How to format hdd for reuse in ims1000 ?

[Mario Neto]

hello masters

need help

I am a cinema technician in Brazil and I have the following doubt:

how do I format the 1TB HGST drives for reuse on the IMS1000 server?

I'm using DiskGenius program and I can even format it to eXT4

but unfortunately my IMS1000 server cannot remount raidy with the 3 units

are units with 30,000 to 40,000 hours of life already used

would appreciate a lot for some help

thanks

[Leo Enticknap]

I haven't touched a 1000 for years, but if it's the same as the 2000, then you need to go to Monitoring > Storage > Reset All Drives, as so:

reset_all_drives.PNG

I'm guessing that your IMS1000's web UI will be in Portuguese, and if so this screenshot likely won't help you that much - sorry.

You don't need to initialize, partition and/or format any of the drives outside the IMS before doing this. The initialization ("Reset all drives") procedure will take a few hours to complete. You can ingest and play while it's still running, but ingestion will be significantly slower than normal.

[Marcel Birgelen]

If you have an existing disk you want to re-use, make sure it's entirely clean, as any existing data on the disk can cause during the rebuild of the array.

1. Wipe all your data on the disk, you can use the "Erase Sectors" option of DiskGenius to do so. Make sure that all sectors from 0 to the end of the disk are selected and fill them with zero's (00). This process will take a while, but once it has finished all data on the disk should be gone and if it finishes without any errors, you know that the disk will likely not suffer from unrecoverable errors.

2. Insert the disk into your RAID array on the IMS2000, simply follow Dolby's own procedures for this:

The IMS1000 interface looks more like the IMS2000 UI if I remember correctly. The IMS2000 interface was mostly a Dolby overlay on the Doremi Web UI.

[Carsten Kurz]

Reset all drives will wipe the RAID. Not sure Mario is ready to accept that. If only one drive failed, he may be after a RAID repair. However, if that drive is old respectively one of the original ones that came with this IMS1000, it may simply be dead. In that case, he would have to buy a replacement. If all this is true, better 3 replacements.

[Mario Neto]

hello Marcel

I did the procedure on DiskGenius and got this result

the next step will be to insert the HDDs into the IMS1000 and see if the system sees the drives and redoes the RAID

Thanks again for the help.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Please also make sure that the replacement drive is supported by Doremi/Dolby for usage in the IMS1000. While non-supported drives may work, there is no such guarantee.

[Leo Enticknap]

If the IMS1000 is no longer in warranty, I don't see how there can be anything to lose by trying an unapproved drive model, if you already have the drive(s). All that approval signifies is that Dolby has done testing with that specific drive model, and that they've satisfied themselves that it performs well enough within a RAID set for simultaneous ingestion and playback without glitchy output, essentially. It doesn't necessarily mean that another model of drive will not.

One manufacturer is very hardline about this, and states that if a server's log indicates that a non-approved drive model has been used, the warranty on that unit is totally voided. Per California law, they can't do that: under these circumstances, a warranty claim can only be denied if the unauthorized part caused the fault that gave rise to the claim. But there are likely other jurisdictions in which this policy is legal, so if your server is in warranty, it's best to stick to their approved drives. In any case, if the server is in warranty, any drive that goes bad will be replaced under that warranty, so this shouldn't be an issue.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Customer/consumer rights are hairy subjects as they indeed differ between countries and sometimes even between states/provinces. In the EU, there is a distinction between professional customers and normal end-users. Professional customers essentially agree to the warranty terms of the supplier, with all restrictions therein. A normal consumer is protected by a much broader spectrum of warranty terms that can't be easily overridden, like a minimum term of two years on all non-consumable products.

Still, what I've seen that if a small business starts to fight a large business that some judges seem willing to see the small business as an end user/normal consumer and apply the law as such, because they often have no other choice than to accept the terms of their suppliers.

What I've seen over the years is that if an unsupported drive is correctly detected, it will usually just operate fine. The problem with the IMS/IMB integrated servers is that their chipsets seem to be more limited in the drives they support, than on those big-box designs using traditional SATA interfaces or hardware RAID controllers.

Still, any unsupported disk that comes without warranty, as in, new, out of the box/bag, is somewhat of a risk and the potential replacement value of your server is much higher than that of a single disk. Imagine some odd second-hand disk blowing up your SATA or RAID controller? If the disk was still under warranty, you could potentially even claim damages on the side of the harddrive manufacturer. But if that drive wasn't supported and was already out-of-warranty when you inserted it into the system, then you have no-one else to blame but yourself...