Beyonwiz T4 - Tuner a died, unit still works but maybe time for an upgrade?

[dabrown]

Hi ex-and current BeyonWiz T4 owners who have moved to an IceBox TV.

I gave 30+ years in IT and Telecommunications and I wanted to know if someone wouldn't mind having a real time message with me either on WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram or iMessage so I can ask questions in real time rather that post a bunch of questions here please? 

Obviously I can build my own box (BYOB) but then it's not fully supoorted.

I've had my T4 since 2016 and I've swap the 4TB WD surveillance drive three times now for content I want to keep.

Sure, the IceTV box is so small I'm never going to fit a 3.5" SATA HDD in there, but maybe I clone the 1TB SSD to a 2TB or 4TB SSD and then copy off the content to a old spinning disk providing this is a possibility please? 

If you want I can DM someone or post my mobile number and get someone who is a previous Beyonwiz owner and they can please let me know what the real world experience of the ICE TV Box is like as the Panasonic Twin Tuner 1TB sux badly.


Anyone who says just read all the FAQ or guides, yeah, that's fine, I can do that, but I just thought if someone has 30-60 minutes to go through my questions I might find the answers quicker please??

Sorry if you think I'm being lazy, it's just easier to ask people who already have made the switch and can answer questions as it looks like IceTV Box doesn't  have a sales line and web chat takes forever.

I'm in Bendigo, Victoria and I have 56 channels on five transponder frequencies with ABC and SBS being weaker than Seven, Win/Nine and Ten.

Feel free to reply or DM if you don't mind please.

I promise not to take too much time but of course I respect people might want to remain anonymous.

I've been using PVRs since the old Topfield TF5000 and then the Beyonwiz P1, P2 and then a T4.

By swapping the drive every few years, using a new WD Purple surveillance drive which is designed for 100% duty cycle (up time) and plenty of ventilation I've kept my T4 going for 9.5 years or whenever the T4 came out.

I would have bought a U4?? But being so small I couldn't put the drive inside.

Keeping the content for myself for the future is something I would like to do please, is that possible please?

An EPG that can read the entire program description thing and being able to clone the M.2 NVMe drive is definitely things I want to do as well please.

I know how to do all that stuff, as I said 30+ years in IT and Telecommunicatiobs plus 11 years working in Film and TV Post Production I have pretty good knowledge but I'm not a broadcast engineer, I dropped out of my Electronics Engineering Degree, I already had an Audio Engineering Advance Diploma and I learned a lot working with broadcast engineers as Film and TV post production was going through the evolution of "punch and crunch" to Non-Linear Editing when AVID owned the market and before Final Cut Pro came along.

I was in Melbourne working in Film and TV post from 1996 to 2008 when I got caught up in the GFC.

There wasn't going to be the variety of roles I could do unless I moved to Sydney.

Post Production now is completely digital from shooting ARRI RAW or Apple ProRes RAW, or Red RAW, right through the editing, compositing, 2D and 3D and then colour grading. But to save money and render time, a lot of the VFX is done at 2K, so we are getting ripped off as they aren't making many true 2160p movies when the VFX is only done at Academy 2K.

I understand all those concepts plus the IT side of things. 

I was the Podt Production Supervisor on the second ever HDTV Co-Production with Canada shooting a kids show on the Sony F900? and yes that was before Sony Digital Betacam SR.

Now everything is shot to a CODEX SAN and productions use iPads to pull up any scene shot, any department, directors and composite in real time, anyone can watch the rushes or dailies depending on your production background, and while ARRI are the most popular cameras either Panavision Lenses, the stuff you can do with Mirrorless DSLR cameras is amazing. There is also what ILM call The Volume which is a bunch of LED screens driven by the Unreal games engine and feeds X,Y and Z data to a sensor strapped to the camera and actors instead of working on a green screen pretending there is a CG character standing next to or front of, the entire state can be animated in real time with the camera having proper depth of field and actors seeing their actual scenery.

These are expensive and I think there are only 3 or 4 of them in use. LA, Toronto, Atlanta and somewhere else.

Of course I've been out of the Film and TV game for a while now, but I try to keep up with the tech but in this instance I really just want to know whether the IceTV Box 4 Tuner is the DVR for me and of course we probably all have Plex servers at home with TBs of content?? 😜🤣👍🏻

Please, if someone wouldn't mind getting in contact and either having a chat via IM or a phone call, I'd really appreciate part it please.

I look forward to a chat please?!?


Thanks in advance.

Best regards

Darren Brown
Bendigo, Victoria
[edited for clarity and spelling mistakes]

[raymondjpg]

Sure, the IceTV box is so small I'm never going to fit a 3.5" SATA HDD in there, but maybe I clone the 1TB SSD to a 2TB or 4TB SSD and then copy off the content to a old spinning disk providing this is a possibility please?

