it only happens at boot from what I see so it should be "simple" - I'd like to know what happens during the first 30 seconds after the player is on "ready".
Will those commands monitor every process running in the system? How would I set them to run automatically at boot?
No, they attach to a specific binary or already-running process... so you'd either have to work out which is the likely candidate, and adjust the startup script which launches it, or run it interactively - which you've mentioned is not particularly easy.
oh well I spent 2 months after those boxes, I don't mind some extra troubleshooting. Knowledge is power.
I'll begin with tracking down what is being run - is there a way to log what's being executed over a period of time?
The "heavy write workload" is loading a soundtrack every now and then. With FILM (35/70mm) already disappeared from the cinema scenario, this happens VERY rarely. When it happens, it's max 2 CDs so 1.4GB of data. So I guess that to fill those 250GB it'll take a while! 😁
(though I see the player is writing the data on a temp folder and re-index them in a new format so say 3GB per movie).
I just thought a spinning HDD was the best solution but...
Well, samsung claims 150TBW for 250GB EVO. How long it will take to write 150TB of data with your workload? And that's only a point where it goes out of warranty, it'll still work for a while after that.
Even considering no TRIM will increase write amplification it is still likely an impossible number...
The "heavy write workload" is loading a soundtrack every now and then. With FILM (35/70mm) already disappeared from the cinema scenario, this happens VERY rarely. When it happens, it's max 2 CDs so 1.4GB of data. So I guess that to fill those 250GB it'll take a while! 😁
(though I see the player is writing the data on a temp folder and re-index them in a new format so say 3GB per movie).
I just thought a spinning HDD was the best solution but...
Well, samsung claims 150TBW for 250GB EVO. How long it will take to write 150TB of data with your workload? And that's only a point where it goes out of warranty, it'll still work for a while after that.
Even considering no TRIM will increase write amplification it is still likely an impossible number...
Aligning partitions to avoid write amplification on SSDs is also something to consider. SSDs, AFAIK, typically have 4K blocks internally, but present 512-byte sectors. This is not an issue on modern Linux and Windows, but might be on something significantly older.
One theoretical way to handle TRIM might be to boot the system from a USB drive set up to run it automatically, as needed, or maybe periodically.
I suspect one might probably be able to set it up to conditionally chain boot to the main OS most of the time and only boot into a newer OS on the USB drive at intervals (based on time or number of boots). That might be both too complex to set up and overkill (as lack of TRIM likely won't significantly affect a good quality TLC based drive bottlenecked by ATA100 anyway).
The display is a USB display and I understand the "player disabled" error is a simple timer: the software must reset the timer constantly. Failing to do so, will trigger the message.
In the video you can see that AFTER the player is "ready" - which is when X Window loads - the HDD drive activity becomes solid green after about 7 seconds which is usually AFTER I see a graphic output on screen. I've just noticed that the clock stops - that suggests that the software has momentarily frozen.
With the SSD I see very little activity on the LED and no errors.
Once again, I'm not too concerned about this error - though it's not nice to see - but every now and then the error stays on for like 45 seconds and I observe that X Window fails to load. On a couple of occasions the whole DTS software crashes, it's restarted and might throw out an MD5 error which triggers a reinstall.
I'll check logs later but I don't see anything when that error shows up - I think from Linux perspective it's just one of the modules taking a bit more time 🙂
@Archer57
Indeed, I am totally happy with the life of the drive.
My only concern is that once the drive is full - and that will take a while - the drive will have to do garbage collection every time something is written to it.
So imagine the player is playing a soundtrack and the software periodically logs the activity on a file. Will those operations grind the SSD to a halt, potentially affecting the playback? The playback is low bandwidth so it should be ok but I didn't want to add the "variable" in the equation, that's why I went for an HDD originally.
@Darry
I hope it's overkill indeed. Though it might be an option to explore: an automatic Linux "cleaner" to be run once a year to TRIM the SSD. As long as it's automatic, it could be an option indeed. Only potential issue is that I don't think that MB boots from USB so it needs to fit on a DVD 😀
I'm not too skilled at Linux so it might be over my comfort zone but might be doable. Ideally, I could re-use the LCD software which is on the XD10 and send some strings to the LCD to inform the user of the progress.
Let me first confirm that an SSD is making the software happy, then I'll think of the rest.
I think, on balance, if the SSD gets rid of the startup troubles you had with the larger replacement HDD, it's worth the (possibly insignificant) reduction in lifespan of the drive, and I'd probably just live with it!
tony359wrote on Yesterday, 12:16:@Archer57
Indeed, I am totally happy with the life of the drive.
My only concern is that once the drive is full - and that will […] Show full quote
@Archer57
Indeed, I am totally happy with the life of the drive.
My only concern is that once the drive is full - and that will take a while - the drive will have to do garbage collection every time something is written to it.
