Low power / hard drives won't run

[Carsten Kurz]

We have bought a few factory new carriers for our own use years ago. As we use them rarely and carefully, they are our option for temporary mounting a drive that came in a failing carrier.

[Peter Mork]

Well. I guess we should put in a stock of new CRU shoes (big prize for anyone who knows what "CRU" stands for. It's the name of the company that makes them, but their website doesn't explain it - probably they've forgotten) and hard drive shells - we actually have a few abandoned drives, so I'll put the Barbie drive in one of those and hope for the best.

Steve, do you know how it comes to be that damaged shells get recirculated? I mean, they have to work for the files to be written onto them, no? Anyway, I will take this new information into my learning curve. Meanwhile we lost our opening day for Miracle Club. What a business.

[Leo Enticknap]

This was made difficult by the fact that every screw on the shell was stripped.

The two screws on the side of the shell that hold the lid on have a habit of stripping: it's very easy to cross thread the little buggers. I keep a packet of spares on hand for this reason: they are 4-40 x 3/16, countersunk head.

I can't remember receiving a bad drive that was in fact a bad cartridge, but there again, I haven't worked in a frontline theater since 2017. I suspect that back then, the CRU cartridges in use were all relatively new, and so this was less likely to happen. A lot of the cartridges now circulating from Deluxe have likely been in use for a decade or more, with at least in the high hundreds of insertion/removal cycles on them. This does suggest to me that I should keep an empty cartridge in my tool kit, though, in case I ever need to help a theater that reports being unable to ingest from one specific drive, and encourage my customers to keep one on site, too.

[Brian Vita]

The screws that held the shell together were fine. The screws that held the drive in were likely put in with a screw gun with a high torque setting. The slots in the heads were pretty much obliterated.

We keep several new shells as well as Movedock 3.0s on the shelf for clients in an emergency.

A lot of theaters are still using Movedocks that were gifted from Deluxe. Many of these have worn or bent connectors. Also. If you have an SR1000 or newer Dolby IMS, the servers have USB 3.0 ports. Upgrading to a USB 3.0 dock will significantly cut ingest time.

[Leo Enticknap]

The screws that held the drive in were likely put in with a screw gun with a high torque setting. The slots in the heads were pretty much obliterated.

Ugh ... the threads for those are in the chassis of the drive itself, meaning that unless you can get the screws out non-destructively, you are not going to be able to secure the drive into another cartridge. It can sit unsecured during ingestion, but not in shipping.

I would never use a power tool on fasteners that go directly into a small electronic device.

[Peter Mork]

I tried putting the drive for Miracle Club into another shell, from one of our spare drives, and sure enough it was now ingestible. Yes, those screws are a pain. In general electronic stuff has too many screws! Not necessary.

[Peter Mork]

>The screws that held the shell together were fine. The screws that held the drive in were likely put in with a screw gun with a high torque setting. The slots in the heads were pretty much obliterated.

So, to clarify, they don't leave the drives in the shells when erasing/reusing them? Do you know this for a fact? Seems unnecessary, and would lead to problems such as I had.

[Carsten Kurz]

I guess that depends on specific duplicating habit's. For a large number of drives, it may make sense to take the drive out of their enclosures and use basic slot-in frames which only take up bare drives. It also excludes potential CRU frame/carrier related contact problems. These slot-in frames are also a lot cheaper than CRU frames and carriers. Bare drives are also cheaper to store. Moot point now, since they simply do not duplicate that many drives now, and whatever hardware infrastructure the various duplicators have, will most likely not be upgraded again, more likely downgraded in capacity.

- Carsten

[Leo Enticknap]

As against which, I would guess that there is 10-15 minutes of labor involved in every remove/reinstall cycle for getting a drive in and out of a CRU cartridge, plus the risk of cross-threading or otherwise damaging a fastener, especially if power tools are used, as Brian suspects.