BARCO ICMP vs DOLBY DSL 100

[Steve Guttag]

Either your hearing is going or you have it sufficiently isolated away. The DSS100 had particularly annoying fans to be near. It's much higher pitched than what the DSS200 stuff has (which is just plain loud but throatier).

[Dave Macaulay]

Yeah... well, I turned an old Kodak digital cinema server (IBM server) into a home NAS server. It didn't last long though, sounded like an RB211 idling in the closet. The DSS is silent in comparison.

[Carsten Kurz]

I would also think these eat the price of a basic modern NAS barebone unit on your electricity meter during one year of operation.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Something I've done with some old DSS/DSL100 boxes, remove the Dolby OS and install one of the FreeNAS solutions.

One of my back up servers here at home is a DSS100 re-purposed this way. Running 2tb drives in RAID 10. Works like a charm. The FreeNAS solutions are very flexible.

I did a similar thing on two early GDC Servers except installed Windows 7 and the GDC TMS plus 8 gigs of RAM. Worked just fine as the GDC TMS relies more on CPU power to move content than it does the RAM. The extra RAM was mainly for Windows..

[Marcel Birgelen]

Something I've done with some old DSS/DSL100 boxes, remove the Dolby OS and install one of the FreeNAS solutions.

One of my back up servers here at home is a DSS100 re-purposed this way. Running 2tb drives in RAID 10. Works like a charm. The FreeNAS solutions are very flexible.

Interesting. About a year ago, I tried to repurpose an old Supermicro server with 16 drive bays that was of a much more recent vintage than a DSL100 and FreeNAS didn't want to install on it, because the hardware was too old. Yeah, maybe I could've pulled an old release out of the archive, but simply out of security perspectives I wanted to run something more modern.

Carsten has a valid point regarding power usage. Those old boxes are often very power hungry and since they often spend a whole lot of time doing nothing, you should really check if you're not fooling yourself as the thing eats itself into your power budget, especially if you consider such boxes for your home environment. I know that power is still pretty cheap in some places around the world, but over here in Europe, it is definitely a factor to account for.

Also, like Steve indicated, the DSL100 had some terrible fans and a lot of those old boxes came with terrible noisy fans unfortunately. While you could go a long way and replace them with some new ones, spend this money on some newer hardware that comes with more silent fans per default.

[Pete Naples]

Marcel that could well be the case, I set that up over 2 years ago and have left it alone in software terms ever since.

On the fans, I removed a lot of the original ones to shut it up a bit, it lives in a comms rack in the cellar anyway. It's one level of my back up scheme and is only powered when backup is running.