If the IceBox can fit and mount a 4TB SSD then there would be no need to clone the 1TB SSD provided. Just install the IceBox software using the USB method outlined in IcceBox Help.

I saw some issues with mounting a 4TB SSD drive on the LibreELEC forum, but as far as I could tell nothing that couldn't be overcome. It would be useful if anyone with experience running large capacity SSDs in an IceBox could chip in here.

Keeping the content for myself for the future is something I would like to do please, is that possible please?

Both the T4 and IceBox have SMB support so I don't see any problems with copying files from one to the other via an intermediary such as a networked Windows PC. Only the .ts files need to be transferred, with the only hitch I can see being the format of the T4 filenames being somewhat user unfriendly. It is however possible to discern the program and date from the T4 files and there should be no issue with playback on IceBox, although I suspect that subtitles will not be selectable unless files are muxed to a MKV container that can be parsed by LibreELEC. I've never tried it.

An EPG that can read the entire program description thing and being able to clone the M.2 NVMe drive is definitely things I want to do as well please.

From what I can see IceBox provides the same level of program description in its IceTV guide as the T4.

I don't have an IceBox, just a BYO, but I'm pretty sure that IceBox is based on a Geminilake NUC that uses the 2.5" SSD form factor, not M.2.

Of course I've been out of the Film and TV game for a while now, but I try to keep up with the tech but in this instance I really just want to know whether the IceTV Box 4 Tuner is the DVR for me and of course we probably all have Plex servers at home with TBs of content?? 😜🤣👍🏻

I have no experience with Plex or NAS but from what I see on Google LibreELEC should be able to cope with either. Again someone with direct experience would be helpful here.

[IanL-S]

The LibreELEC OS (operating system) supports SATA, SSD and HDD (both 2.5" and 3.5"), either mechanical or SSD, it also supports M.2 and M.SATA drives. I have an IceTV IceBox with a 2.5" SATA SSD, and 2 Intel NUC with M.SATA drives (one 1TB the other 2TB). I do not have any device with an M.2 drive (either SATA or NVMe). I have also IceBox OS on and PC using a 4TB WD RED NAS drive.

PVRs such as Beyonwiz and IceBox place stress on the recoding medium, for that reason optimal solution is to use a drive optimized for media recording (a NAS drive is runner-up). Some mechanical drives do not cope well with PVR duties, particularly those using shingling. Similarly, as we found with the IceTV IceBox non-TLC SSDs do not cope well; the trim function does not seem to overcome the problems.

Ian
 

[raymondjpg]

I have an IceTV IceBox with a 2.5" SATA SSD, and 2 Intel NUC with M.SATA drives (one 1TB the other 2TB).

Is the 2.5" SATA SSD any greater capacity than 1TB? OP is more interested in an IceBox than the BYO option.

Similarly, as we found with the IceTV IceBox non-TLC SSDs do not cope well; the trim function does not seem to overcome the problems.

OP is looking for a 4TB option. The Samsung 870 evo is a TLC SSD, but the question is are there any issues with mounting this size SSD in IceBox? As far as I can tell from looking at one (I have some of these SSDs) they look to be the same dimensions as 1TB so shouldn't present any problems with physically installing them in IceBox.

[dabrown]

The LibreELEC OS (operating system) supports SATA, SSD and HDD (both 2.5" and 3.5"), either mechanical or SSD, it also supports M.2 and M.SATA drives. I have an IceTV IceBox with a 2.5" SATA SSD, and 2 Intel NUC with M.SATA drives (one 1TB the other 2TB). I do not have any device with an M.2 drive (either SATA or NVMe). I have also IceBox OS on and PC using a 4TB WD RED NAS drive.

PVRs such as Beyonwiz and IceBox place stress on the recoding medium, for that reason optimal solution is to use a drive optimized for media recording (a NAS drive is runner-up). Some mechanical drives do not cope well with PVR duties, particularly those using shingling. Similarly, as we found with the IceTV IceBox non-TLC SSDs do not cope well; the trim function does not seem to overcome the problems.

Ian
 

[dabrown]

Thanks for all who replied!  Raymond and IanL you seem to be the gurus in here!?!

Sorry for the spelling mistakes and grammar errors, I wrote the reply on my phone - I'm trying to clean it up.

OK, so you guys are using SATA SSDs not M.2?  Any reason for that - SATA SSD while its still around, its getting really hard to buy good brands.

I know Samsung have cleaned up their range and instead of having 870, 870 Plus, 870 Pro, 880 Pro, 890 Pro, and now the 9xx series, unless the boxes are more than six years old, everything has M.2 slots, very few have SATA connectors, so maybe the NUC you are using is an older model.  Even the Gen 10 NUC I have here has one M.2 slot and one SATA slot and that's from 2020.

I can do a BYO box, I have the gear here, and most of it is ex-lease USFF Desktop PCs, so a bit bigger than a NUC.  I deployed some NUCs at a business and found they all overheated their M.2 drives when we did updates or large data transfers - the Samsung 870s back then were cooking inside a NUC in the high 70s and low 80 degrees.  What I found is that I ended up having to replace two non Samsung drives as they were intermittently failing to write blocks.

