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.

[Sebastian Binz]

Has there been any development on the list of approved drives or more experience with other drives?

I am considering to replace our 3x1 TB HDD within the ICMP-X, but the list of approved drives I found isn't realling appealing to me. It's either the rather small 2TB HDDs or the super expensive 3.84 TB SSD. I would be interested in something like a 3TB or 4 TB HDD setup.

[Steve Guttag]

Barco has taken the position that they are not going to issue an approved drive list, going forward. They've found that drives of the same make/model are not identical and that they can only ensure performance with the specific generation/firmware of drives that they supply. This is not to say that other drives won't work. It is just that Barco won't sanction them. I suspect, if you have an issue with a non-Barco supplied drive (or one of the legacy ones that is on the older list), they'll start with that you are using an unapproved drive.

[Sebastian Binz]

So that pretty much comes down to just trying some kind of 3TB drives and run them, if they work. In case warranty is needed, swap in the original drives....

[Steve Guttag]

Now, on the heels of their new stance on the drives, they doubled their size for the same price. So, they are supplying 2TB drives for their old 1TB price and 4TB drives at their old 2TB price. So, in their mind, that is a deal. However, compared to street prices, they are not such a deal.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Apologies to anyone who knows all this, just more information:

Some of these SSD "models" have been around a VERY long time, it makes sense that the chips and design has changed, either due to shortages, cost-cutting, or improvements. Barco's position kinda makes sense, they probably don't have the resources to maintain an approved list. But they could defer to some other industry that does... plenty of those around.

Write endurance (often expressed as MTBF, Mean Time Before Failure, or DWPD, Drive Writes Per Day) are pretty nuanced with SSDs depending on the memory storage methods deployed within them. I don't think an IMB/server in a first run theatre would be considered an extremely write heavy use case, but we do tend to move giant files around a lot. So definitely above the endurance demands of a home user. Festivals and full-time repertory theatres probably put heavier demands on the drives comparatively.

Kioxia for example has extremely high write performance enterprise and datacenter SSDs that fall into 1, 3, 10, and 60 DWPD categories of endurance. It appears Barco's prior approved drives such as the Seagate Nytro line were in the DWPD=1 category, but fairly optimized for read performance, marketed as an "enterprise" level SSD, but still with familiar "consumer" 3D Triple Layer NAND flash.

Seems fair that if you were looking to go off list after warranty you would aim for minimum 3D-TLC, DWPD 1 or better, and 5 year or more warranty, and look to match the read performance advertised on the 3.8TB Seagate Nytro datasheet.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with these terms:

A decent article on SSD endurance:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchsto...rite-endurance

A quick primer on differences in NAND memory:
https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-...lc-tlc-3d-nand

Edit to say Kioxia is probably a bad comparison brand, as all their SSDs now are either SAS, PCIe, or NVME. Sata6 is definitely "yesterday's tech" in the enterprise space.