So imagine the player is playing a soundtrack and the software periodically logs the activity on a file. Will those operations grind the SSD to a halt, potentially affecting the playback? The playback is low bandwidth so it should be ok but I didn't want to add the "variable" in the equation, that's why I went for an HDD originally.
SSDs have more storage than is exposed to user, you can not fill it up completely - it'll always have some free space. Write performance will degrade if you write enough to run out of that, but it will not "grind to a halt" and will still be bottlenecked by IDE even if it'll have to erase during write.
Also there are multiple levels of buffering everywhere - on os level, inside the drive itself and playback likely uses buffers too. A tiny write like you describe will not cause issues....
Also there are multiple levels of buffering everywhere - on os level, inside the drive itself and playback likely uses buffers too. A tiny write like you describe will not cause issues....
For sure - but those buffers didn't work with a larger HDD! 😁
In any case, I don't seem to have many other options. Fingers crossed the Samsung SSD will work UDMA100 on BOTH boards and with no errors.
Just for curiosity, here are logs from today at 12:39:16 when the clock stopped until 12:39:20.
I see a
1Aug 13 12:39:20 xd10 kernel: 80 timecode record(s) lost to application
Exactly at 12:39:20 which seems to be "normal", I have logs from many units to help me understand what's normal and what not. Though I once had a sound "drop" which coincided with one of those errors. "timecode" should be the actual signal timecode arriving from the projector but there was nothing running then. It seems to be a constant though, every time I have that error on the LCD at boot, there is also that message.
My research suggests that those are all "normal" errors with the exception of "BAD clock". E622 and E494 are the DTS proprietary cards in the player.
Some players have more "E622: Fallback occurred" than others apparently but they all more or less do that.
The line
1 [3] [Aug 13 12:39:20] Error: TCR delay too big, > 1 sec. nDelaySize=158 Diff=112 [29]
Usually coincides with the below in "messages"
1Aug 13 12:39:20 xd10 kernel: 80 timecode record(s) lost to application
TCR: Time Code Reader, the signal from the projector
Finally, another log from the "content manager" which is also starting X Window. This all seems to happen before the fact - but as I said sometimes X Window fails to start and/or starts in 10+ seconds.
The Samsung SSD has arrived and it seems to behave as expected. No errors, no issues and - as a plus side - the box is snappier 😀
I'd still would love to find out what's holding the software at 12:39:16! One test I'd like to do - purely for my curiosity - is to plug the original HDD back and see if the activity light does a similar thing after "Ready".
I know this is not Linux stuff, I just wanted to share this in case you're curious!
Trashbyteswrote on 2025-07-03, 09:53: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 […] Show full quote
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 !
Drives do not auto trim. There was some speculation that some PNY drives did it automatically. But that was proven false. It was just vague marketing speak.
SSHDs don't need TRIM. Those actually take care of everything internally with no OS support required.
Trashbyteswrote on 2025-07-03, 09:53: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 […] Show full quote
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 !
Drives do not auto trim. There was some speculation that some PNY drives did it automatically. But that was proven false. It was just vague marketing speak.
SSHDs don't need TRIM. Those actually take care of everything internally with no OS support required.
Never claimed they did, their own onboard software will handle 99% of problems as long as some best use rules are followed, like leaving unallocated space free for the drive to use, not filling it to 100% and not using it as a drive that receives lots of read and writes. If its simply being used as storage of for a system that doesn't change or create a ton of reads and writes then Trim is not required or required VERY infrequently and the drive itself will handle all other maintenance just fine.
People who espouse Trim as the be all end all of SSD requirements are delusional, its a tool nothing more and its specifically a tool for drives seeing high read/write usage that tends to use a drive above 80% capacity. So such cases a HDD/SSHD would be far better, but hey people tend to do stupid things with hardware.
Ive had SSDs on non Trim capable systems die but NEVER from a lack of Trim.
Thinking about this, the box has software quotas for storage - which is set to 25GB at the factory, this gives you an idea of the amount of data expected! 😀
I will leave that quota to something like 100GB and the drive will never be full to the brink.
What I am not sure I understand is what the role of TRIM is. I understand that without TRIM the drive doesn't know what is deleted, is that correct? So how does the firmware garbage collection work if the drive doesn't know what needs to be deleted?
Back to the box, this morning I plugged the original PATA drive, 160GB, and observed the behaviour at boot. There is NO long "solid" activity after "Ready" appears. There is some activity but less than a second of "blink" so something is odd when a large drive is used.
I'm curious to see whether a 500GB SATA HDD shows the same behaviour. The SSD seems to be working fine for now. I see the light at the end of the tunnel - this project has taken all my energies for months now!
tony359wrote on Today, 10:40:Thinking about this, the box has software quotas for storage - which is set to 25GB at the factory, this gives you an idea of th […] Show full quote
Thinking about this, the box has software quotas for storage - which is set to 25GB at the factory, this gives you an idea of the amount of data expected! 😀
I will leave that quota to something like 100GB and the drive will never be full to the brink.
