I wish... Zidoo would cut down disk seek noise

Gradually getting familiar with my Z3000 Pro.

I put a 26TB Seagate Exos enterprise HDD in the drive bay and am thinking of ways to deal with the head seek noise. The disk spinning noise isn't a problem, just a very quiet, low thrumming noise that is easy enough to ignore. The problem is the head seeking noises during playback which are best described as thudding, chugging sounds.

This was always going to be a problem with a big 3.5" magnetic drive. They are noisy. Much more noisy than 2.5" magnetic drives and >16TB silent SSDs are a still a far-off thing.

The easiest thing would be to relocate the Z3000 Pro into some acoustic enclosure to mask the sounds and that's probably what I'll end up doing. Either that, or put the disk in a NAS enclosure and keep it in another room, just connected over gigabit Ethernet to the Zidoo... kind defeating the point of the built-in SATA bay but hey, whatever. This assumes that it can actually communicate with a NAS drive quickly enough over SMB (and the Z3000 Pro seems very slow at network connections, at least to Windows 11 shares... averaging only 30MB/s for "reasons").

But there should be technical ways to reduce the in-machine noise a lot. Playing music files yields very little noise as the drive (or the player or OS) reads ahead and mostly caches the entire track (it's only a few MBs) and then plays it from RAM. Like my 2009 iPod Classic 120GB HDD does. For video this is harder but only because of the size of the files. But with 8GB of RAM on the SoC, there should be some spare memory to read-ahead cache video to reduce the amount of disk seeking activity. Either that or employ some PC hybrid storage technology where a small USB SSD is employed as a read-ahead cache. In theory, an entire blu-ray movie of 40GB could be cached on a SSD in about 4 minutes with the on-board SATA disk reading at a modest 150MB/s. This even allows the magnetic disk to spin down and sleep while the movie is playing (eliminating the spin noise too and improving energy efficiency). It's a well established storage performance management technique.

It could be triggered by, say, lingering on the movie's poster detail page, or even a manual "pre-load" button in the UI. You chose the movie you want to settle down and watch, hit "pre-load" and go and get your drink and snacks while the entire ISO image file is cached on an inexpensive USB 256GB SSD. If you don't use the pre-load button, the video will play as normal from the magnetic drive (with the attendant seeking noise) but that's a choice.

 

NAS is your answer.

There are no spare development resources at Zidoo to come up with their own proprietary file system to reduce head seeking. Not that you'd want that anyway.

For what it's worth, WD drives are quieter in operation than Seagate, but they still make noise that you are likely to notice. Put the HDD in a NAS elsewhere. That's what many of us do and it works well enough.

 

Completely agree - NAS drives are the way to go - I'm particularly sensitive to whiny clicky noises so wouldn't consider having a hard disc in the same room as me when I'm watching a movie even at the volumes I use! And this is using a UHD8000. I even have two panes of projector port glass (angled as per Doby's recs) to kill all projector noise.

But again, as Peter says, Seagates are notorious for noise - I've always used Western Digital.

 

That's a real concern if there's a lack of willingness at Zidoo to develop the products they are manufacturing and selling today at high prices.

I really don't think it's that much work and it doesn't require a proprietary file system or OS level change.

I gave it a try already, doing it manually in the File Manager app. Connected a spare USB3 SATA SSD to the rear USB ports on the Zidoo and used the file manager to copy the ISO of the movie I want to watch to a temporary directory on the SSD and then open the ISO from the File Manager at that location. The SSD is not added to the list of library locations so saving movies there won't mess up the Poster Library database which points to the magnetic drive folder tree. It's just a temp directory on a quiet drive. The File Manager app already even helpfully offers a pop-up message asking "Do you want to play the movie in this ISO with the Blu-ray menu?". This is a minor tweak to the Poster Wall app to a) be able to specify the temp file location and b) add a button in the film poster page template to clear the temp directory of old files and copy the contents of the current movie directory to the temp directory and play from there. I also confirmed that when the movie is playing from the SSD, the HDD goes to sleep after the 10 minute hibernation time-out. There was only one problem... the SATA / USB ports on this thing are unbelievably slow. The best I can get on the left hand USB port (viewed from the back ) is about 67MB/s writing to the SSD. It only manages about 32MB/s on the right hand USB port somehow.

 

top tip: choose quieter drives. Many articles, videos, etc. on choosing the questest drives. I have WD red NAS drives in my UHD8000 and perectly fine. A prior Segate drive I had with HTPC was always clattering away. This is well known, and not something Zidoo needs to adress or support, as inevitably some troll will waste a year of their life with audio DB measurements complaining the device is "noisy."