Deep analysis of the blocks showed they less of a lilfe span.

This is why the faster the drive, the more likely you want to think about putting a Heat Sync onto the SSD if you are using M.2 drives.  All the decent drives use TLC NAND chips, Samsung tried their QVO?? drive which was a quad layer, these drives lasted half as long and didn't like hot environments.

I was hoping to put M.2 into the actual Ice TV Box, but it sounds like its only got SATA SSD?  They are some old cases compared to what is around now.

The USFF Corporate Desktops like say an HP Elitedesk Mini, they usually have two M.2 - one is for a boot M.2 drive and the other is a smaller for WiFi and Bluetooth if you order them in that spec.

You can really order The Lenovos, HPs and Dells in the USFF with whatever connectors you need, but the Intel NUCs were square boxes, the original ones higher, they had one lower profile one, and somewhere around Intel Gen 12 - which would be around 2022, Intel sold their entire NUC division to ASUS.

Intel support their NUC hardware, but there is a date, where you have to go to the ASUS site to get drivers, but ASUS has kept some of their NUCs in the square shape for low volume work.

The stuff that HP, Lenovo and Dell have in their USFF are more retangle and have more room, and yes. many can be configured with SATA SSD, but the units I've worked on in the past few years, most are Gen 12 and are off their lease and being refurbished and resold.

The configurations inside them often dual monitors, and a single 256GB M.2 boot drive, with people doing Remote Desktop or Citrix, but from my colleagues in Melbourne, they are telling me, that prior to NBN bringing in 500/50 as their minimum FTTP speed for residential, doing M365 remotely from a DATA centre was horribly slow, or massively expensive, depending on the businesses.

People are starting to move back to partial local servers, because if you want symmetrical speeds, you pay through the nose for it.

Bendigo only got a full FTTP rollout in the past two years, and I have business clients who were using NBN, and wondering why downloading was OK, but uploading was horrible, this is more on FTTN, most businesses were lucky if they were within 400 metres of a node and could get 100/40 and then 100/20

NBN was not really designed for businesses, but NBN do have business plans and you could get 250/100 which was a popular speed for one or two clients - it depended on how many staff you had.

You can also get 1000/400 on a business plan, but if you have 50 people in your building, we were bringing in two or three NBN FTTP connections at business rates. or Enterprise Ethernet, which was even more expensive.

So, my colleagues tell me, they were moving back to partial local servers, and partial cloud and using the local servers as a high speed cache, which was constantly writing to the cloud to keep up.

Or one client had no DR, no cloud, and had all local servers meaning if he had a fire, the best he had was a HDD backup of their servers which the IT people would take home at the end of the day, so the most they would lose is a day worth of data.

That was very common in the 2000s

Enterprise Ethernet gives symmetrical speeds, but you pay for it - and look I only do work for a few clients, most have larger IT vendors who have taken over my work, as I couldn't keep up, so apart from one corporate client, I'm back to domestic customers again.

Sorry. I digressed there a bit.

I mentioned to you I currently use the WD Purple Surveillance 4TB HDD in my dying Beyonwiz T4.

They are designed for 100% duty cycle, similar to a top end NAS WD Red Pro drive.

As many would know, WD messed up the market of having a cheap shingled RED NAS drives as an entry level NAS drive.  It caused huge headaches, because the model numbers didn't mention SMR, and someone would replace a HOT spare with a COLD SMR drive, and the next time they needed to rebuild their array, the one SMR drive, would be way slower than the CMR drives, and the NAS would mark it as bad, or worse, it would take a week to rebuild their NAS array.  There are heaps of articles online about this.

After everyone worked out what when wrong, the marketing team, came up with BS about SMR drives being fast enough for a NAS, which they aren't - which was one reason Synology started insisting upon their own certified drives.

I would never touch SMR for recording video even though the record bitrate isn't very high. I've lost data to early SMR drives, and generally speaking the write speed once the cache inside the drive is full, gets very slow.

The WD Purple Surveillance drives are designed to go in Security Camera DVRs, recording maybe 8 or more video feeds, so they are going to handle 1 or 2 HD H.264 streams easily.  Since I've been dealing with HDD since they were 20MB in 1991, I've seen a lot of crud over the years.

What worried me is that the IceTV Box only ships with a 1TB drive, which includes the OS, plus storage for TV shows.

However, as the old Intel NUC are typically square, heat and ventilation was always an issue - more fans more space, your M.2 SSD runs at a lower temp.

I'll never fit a 3.5" full size 4TB WD Purple inside a NUC case.  I knew that, but I also don't want to be copying from a single M.2 SSD to an external drive all the time. as 1TB is pretty small.  It used to take me two years to fill a 4TB drive before I started culling stuff, and I might have got another year if I kept culling old stuff, like News broadcasts etc, stuff which was just taking up space, and I knew I'd never get around to watching it.

