Beta version v6.4.62 for Z9X/Z10 Pro/Z1000 Pro/UHD3000 release

I used to use two 8 disc arrays in RAID 5 but then one day the RAID controller on the music drive screwed the lot up and I lost a hundred thousand or so songs. Fortunately I'd been building the library with a friend so was able to rebuild it, but from that day I moved away from proprietary RAID and simply used separate single NAS drives with content mirrored so if one fails I switch to the other and just replace the faulty drive and copy back. I've had to do this a couple of times and it can take days!

I know this is how RAID generally works, and depending on the level you just replace a faulty drive, but if the controller screws up it can be the devil's own job unpicking a partially spanned volume.

I've since moved to Western Digital EX2s (two drives) but have them mirrored too - again, the controller can screw up, but mirrored volumes are easy to replicate.

It's not elegant and it's not efficient but at least it's easily recoverable should a drive pop.

 

What are mirrored volumes? I have about 100 TB of Movies and TV Shows that I would Hate to lose, but having to buy another 100tb just to have a back up is expensive.

 

Basically one for one copies - so for example in a RAID 5 array (probably the most popular), data is split across several discs, any two drives can rebuild one faulty drive, and it will tolerate one faulty drive which can be hot swapped without loss of data - the new volume rebuilds over time but that's transparent to the user. It's a good trade off for storage space vs fault tolerance. But a single disc on its own contains seemingly random gibberish.

There are other RAID levels, all with varying degrees of transparency, redundancy, fault tolerance and storage efficiency but they all rely on a proprietary system to manage themselves which can be (although to be fair usually isn't) a problem.

I've just had too many issues over the years so I now mirror which simply means for any two discs, the same data resides on each disc - no clever striping (splitting of data between numerous discs) - essentially each drive has a full backup on one other drive - as I say, not efficient for storage, but easily managed and very tolerant of hardware failure.

The bottom line, never ever be without some form of backup. Hard discs are consumables. At some point they will fail with 100% certainty so you just have to put something in place to mitigate for that for when it happens.

 

Just throwing out a suggestion for unRAID - it is a paid NAS OS that has a ton of amazing features. The main storage concept is that data is not striped across disks like with traditional RAID, instead it uses a FUSE mount and shares to present all data across the disks as one location. You can have either one or two parity drives, so that if a disk (or 2 with dual parity) fails, you can restore from the parity data onto a new disk. And the best point is that even if multiple disks (more than your parity amount) fail in the array, you would only lose what is on those disks, and not the whole array like with RAID5 or RAID6. You do lose out on the read/write speed of RAID striping across the disks (you are limited to single disk transfer speed), but for media streaming this would never be an issue. You can also frontend the array with high speed cache drives (NVME/SSD) so that writes to a specific share are sent to the cache first and then moved to the array overnight. I have a 175TB array currently with unRAID on a custom built system and it is rock solid.

 

plus 1 for unraid. its easy to swap out to larger size drives within the array as and when they become more affordable, I'm currently running 4x18tb with a 20tb parity.
Just an update on the single disk transfer speed, not exactly accurate as you can asign or exclude different shares to different disks so you can have one drive specifically for the wife or kids rubbish and the other 3 for high bit movies allowing simultaneous transfer speeds.

 

I had pretty much the same experience. Now I use duplicate copies of hard drives via usb. Yes it is slower and cumbersome but it makes it unlikely to lose yrs. worth of music/vids etc.

 

yeah unRAID is nice when you've automated the arrs, torrent and Plex, I've been using it for a year now with 4x14TB drives, but still harddrives will fail...so to hopefully avoid this...

I have for the last couple of days been using Stremio + Torrentio + Real Debrid, which is enough if you only want to stream your media for yourself which works great but I have family and friends that have been using my content through my Plex server for years...

so on top of that I configured Plex Debrid which truly does magic, the media I start to play on Stremio is being synced to the Real Debrid cloud and it then adds it to my Plex server (now a Windows laptop) but without any physical harddrive attached, everything automated.

I'm using Kodinerds with Plex addon to play all the media on the Shield Pro without the need to worry about harddrive failures anymore...

unfortunately Z9X can't make use of the Zidoo player as I need the watch status etc so we'll see after I've been using this for a little while if I sell my Unraid server and Z9X, atm it works nice, but who knows, it was not cheap with those harddrives either so money will be saved too.

 

I wonder if we are going to see a firmware update on these boxes anytime soon, or ever again? Have they been abandoned now for the new ones? This is my first Zidoo so I’m not sure how they handle their older products once new ones come out. It sure would be nice to get at least some small updates with bug fixes and stuff though.

 

Hey Markswift2003....would it be ok if I PM'd you to ask for advise on this topic?

 

Is it possible for Z9X to have a Extended RAM feature?

 

Sure. It’s called the Z9X Pro.

 

Okay. I get it.
Or I just wait for a new Shield...

 

for dune being around for so long, The zidoo has such a better menu. I have had Dune's since the first model. They work very very well, less glitches than zidoo, but the Zidoo menu is a pleasure to use.

 

Nope, but did you find the advanced option to let android manage the memory?
Over here i have a ext USB SSD, and after a factory reset you will see that you have more RAM available?
This solved the whole App low mem warning over here?

And about other brands, personaly i'm waiting for the amlogic S928X models ?
https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/09/12/8k-tv-box-amlogic-s928x-processor/

 

?

 

... on which way ??

 

Not to be that guy, but any news on an updated firmware? I am having problems with crashing back to main screen while in HT or performing scans. Or is there an easy way to rollback to .42 or .60? I see mention that it isn't easy to rollback, unless I am misinterpreting that, and it is as simple as uploading an older firmware (on z10 Pro)? Earlier @thivame mentioned going back to .60. Any link to steps is appreciated. (I am looking now...). I found MarkSwift's "There is a way to allow regressions on the older boxes which involves a factory reset, but not the 1619." post. The crashing is frustrating..... @thivame what is trick to go back to more stable firmware?

UPDATE: I just read about the changes to auto trailers, etc, that may help on crashing, thanks for those suggestions earlier in thread. Hopefully that will help my issue.

 

To downgrade the firmware of your Z10 Pro, you will have to flash the player. The ROM for the Z10 Pro comes with the firmware 6.4.42 included , so no need to update it after that. If you choose to do it, be careful to follow the steps exactly (rename the ROM correctly, put it on an USB key formated in FAT32 and nothing else, release the restore button as soon as you see "UP_ _" on the front screen of your Zidoo, don't touch anything after that).

https://www.zidoo.tv/Support/support_guide/guide_target/e[ld]APLKUfGaDeq7k9e[ld]3ulg==/guide_faq/raXr0bxKWKM=.html

 

For me, this latest firmware has been totally stable with no crashes whatsoever ..... ever since I disabled auto trailer playback. I haven't experimented at all with extending the delay before that auto start, but currently I am only selecting my trailers to start manually... which actually I seem to prefer at this point.... so it would seem some part of any HT4 crashing is somehow tied to automatic playback of local trailers in my instance.

 

I have turned that off, and seems smooth. Placebo, or fixed. I think it is fixed. Thanks again!