Enterprise and data-center hard drives, such as the Seagate Exos and Western Digital Ultrastar, produce the most noise. Designed for server rooms, these 7200 RPM drives prioritize heavy workloads and performance over acoustics, generating significant vibration, hums, and aggressive seek clicks.

https://nascompares.com/2023/03/10/comparing-hard-drive-noise-of-wd-seagate-synology-and-more-hdds/

 

My dishwasher can be noisy.

I wish Zidoo would fix that.

 

Need a raspberry pi control board to inteface with the zidoo, and then burn on the custom code to setup custom spinner and water jet profiles to try to match the resonance of the HDD in use.
(*kidding)

 

Sorry, my day job is being the "unreasonable engineering customer". I realise in these days that attention to detail and customer service are an anathema to manufacturers.

While the Exos may not be the quietest drive, it, like all mechanical HDDs (especially big 3.5" units), makes unavoidable seeking noise. As the primary type of drive intended for the drive bay (I doubt they expected us to buy silent 16TB SSDs), some attention to the problem of optimising drive noise IS an expectation the customer would reasonably have.

I bought a Seagate Exos drive over a WD Red NAS drive because I could get a factory recertified 26TB drive for £595 instead of £1,265. And enterprise drives are (as pointed out) rated for much higher reliability, ruggedness and performance so those are all plusses on a 26TB drive. There's only the seek noise as a downside - one that Zidoo should address if they're even going to offer a player with one or two 3.5" mechanical drives in it because even the quieter drives could also benefit from being made silent through software design optimisation. It doesn't even require extra built-in hardware - just the features it comes with and which would work acceptably, assuming no more than "typical" drive subsystem performance for USB 3.1 Gen 2 and SATA 3 for 150MB/s or better transfer rates.

Me: My Zidoo dishwasher can be noisy.
Zidoo: Have you thought about not washing your dishes in our dishwasher, buying a different brand of dishwasher, putting it out in the yard and then connecting it to ours with extended plumbing?

 

The Zidoo is not noisy. The well-known noisy drive you chose is noisy. You need to choose another drive if you want the drive to be quiet. The Zidoo never claims to manage the drive, and there is no simple way to change the behavior of how the mechanical drive works.

So, not going to happen on Zidoo's end as nothing to do with their hardware or software, but user issue.

It's nice you've joined the family, but a noisy drive is not anything Zidoo needs to address. The solution as noted is to get a drive that is not widely and well known to be one of the noisiest on the market.

Good luck!

 

FYI: I have two WD RED NAS drives in my UHD8000 and zero noise issues.

Enterprise drives are not ntended for your living room. I would suggest getting a WD RED drive or simliar for your Zidoo, then use the EXOS as your "backup" drive.

Or, put the EXOS in a UGREEN NAS/DAS box, connect to it over the network, and put the "noisy" drive in another room, or closet.

This would be correct solution for your problem.

There is no "problem" to be fixed or developed for the Zidoo boxes.

 

Just because you don't have a problem with the noise level of your WD Red drives (and I assure you, they are not silent), it doesn't meant my problem with Seagate Exos drives isn't a valid problem that could be addressed with minimal application development effort to broaden the appeal of the player.

You aren't the audience for this post and thread. You're just another customer. I'm hoping the developers or product managers are listening and are interested in an easy continuous improvement upgrade to the Movie Poster app.

While using a quieter drive is undoubtedly an answer (call me when you can buy 26TB SSDs for £600), any mechanical HDD could be optimised to be quieter in this application with a cache SSD. And if I were a Zidoo product developer, I'd view the opportunity to optimise the product with no extra spend on hardware (in the product) as legitimate continuous product improvement for people using gigantic enterprise drives that aren't the most silent.

I find it amusing that you confidently proclaim that the "correct solution" to my problem is to put the Zidoo in a closet.

Meanwhile, I've already said how I've managed to pilot an easy actual technical solution: Caching the BD iso files on a USB SSD. Because the movies are .iso files, once launched in File Manager, all the BD menus take over. The Exos drive makes no seeking noises from this time and after the set 10 minutes, the HDD spins down too. Now the Zidoo is totally silent while playing. It's even quieter than the blu-ray player in the same equipment rack. No disk spin noise.

My solution would work much better if the SATA / USB interface in the Z3000 Pro wasn't so inexplicably slow (it barely manages "internal" file transfer rates of 35MB/s - another thing that needs to be fixed or developed for the Zidoo boxes). Other than that, to make the whole thing work more comfortably from the Poster Wall app, it only requires a modification to the poster pages template to add a button to copy either the currently selected movie object (or a 'copy all' button) to the cache drive directory set in the settings and then play it from there. This isn't even Mentos Coke Rocket Science.

 

Absolutely agree with such planning. My NAS is in another room over the WiFi-network and you'll get a real noiseless system!!