I kept lots of Current Affairs or ABC specials on my drives, because iView was mostly 720p - not sure if they are streaming in 1080p or not.  They do have adaptive bandwidth for people with slower connections.

Now that each channel has 3 of their 4 multichannels in 1920x1080i in H.264 assuming the Ice TV Box saves the H.264 streams from their DVB-T2 tuner, they are smaller than the older MPEG2 streams.

There is barely enough bandwidth in our 7MHz broadcast for 4 x HD 1920x1080i streams, which is why one is still 720x576i

I am rebuilding old USFF ex-lease machines for people to run Windows 11 on if they have old PCs, typically I swap out the 256GB SSD and put in a 1TB M.2 SSD - for people who really only surf the web and do email, the 256GB SSD is often enough, but its hard to source stock of smaller than 1TB SSDs for customers, so I have to check the drive and see how much it has been written to, and many of these were used for a SOE / Boot environment only, there was still plenty of life left in them.

I wanted to run M.2 Samsung 880 Pro or 890 Pro, as that is what I have in stock, but I'm finding it hard to get older PCI 3.0 drives the stuff that was around five years ago. Samsung have dumped it, and they mostly only offer 990 or 990 Pro M.2 drives - buying SATA SSD I will end up with brands I might not be 100% happy with.

I was going to clone the 1TB SSD that shipped to a 2TB M.2 but it sounds like the NUC boxes you have don't even have M.2 slots in them?

Since I'm recording to a SSD instead of a spinning HDD, unless the NAS NAND flash is designed for higher duty cycles, that would extend the longevity of any M.2 drives I put in the NUC and copying the video off to a Spinning HDD periodically, like a 4TB WD Surveillance drive, those drives are designed for 100% uptime including reading and writing and is a CMR 7200RPM drive.   Overkill for playing back video.

Also. Surveillance HDDs are still CMR aka PMR NOT *SMR*. 

Even the most basic M.2 SSD is at least 3000MB/sec.  Some of this stuff is QLC, and you WANT TLC NAND Flash Chips.

SATA III SSD is only 600MB/sec maxed out speed.  Of course I want to do M.2 everywhere. Its so much quicker for copying files.

I don't understand why you all went with SATA SSD drives?  How long has this gear been sitting around for please?

Higher performance is usually 5500MB/sec and you can go faster.

I hate SMR with a passion.

I figured I'd put a 4TB SATA HDD into an external case and copy files off the Ice Box TV periodically, using either SMB or USB 3.0 as it would be a bit faster.

I was curious what brand SSD Ice TV Boxes ship with as standard please?

Most regular M.2 SSD are not designed for high duty cycle, but again, recording one or two H.264 streams, that won't stress the drive but if you have the rewind feature set up for two or unlimited hours, you are going to get a lot of repetition to the same NAND blocks, though TRIM should handle some of that, as was pointed out. a NAS based M.2 SSD will last longer if you have 2-4 hours of rewind, plus saving program content off the SSD as well, that will spread the data across the blocks more evenly which is what the SSD controllers are designed to do. That's why defragmentation doesn't matter on SSD, just TRIM.

That was one of my concerns.

And it was addressed earlier. Thank you!

A regular SSD does not like rewriting to the same blocks over and over and eventually these will wear out.

You can map out bad blocks if you know what you are doing but Linux doesn't have the same number of utilities that say Windows does for doing this sort of thing.  I use Ubuntu a bit, but more IT support on Windows 10/11 and Server 2019 or Server 2022, and haven't done any Server 2025 upgrades yet and a little bit on MacOS 

I'm trying to get an idea as when an SSD dies, it usually takes out everything and often isn't recoverable. 

Spinning disks with a minor bad blocks, you might be able to rescue 80-90% of the data before the heads fail completely, spindle motor dies or actuator arm dies.

SSD five or six years ago - even two or three years ago, FLASH NAND wasn't as robust as 2025 SSD FLASH NAND especially TLC chips, which is why some Samsung 990 Plus and Pro have the option of Heat Syncs.

The heat generated inside a NUC, you would be concerned if your SSD, M.2 especially, is running in the 70-79 degrees Celsius range all the time.  Anything above 80, I'd be really worried, and want to run additional cooling on.  I had this exact problem with 2020 model Gen 10 Intel i7 NUC boxes.  i5 was OK, but the M.2 could get hot 80s-90s degrees C, if you copied a lot of data, but the ventilation was designed better as the NUCs evolved, but one company I did work for, they had a bunch of Gen 9 NUCs and it was like one every few weeks was failing due to the SSD or CPU overheating.

If you buy a specific high speed M.2 SSD, you can get special high-density with Heat Syncs SSD which have far more read and write cycles, than domestic ones.  We are talking speeds around 7000MB/sec!  We don't need that, and it would be too expensive and overkill. 

