready to swap in ever since: I didn't see any reason to pull the desktop drive until it actually gave trouble. Given their behavior under partial failure conditions, I think I'll do so the next time I'm in that booth.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-26-2017 11:45 AM                     I think it is way more than just firmware Leo. I have found that the WD Red hard drives are about the best out there for serious IT use. HGST IT grade would be the next best and it is what I use in cinema servers because the price vs. performance is just about right. The WD Red drives are way too costly vs. HGST drives to be installing them by the case lot in a cinema application. Mark  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-26-2017 12:26 PM                        The Western Digital "Red" series is mostly (entirely?) made up of 5400 RPM drives. The performance on these is pretty dismal. You _really_ do not want to mix 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM (10K, 15K, etc.) drives in a single RAID group. This will kill performance for everything. (Actually, you really want every drive in a RAID group to have identical specifications.) As for desktop drives vs. NAS drives, you can look at the specifications and there really aren't many differences aside from the firmware. The unrecoverable error rate is normally the same for both. Part of the cost difference is probably justified by the (typically) longer warranty on the NAS drives and also because of greater competition and volume in the desktop market. In the intermediate and long term, it will probably be harder to find enterprise-grade mechanical drives. Data centers are rapidly moving to flash-based storage for performance reasons, as well as reduced physical space, power, and cooling requirements.  |  IP: Logged Ioannis Syrogiannis Expert Film Handler Posts: 147 From: Reykjavík, Iceland Registered: Jun 2005 posted 01-26-2017 01:27 PM                     I would confirm, dropped frames on the same time-code (spot/sceene) of a movie, due to one of the 4 drives of a DSS200 being problematic. Even more, with the drive (a Seagate Barracuda ES.2) having no alocation sectors at all, reported. I am all for using the same type of disks on a RAID array. I wouldn't suggest to anyone buying a Seagate product, but I that's just me. As for the PSUs of the DSP-100, that is a custom Dolby make, it might be repairable by replacing specific parts. Now, as an hypothesis: If I had a DSP-100 and I ran out of PSUs, I would consider (until server replacement) to take the PSU backplane out and use a commercial one. That, due to dimentions, would leave the lid open, but, at least, I wouldn't have a black screen. I wonder what would have happened to all these dead PSUs if there wasn't the filter on the DSS100... As for the IDE bootstraps, I 'd go for ebay, just as Martin suggested. I am afraid a re-installment of the OS (content deleted) would be needed. Other than the above, for the DSS/DSP100 all hardware support has been moved to a company called Venture Manufacturing. You can contact a Venture representative by email at lrocks(at)venturemfg-usa.com or by phone at 1-510-456-9398. (That is a two and a half years old info.)  |  IP: Logged Marco Giustini Film God Posts: 2713 From: Reading, UK Registered: Nov 2007 posted 01-26-2017 03:26 PM                     Scott, The RED's are all 7200rpm - I have some in my NAS. Specifications here. Leo That's my understanding. WDC RED's are basically GREEN with a different firmware that make them less prone to be dropped by a RAID controller. Don't you pay £100 for a "coming home" feature on your car - when it's basically a few lines of code already there on the main computer? If you want something actually better, then you get the Enterprise (Black) drives. Those are not only 20% dearer!  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 01-29-2017 11:43 AM                    Several years ago I had freeze / tick playback issues on my DSS200 (running Dolby-approved drives). An ingest was happening at the time so I pulled that and the issue was resolved. No errors were shown but a reboot after the show said one drive had failed. So much for the system properly prioritizing playback data flow over other activity. Or reporting the issue. With another screening following closely, I opted to run that "live" from the transport DCP to minimize use of the degraded RAID. These were fairly new 1T drives and I still had the old drive complement, untouched, 500GB's, so I put those back in and ran with those until a matching replacement drive could be obtained. Oddly, the alleged bad drive checked out okay on subsequent testing so I have no idea what was going on. Trying to recall what I did with it but I think it's one I keep in the booth, popping into a CRU box now and then to back up DCP test material.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 01-29-2017 11:48 AM                        When I have a degraded array error I get a new set of hard drives and change the whole works. I've done that twice since I got the server in 2011.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-29-2017 02:42 PM                     quote: Marco Giustini The RED's are all 7200rpm With the gigantic sized sata drives pricing coming down I can see these raid 5's becoming a thing of the past. Throw a couple 4 tb drives in raid 1 and you are done, would have faster read/write speeds and you'd have more safe local storage than you'd probably ever use. Mark  |  IP: Logged Ioannis Syrogiannis Expert Film Handler Posts: 147 From: Reykjavík, Iceland Registered: Jun 2005 posted 01-29-2017 02:53 PM                     quote: Steve Kraus Trying to recall what I did with it but I think it's one I keep in the booth, popping into a CRU box now and then to back up DCP test material. If you 're backing up from the DSS200, keep in mind that the packages (lacking all DCP elements) will re-ingest only in Dolby servers (DSS100/DSS200/DSS220) and libraries. You 'll have to extract the generated packages for them to be ingest-able elsewhere.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-29-2017 03:04 PM                        It's going to be interesting to see how this goes. My NAS box at home has 2 x 6TB WD Reds in RAID1 configuration in it, which cost around $250 each last year. The total cost of the package (the 2-slot Buffalo NAS box plus the 2 6TB drives as a RAID1, versus a 4-slot box with 2TB drives in a RAID5 configuration) came in at around $200 less than the RAID5 alternative with the same capacity. So even by summer 2016, RAID capacity was cheaper by using a smaller number of drives in a RAID1 configuration than a larger number as a RAID5. If the 6TB and 8TB SATA drives prove to be as reliable as their smaller predecessors and come down in price to match them in $ per TB within a couple of years, I agree with you that RAID5s of 4-8 drives in "medium sized data" applications such as DCP servers will likely become a thing of the past. As for SSDs, they're a no brainer for frequently accessed data (e.g. operating system volumes) now, but from the prices I've seen for larger ones, you'd have to save a lot of electricity and gain a big reliability improvement to justify the initial cost in using them for online storage of digital assets of tens of GB or more. At the moment they seem to be like electric cars: in a total ownership and operating cost comparison over a typical lifestyle, not worth it yet.  |  IP: Logged

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