As long as you overprovision (leave say half of the lba's unallocated to partitions) and the thing is not constantly swapping, you should be fine.

Not an issue at all, if its a fairly recent SSD then it'll look after itself so long as some space is reserved when the drive is being partitioned, ~10% of total drive capacity is a good starting point.

Trim is really only an issue if the drive is being used 24/7 with lots of reads and writes to the drive or when the drive is being used to near its full capacity, neither situation happens in a retro system so the benefit of TRIM is negligible.

But if it really bothers you I guess you could boot the system under a more modern Linux via a CD or USB and run the TRIM command manually every 6 months.

Also, love your YT content, keep up the great videos !

You'll have write amplification without TRIM, but 2 Gb of data per week is not enough to bother, unless your SSD has really small capacity.

It will reduce write performance (dramatically on modern SSDs with dynamically allocated pSLC cache as there will basically be no cache) and increase write amplification, that's it.

You may overprovision or you may not - all SSDs have some space reserved anyway and it'll be fine.

Thanks for all the input - and for your kind words, @trashbytes!

It's a closed system, I cannot change the partitions - well, I could but there is an automatic installation script which partitions everything and I'd like to leave it as it is 😀
Manual "garbage collection" is also not an option I'm afraid.

I'd plan to get the smallest SSD I can - 256 or 500GB. The original HDD is 160GB.
I'm tempted by a spinning HDD to maximise compatibility but I am also appealed by the SSD! Uhm...

tony359 wrote on 2025-07-03, 11:36:

Thanks for all the input - and for your kind words, @trashbytes! […]
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Thanks for all the input - and for your kind words, @trashbytes!

It's a closed system, I cannot change the partitions - well, I could but there is an automatic installation script which partitions everything and I'd like to leave it as it is 😀
Manual "garbage collection" is also not an option I'm afraid.

I'd plan to get the smallest SSD I can - 256 or 500GB. The original HDD is 160GB.
I'm tempted by a spinning HDD to maximise compatibility but I am also appealed by the SSD! Uhm...

Anything under 1Gb is likely to be too small to offset the lack of Trim by using over provisioning and on board garbage collection, smaller drives also don't have as much cache to work with so end up doing more writes to the Nand which obviously we want to reduce here.

A small fast HDD would certainly be a good idea for this use case and likely to last a long time before it requires maintenance on your part.

If I remember well, TRIM support was introduced with Linux 2.6.33, is there a reason why you cannot upgrade to a slightly newer kernel ?
A newer kernel with an older distro shouldn’t be a problem.

Nehalem501 wrote on 2025-07-03, 12:48:

is there a reason why you cannot upgrade to a slightly newer kernel ?
A newer kernel with an older distro shouldn’t be a problem.

It's a custom box, a cinema sound player for 35 and 70mm film. It has custom cards in it, I'd imagine some custom drivers too.

I'm already concerned in using a SATA drive instead of a PATA - but only mildly. Anything else could potentially causing software issues and if the software glitches, the sound glitches leaving many people upset 🙂

It's such a small niche of products that software was tightly tailored around the HW, not designed to work with anything but what they were installing at the factory. I wouldn't be surprised if something was hardcoded etc.

I use SSD for more than 15 years, never have a OS with trim

Would it be possible to use some kind of disk copy, maybe in another system, to create it in under partitioned form.
The problem with lack of trim, is that deleted data is considered valid by the SSD garbage collection, so must be moved when trying to free an erase block. Once an entire SSD worth of data has been written and deleted, the SSD is effectively full, as far as the SSD garbage collection and block allocation sees it, and it will struggle to piece together space from the fewer bits which are discarded from having been rewritten to other blocks - unused space within a partition does not alleviate this, especially if it the file system allocation remains at preferring fresh space over deleted, only unallocated space will account for the inability to recycle file system discarded blocks

Oh it’s a DTS XD10?
Then yes the custom stuff is on PCI cards and some custom drivers might be present in their kernel. I wanted to tinker with one someday but didn’t have the time to (I wrote a small utility to extract the soundtrack from these to get the original DTS disc ISO back).

it is 🙂

Would you be willing to share the utility with me - or with everybody? I'd like to keep what's on the drives - also to re-load it once I replace the HDD.
I'm re-furbishing one - and making it more reliable. Whoever designed the airflow in that box should change job!

and yes, video will come on that. I plan to test it on my 35mm projector with some actual prints 🙂

Sure, I can create a GitHub repo for it.

The original HDD can be mounted on a modern Linux PC. There is a folder on the biggest partition which contains all the DTS files, the file names are md5 hashes of their content. And the logos / trailer soundtracks are split separately instead of being bundled in one files like on the CD. The file content is not modified but the XD10 uses a different header format than the CDs, so it must be reconstructed.

The issue I have is that I couldn’t really test it because I don’t have access to working 35mm equipment at the moment. If you have still some soundtracks both on CD and inside the DTS XD10, it should be easy to compare if it was extracted properly. Ideally I would like to test it with a DTS 6D to be sure the CD images are correct for all DTS readers.

I have soundtracks, soundheads, a projector and some prints 😀

If it saves the hassle for you, I'd be happy to host the file on my github, obviously making clear that you are the author.

We never had trailers in Italy in DTS so I don't know how the "trailer reel" would work on a DTS player.

tony359 wrote on 2025-07-03, 11:36:

I'd plan to get the smallest SSD I can - 256 or 500GB. The original HDD is 160GB.
I'm tempted by a spinning HDD to maximise compatibility but I am also appealed by the SSD! Uhm...

That's perfect.

Just dd the entire 160GB disk onto the new ssd and you're good to go.

Less chance of sound glitching if you use a good ssd, as io service time will be an order of magnitude less.

That also means that the unit cannot be re-installed on site if needed - unlikely but... Even if TRIM was available, it would bother me a little to install an SSD as someone might need/want to reinstall the SW at some point. But I could just add a label on the front mentioning that (*). DD a drive is a bit less straightforward.

(*) Now I'm thinking about it, I don't have credentials for that box so enabling TRIM wouldn't have been possible!

But thanks for the idea.

tony359 wrote on 2025-07-03, 16:28:

I have soundtracks, soundheads, a projector and some prints 😀

If it saves the hassle for you, I'd be happy to host the file on my github, obviously making clear that you are the author.

Ok, let me clean up the code a bit, and I'll post the link to the repo here.

Nehalem501 wrote on 2025-07-04, 15:39:

Ok, let me clean up the code a bit, and I'll post the link to the repo here.

Amazing thanks. Meanwhile I've managed to access the data folder of the XD10 HDD. Do I need anything else from the HDD?

If you took the content of the folder with SND and HDR files: yes that’s all you need.

You don’t need to clone your HDD on your SSD, you can reinstall the OS directly.
The installer ISO for the latest version of the DTS software (2.2.06) can be found here https://www.film-tech.com/warehouse/index.php?category=2, it will the in the software section near the bottom of the page.

If you have time, would you mind ingesting the following disc on an empty XD10 and sending me the resulting files? https://archive.org/details/dts_11-05-2004
Having the same files in both original CD and XD10 forms would help me finishing testing if everything works properly.