However, you pay through the nose for these, as typically they are made for enterprise NAS and SAN equipment.

One thing to note about M.2 SSD, the larger the drive size, the longer it is likely to last.  Brand does play a part though.  You can still buy with our without heat sync for domestic M.2 SSD, but if you are copying terabytes a day, then you will want extra cooling and heat syncs.

Sorry, I'm rambling - you guys probably know most of this stuff.

I don't have enough corporate clients any more to justify this.

Moving data around from one M.2 SSD to another can mitigate bad blocks developing, TRIM can help a bit, but NAS based SSDs usually have higher density NAND and yes it's all TLC (from what I understand).

I've never built a NAS box from M.2 SSDs because while you should get five years of average computing access, if duty cycles are higher you need ventilation, cooling and high-density FLASH NAND chips.

NAS based SSDs usually if you want super-fast access time to sane data over and over. They won't give you the lifespan of a spinning disk or at least they didn't.  SSD tech is much better now, but you still need to pick and choose. I've got 8 year old Samsung SARA SSD and while the health has dropped on some to 60% or 70% - I'm not into the danger zone but this is why you can think about zoning 10% of the drive as spare space. That way the frequently used blocks can be reassigned and you have that 10% which is almost brand new, and that while increase the longevity of the drive. Samsung recommend this with their Magician software.

I typically have preferred using Samsung and Crucial SSD. More Samsung. All have outlasted their five-year warranties.   

Plus Samsung NAND tend to live longer which, anecdotally, which is why they have a 5-year warranty and I am such a fan, but they also cost more.

However I am not sure whether Samsung make NAS SSD or if they do, I haven't seen them, but Samsung make lots and lots of OEM chips so who knows.

Samsung also make all the components on the M.2 or SATA SSD, which has major benefits.

But anyone looking at SSD, the bigger the SSD drive, the more read/write cycles you will get, the longer it will last.  However you still need to consider how you use the NAND chips.

The tech had gotten much better, and more tolerant of temp, or better designed to dissipate heat.

Again. this isn't relevant to a DVR!!

I'm just trying to get a feel for what people are setting up and knowing it was a NUC case I knew I'd have to put at least one or two NAS based SSDs into the box and ensure it has plenty of ventilation, temps under 80 degrees C, i'm guessing you guys probably aren't checking the SMART info to see if the SSDs are idling at under 50 degrees Celsius.

Thanks to everyone who answered my question.

Where I am going to find SATA SSD, plus they are so slow!

This gives me a good start and has answered some questions.

Thank you all for getting back to me!

Cheers, Darren   

[raymondjpg]

Three comments:

1. IanL-S could confirm, but if Icebox is based on the Geminilake NUC then it *exclusively* uses the 2.5" SATA form factor drive i.e. no mSATA or M.2 option The Geminilake NUC was something of a curiosity because generations before and after all (to my recollection) had the chewing gum stick SSD option right back to the first manufactured. I think I acquired pretty much one of every generation of NUC up to the 14th, and because I was really only interested in their use as a HTPC, rehoused them in fanless cases.

2. My Geminilake NUC was the Pentium Silver model. From what I could tell from earlier chat on this forum Icebox is a Celeron variant. It was difficult to tame the heat output from the Pentium Silver NUC, my recollection was that there were limited options for configuring or disabling turbo options in the bios, and it always ran hotter than any of my other NUCs. It was however among the first of the NUCs I acquired that was capable of rendering HEVC Main 10 and it's still in use as a HTPC at my son's house, a testament to its durability.

The Celeron variant would likely have much less heat output than the Pentium Silver variant, and running LibreELEC would be minimally challenged CPU-wise. I don't think there have been any reports of overheating of Icebox, or come to that of excessive fan noise. Having said that, in my opinion, the inbuilt fan is the major weak point of all NUCs and a right royal PITA if necessary to dismantle for cleaning or replacement. Keep them away from dust!  I have my BYO installed and running in an 8th generation NUC housed in a fanless case, and it barely gets warm to the touch.

3. Your comment that the 2.5" SATA SSD option for Icebox would be somehow inferior to an M.2 option is valid when considering file transfers to and from the device, but not in my opinion for general PVR operations. LibreELEC is a lightweight application that runs perfectly well even on a 2.5" spinner. My installation is on a 2.5" 1TB WD Blue HDD.

A final observation, you expressed a preference for Icebox rather than BYO because of support considerations. In my experience there is sufficient IceTV support for BYO barring hardware, particularly as there is also the forum for users to rely on for answers to issues that may arise. Icebox would likely be the choice for most users who put a premium on convenience, but if you really want to go down the route of equipping Icebox with an M.2 SSD then BYO looks to be your only option.

[IanL-S]

I agree that an M.2 NVMe drive would be overkill. A 2.5" HDD, such as the one I had in my Beyonwiz U4 was able to deal with multiple simultaneous recordings (I did a test once and had about 10 recordings going).