What I am not sure I understand is what the role of TRIM is. I understand that without TRIM the drive doesn't know what is deleted, is that correct? So how does the firmware garbage collection work if the drive doesn't know what needs to be deleted?
Back to the box, this morning I plugged the original PATA drive, 160GB, and observed the behaviour at boot. There is NO long "solid" activity after "Ready" appears. There is some activity but less than a second of "blink" so something is odd when a large drive is used.
I'm curious to see whether a 500GB SATA HDD shows the same behaviour. The SSD seems to be working fine for now. I see the light at the end of the tunnel - this project has taken all my energies for months now!
Thanks - then I am not sure I understand how it works without TRIM.
Without TRIM the SSD cannot know what needs to be deleted so everything stays there... until all the data has been written. At that point, how does the SSD know what can be "recycled"? The OS will just present new data to be written.
One option I did not consider is to use Compact Flash cards. Though I had issues with them and WIndows XP so I'm not sure they'd be trouble-free. But I might want to try and install to see if it works, just to keep it as an option.
What I am not sure I understand is what the role of TRIM is.
TRIM informs the drives which blocks no longer contain useful data and can be discarded. Doing that allows controller to erase those cells as part of garbage collection (it is not as simple as simply erasing because erase blocks are very large, stuff has to be moved around etc), remove the association between this cells and logical blocks from translator and return the cells to empty cell pool.
Without TRIM when a file is deleted controller has no idea the cells can be erased and those cells remain allocated. So eventually whole user accessible/partitioned size of drive is allocated and from controller's perspective is storing useful data.
SSDs have quite significant amount of extra memory though, for various purposes not the least of which is being able to function when full. Easily ~10% or more.
When data is written to SSD it will write it to empty cells it has and map those to associated logical blocks, always. Without TRIM the only empty cells the drive has are those extra ones and if you perform write operation large enough for those to run out at that point you get performance hit since now controller will have to move the data around and perform erases to store more. If writes are not large enough to run out - now controller knows it can erase the cells it just remapped with empty ones, so given some idle time it'll free up the same amount of space again.
Operating like this also complicates some things like wear leveling and garbage collection, because there is less empty space to work with, ultimately increasing amount of extra writes performed for those tasks => increasing wear.
This also affects controllers which have no DRAM cache more significantly, because when those need to temporarily store data they always have to write it into flash...
In another words - lack of TRIM is not the end of the world, but it makes SSD operate less efficiently and places a limit on amount of data you can write in one go before performance goes down the drain...
their own onboard software will handle 99% of problems as long as some best use rules are followed, like leaving unallocated space free for the drive to use, not filling it to 100% and not using it as a drive that receives lots of read and writes.
Fun fact - most of those "best use" "rules" are complete nonsense and lead to harmful conclusions/actions. Some make some sense, but still have to be treated carefully and only in relation to specific situation.
There are so many myths and misconceptions surrounding SSDs... basically 90% of all the info online is misinformation to a certain degree.
There is still something I don't fully understand.
You say that without TRIM, the controller doesn't know what gets deleted and keeps using the available space until it reaches the end. In this situation, the OS won't see a full SSD but the controller will.
So next time the OS asks the SSD to write some data, the SSD will have to use the additional space, hidden to the OS.
But the OS is STILL not telling the SSD what needs to be deleted so how can the SSD know what to delete to make space for the additional data which is being saved?
So the trick is the "overprovisioning", the extra space that is "always empty". In fact, when I tested the Samsung SSD with Samsung Magician (what a horrible piece of SW!) it had an over provisioning option. I wonder whether it would be wise to reserve some more.
On a side note, today I have tested an old 500GB sata HDD: I installed the SW and rebooted multiple time. No issues. I was expecting to see that "hung" on the activity LED for - say - less time than we observed with the 1TB drive but no. Just a quick flash and that's it. The software is perfectly happy with the 500GB drives.
So now I have two options! 😀
500GB HDDs or 250GB SSDs? Costs are similar. The HDD still feels more "original", that is, won't add unknown variables to the equation. Which might not be true as the 1TB HDD was also supposed to do that.
The SSD though seems to work perfectly fine and on a side effect the machine is snappier 😁
But the OS is STILL not telling the SSD what needs to be deleted so how can the SSD know what to delete to make space for the additional data which is being saved?
OS writes to specific logical blocks and at that point controller knows that whatever was mapped to those blocks can now be erased, because it was basically asked to overwrite it.
I finally understand how it works - sorry, I can be slow sometimes! 😁
So yes, I can see that eventually the controller will be able to free up space when the OS asks it to overwrite some data - the SSD will use the extra data and when idle will do garbage collection. Yes, I totally see that with moderate use this is not going to be a problem.
The problem arises when one starts deleting/writing gigs and gigs, then the SSD won't have had time to do garbage collection and it has to do that "real time" which is costly. Nah, this is never going to happen to those players. And again, the "large data" the user might load is 1.5GB from a CDROM drive - 8MB/s max. I think it should be ok 😁
