Barco ICMP now ships with SSD instead of HDD

[Antti Näyhä]

Makes sense, I guess. What’s curious, though, is that in the new InfoT 1630’s list of certified drives there are no options larger than 2 TB – and it’s explicitly stated that using any drives outside the list will void warranty.

A previous document from 2021 lists one specific 3.84 TB SSD model among certified drives. I just installed those in two ICMP-X’s a couple of months ago and they’ve been running smoothly so far. Just wondering if they are officially unsupported now.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Wasn't the original 2 TB limit only applicable for the "original" ICMP and NOT the newer ICMP-X? Maybe they now simplified that down to a singular list?

[Antti Näyhä]

I’m afraid not… the new certified drive list has separate columns for the three ICMP models (X, non-X with HDMI 2.0, non-X with DisplayPort).

[Leo Enticknap]

I've installed a set of WD Red 4TB SSDs in two ICMP-Xs (both out of warranty): both have been running for over a year with no (reported to me, at any rate) problems or issues.

[Antti Näyhä]

Good to hear! Mine are the Intel ones that were listed as Barco-approved in 2021. The ICMP-X’s are still under warranty (hopefully).

[Jerry Bian]

This SSD is manufactured by Taiwan Advantech and is very good

[Agnius Acus]

Could you tell a difference between IMBs operating SSDs and HDDs? In a way it loads up, responds, ingests materials?

[Antti Näyhä]

For me, ingesting from a NAS via NFS is roughly 10% faster with SSD’s when not playing a DCP simultaneously.

The difference is much larger with parallel operations, such as ingesting, playing a DCP and let’s say transferring another DCP to another toom via FTP all at once. Such a load can really slow down a HDD RAID, but SSD barely cares so you can pretty much saturate the ICMP’s 1 GbE bandwidth.

As for responsivity in general UI operations, such as opening a clip in the player, I haven’t really noticed. The ICMP has always felt snappy enough to me, even with HDD’s.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Good to hear! Mine are the Intel ones that were listed as Barco-approved in 2021. The ICMP-X’s are still under warranty (hopefully).

I guess someone must have dropped them from the list because they had only limited demand for those and they simply stopped testing them for compatibility for new software releases. Since we know that at least the ICMP-X hardware is compatible with drives larger than 2 TB, the only reason to drop those during testing is probably either because they wanted to simplify their testing routine or they had trouble sourcing those SSDs for local testing.

Interestingly, if I look at local availability of those 4 TB Intel SSDs, then back a year ago, there were at least 3 suppliers with valid price listings and now there is only one left, but it's a backorder item with an expected lead time of 3 weeks or more...

[Antti Näyhä]

Previously, the only approved 4 TB drive was a Seagate Nytro model. That one got progressively more expensive and harder to find over time, then disappeared from the market completely, and finally in 2021 it was replaced on the list by the Intel SSD.

Perhaps the Intel is indeed on its way out, and will be replaced by a newer approved 4 TB SSD soon.