In order to get the price as low as possible, IceTV looked carefully at the minimum hardware needs (this was done more that two and a half years ago). The custom OEM NUC uses older CPU that is more than capable of dealing with the needs of IceBox users. During beta testing we managed more than 10 simultaneous recordings across 4 networks and both RAM and CPU usage came nowhere near the limits. The recording process places limited demands, playback is a little more resource intensive (but you can only playback one recording at a time).

My BYOB have 2015 vintage NUCs performance is similar to my IceTV IceBox.

I understand that IceTV decided on SSD rather than HDD to minimize noise, and chose a NUC that included an internal fan to dissipate heat.

[IanL-S]

Cannot find any information on the chipset used by the IceBox; but it uses a Celeron J4125 CPU [launched in 4th quarter of 2019] and has 8GB of RAM. My BYOB has a Core i5-4250u CPU [launched 3rd quarter of 2013] and 8GB of RAM.

[raymondjpg]

Cannot find any information on the chipset used by the IceBox but it uses a Celeron J4125 CPU

According to Google's (largely excellent IMO) AI bot "the Celeron J4125 is a System on a Chip (SoC)".

[dabrown]

Hi Ian and Raymond -

It might be worth ignoring most of what I wrote as the link I posted suggests the Gemini Lake were Celeron, designed for low-end work, but according to the research I've done indicates the Gemini Lake Hardware is from around 2017.

So I can only assume Ice TV started working on these boxes 7-8 years ago?  I would not think you would be able to get any stock of Gemini Lake hardware now.  Since ASUS took over NUC in 2022 iirc, they maintained some INTEL NUCs, but once you get past Generation 12, it will be all ASUS based hardware.





thinking back to what I wrote - based on my memory, it would be highly unusual to put a spinning 2.5" HDD in a NUC, I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but boot times would be diabolical, as they generally run at 5400RPM and, at that rotational speed, the drive shouldn't get very hot, but if you were recording 10 streams, I think maybe that WD Blue 2.5" drive was more likely an 2.5" SSD because if it was recording that many streams, then it would tend to thrash the heads around a bit, though Linux file system ext3 or ext4 depending on the kernel being used on that version of LibELEC at the time would have been more optimised for SSD storage.  Plus spinning disks, anything since about 2017-2018 in 2.5" form factor, is 5400RPM and a WD Blue would for sure be a SMR drive, though its impossible to tell unless you get the model numbers, and WD published more of the WD Red model numbers so people knew who had a WD Red NAS drive which was SMR, as they caused rebuilds to fail, as rebuilding a RAID array is one of the highest stresses you can put on a spinning disk.

I found that not running a SSD whether that was a 2.5" SATA, mSATA or a M.2 drive, systems were just too slow.

I was typically seeing boot speeds of 15-25 seconds at the most on systems Gen 9 or higher - I would never think of putting a spinning disk in one of these - yes, a mSATA drive or 2.5" SATA drive, sure, they would be a bit slower, but I didn't see anyone running much except M.2 from about 2019 onwards (in terms of new hardware) and if there were older hardware, were it was a Gen 5 or Gen 6, we would clone the drives from Spinning 2.5" SATA drives to a 2.5" SSD drive, and the performance boost was substantial.  That was mostly done for residential/domestic customers.


If you got down to this part, its possibly worth skipping most of this, as its not particularly relevant.

Typically, anyone running a RAID array whether its an old RAID5 or more likely RAID 10, they thrash the disks about while rebuilding, this is how customers discovered that WD was pulling a shifty on them and selling them a WD Red SMR which had a different model to the CMR drives.

This was especially useful for checking for COLD spares that people may have purchased from a vendor that didn't know that WD sold SMR Red RAID drives (there are now three models I think). 

IIRC, it was when people were rebuilding a drive which was marked as "slow" or "bad" for some reason, that caused them to swap out their disk, not everyone can afford the luxury of a HOT spare, plus that makes your array even smaller.

Customers did their own investigations on individual drives, then contacted tech media or journalists themselves who had their own home NAS array discovered this either by owning the drives, when they did testing on the drives, or checked model numbers that were different from other WD Red drives in their arrays, as 4TB was a common and affordable size.


Again - this section confuses things as the Gemini Lake, though it was a Celeron NUC around at the time, I was building fairly high-end workstations - which is overkill for DVR of DVB-T2 video.

Also, I have motherboards from ASUS going back to 2017 - which was probably Kaby Lake, as I mentioned before, the Gemini Lake Chipset and CPUs were essentially lower end Celerons and very slow compared to what I was working with, and just checked, but I am confused about the different names applied to different CPU and Chipset combinations as I was just reading that the Palm Cove and Kaby Lake are in a similar generation.

Now someone mentioned the M.2 SSD drives, I am not 100% certain, but about 90% certain the Kaby Lake CPUs, which is the 6th and 7th Generation Intel Core CPUs.

They both had M.2 slots, though by the time the Gen 7, some ATX boards were being shipped with 2 x M.2 Slots for Storage, but due to the high cost of M.2 SSD drives at the time, it was rare to see more than a 512GB drive, and maybe a 1TB drive if you were very wealthy.

I built four identical ASUS computers in 2017, and we used Samsung Evo 860 512GB M.2 SSD drives in the systems, two machines, were sold off long ago, but my parents have one which they use daily, and I have one which I used to use for spinning up VM systems based on VMWare, but I haven't used mine in at least a year, because the copy speed between the 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA III drive and the M.2 was substantial, moving images around from the 3.5" SATA Drive wasn't that slow, but its nothing like speeds I get copying M.2 to M.2 internally.
"

If you check the speeds of M.2 drives even in 2017, they were either on older boards with PCIe 3.0 slots and the motherboards I used, were higher performance ASUS boards, but I can't get you the model numbers and chipsets just at at the moment.

SATA III maximum speed was around 600MB/sec, while even the early M.2 drives on PCIe 4.0 slots were capable of 3000MB/sec transfer speeds.

If you were getting ten streams and writing them to a SPINNING HDD, splitting the multiplex into individual streams, and you suggested that a 2.5" drive running at 5400RPM was even getting warm, I find a little difficult to believe, but it depends on when you were doing the testing as there was dual signals present from around 2016, where the main channel on the transponder, was being broadcast in H.264 1920x1080p, that uses about 50% less bandwidth than the equivalent of MPEG2 which was never broadcast at 1920x1080, but only around 1440x1080 and that is what is ABC News were broadcasting there HD signal at that resolution at MPEG2, but once everyone moved to H.264. it was full 1920x1080i.

The USA was worse as what the FTA broadcasters considered HD resolution varied from one broadcaster to another, but let's not go there.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/cores/gemini_lake

The Gemini lake NUCs - I never worked on one after I read that link, unless it was referred to as a Celeron and Celeron CPUs around that time were horribly slow, IMHO, but again, it depends on the CPU speed.

I have had about 12-15, I don't recall the exact number go through my tech work area of HP Elitedesk 800 Mini computers that have been refurbished that I worked on myself, but all had minimum of Gen 8 CPUs or higher.

Every board in the USFF which is about four times larger than a NUC, but not as high, ALL had M.2 data drive slots and M.2 WiFi/Bluetooth slots in them.

HOWEVER, a number of the i5 Elitedesks didn't have Wifi or Bluetooth, that shorter M.2 slot just had no card, and no external antenna on the back.  This was quite normal as they were typically deployed in an office with Ethernet - all had GIG-E ethernet on them.  The Elitedesk Gen 8/9 i5 and i7 models tended to have faster internal architecture.

These boxes are serious desktop workhorses. not like the Gemini Lake Celeron.

I think most were at least either i5 or i7 Gen 8 or Gen 9 CPUs

HP configured there systems in a number of different ways, and while nearly all the motherboards were same or similar IIRC between the Gen 8 and Gen 9 CPUs, where I noticed the differences were the Gen 8 i5 tended to be single HDMI or single Displayport, no Wifi and no Bluetooth, and the storage, the *ONLY* drive in the machine was a 2.5" SSD which was mostly the same thickness as the machines I worked on and resold were mostly 256GB 2.5" SATA SSDs, connected via a ribbon cable to the motherboard.

The i7 otoh, they were more likely, but not all, some had dual display port INTEL graphics on them, but the drives were 90% all 256GB M.2 SSD drives as their boot drives.

I swapped more than 50% of the drives out and replaced them with whatever was available, but using a Samsung 970/980/980 Plus or 980 Pro or higher since they were were designed for PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots.

The RAM is rated on the boxes as around 5500MB/sec

Even ten x 1920x1080i streams would not use that amount of data, and you would not hear drive noise, but fans were set up thermally so if the SSD exceeded 70 degrees C, the internal fans would spin up, and HP did not make quiet fans, the Gen 8 were a sealed case iirc, but those were mostly i5 and the Gen 9 and Gen 10 had like a mesh covering on the top for thermal dissipation but when those SSDs started hammering copying from one M.2 to another, the thermal fans would make a very noticeable noise, the NUCs were worse as they were in such a smaller box.

I still have a since Gen 10 i5 NUC here, and if I push it, it will make noise copying to the Thunderbolt 4 Slot or I also had a 2.5" 2TB Samsung 870 SATA SSD as well as an 1TB 880 Pro as the main boot drive.

Sorry for all this writing.

I am writing as I remember doing it, so I need to go back and edit this reply.

It's true, I probably don't need M.2 Drives. but its a matter of what is available these days and I've found certain models of 2.5" SATA SSD harder to get that M.2 simply because people who typically are building systems tend to be building for gaming or some sort of performance and you mostly want to keep away from SATA III SSD as it is such a bottle neck for data copying.

The few Gen 11/12 HP Elitedesk G6 Mini or G7 Mini, are a completely different design, but none of those models have brackets for 2.5" SATA SSD


Again, I gotten confused by the age of the hardware used by the original Ice Box development.  Surely you aren't still using Gemini Lake Celeron CPUs anymore - they would have disappeared from the market years ago, or you had a huge supply?


This is my concern.

1.  I don't want a Celeron based NUC, even if it is more than enough to run a DVR.  I'd rather get a Gen 8/9/10 i5 with at least 8GB DDR4 RAM

2.  I'd rather not use 2.5" SATA SSD drive, I would prefer to use a 2TB M.2 SSD, as the hardware from that era should support all the M.2 storage.

3.  Long term, I can either get a USFF PC with 2 x PCIe 3.0 or 2 x PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and if I really need to, I could format the second drive as storage, eventually moving it to a 4TB External SATA HDD.


Sorry for confusing the issue.

I just couldn't understand why the hardware on the site looks like its from six or seven years ago?

I'd rather build a over powered box which is more like a HTPC than run from a Celeron, but that's just me.

It's likely to have less thermal issues as well - the SSD will never get hot enough writing one stream of pre-recorded video from the EPG as well as Time-Shifting a few hours.

Its the time-shifting I am concerned about wearing out the drive in certain sections, especially if you are saying you haven't had great success with TRIM.

I hope that explains what I'd like to do, but I am happy to start with a Genuine Ice TV Box first, and then build something custom, as I've seen explained in previous posts.


Sorry I got a bit confused about the whole thing, over thinking it.

Thanks again for getting back to me.

Best regards

Darren

[raymondjpg]

This is my concern.

1.  I don't want a Celeron based NUC, even if it is more than enough to run a DVR.  I'd rather get a Gen 8/9/10 i5 with at least 8GB DDR4 RAM

2.  I'd rather not use 2.5" SATA SSD drive, I would prefer to use a 2TB M.2 SSD, as the hardware from that era should support all the M.2 storage.

3.  Long term, I can either get a USFF PC with 2 x PCIe 3.0 or 2 x PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and if I really need to, I could format the second drive as storage, eventually moving it to a 4TB External SATA HDD.

I think you will have difficulty locating anything new in the NUC Gen 8/9/10 i5 range. Even if you did it's likely they would be charging a premium because of their rarity. Maybe a refurbished unit.

All of these will give you an M.2 SSD option and at least 8GB DDR4 RAM, but if you wanted to also fit a secondary disk drive, say a 4TB 2.5" SSD, then you would need a "tall" variant.

I hope that explains what I'd like to do, but I am happy to start with a Genuine Ice TV Box first, and then build something custom, as I've seen explained in previous posts.

I'd suggest that you ask the IceTV people if they know of any problems with fitting and mounting a 4TB SSD.

[dabrown]

Hi Raymond

I was thinking maybe of getting a USFF Dell, HP or Lenovo, as these units are physically bigger, and while they do take up extra space, they should run cooler - the GEN 10 NUC I have here, would be more than adequate, if I were considering that size, but if I go for a HP Elitedesk G5 or G6 which have either Gen 8 or Gen 9 i5 or i7. most come with at least 8GB and some come with 16GB - but it's the room inside, there is plenty of room for a 12mm 2.5" SSD or a 2TB SSD - iirc the 4TB SSD is thicker, but it's still smaller than your typical 2.5" Spinning Disk.  I haven't seen any of the higher performance drives, like the WD Purple Surveillance drives in anything smaller than a 3.5" configuration and I suspect a 1TB WD Blue 2.5" HDD might be a SMR drive - as all the drives I've seen in 2.5" over the past 5+ years, anything smaller than a 5TB 2.5" portable HDD have been SMR drives.

Correct me if I am wrong, the Blue WD as 2.5" HDD is WD absolute entry level drive - which would likely make it a SMR drive, unless you have had it for more than 5 years - I first encountered 2.5" external SMR portable spinning HDD as far back as 2018.

So If you have a 1TB WD Blue SSD in a 2.5" SATA config, I am certain that has enough speed to read and write video, but its limited by its SATA interface.  Even mSATA drives are still limited by their 600MB/sec interface afaik.

I have a Samsung mSATA in a HP Probook G4 from 2017.

I have purchased three different Elitebook G7 and G8 and these come with M.2 SATA, but it depends on which model - some have room for a 2nd full sized 2280 M.2 SSD and some have one which is only half size, and you can buy 1TB and maybe 2TB in that shorter smaller, forgot the length.

I wouldn't use a laptop for a DVR, but it would be handy to look at the screen rather than running a remote ssh shell to it from somewhere else on the network, and a laptop definitely doesn't have the room, not any more, back in 2017-2019, many of the Probooks were thick enough you could buy a 2.5" bracket, but buying the bracket was about $50-80 and then you needed screws, and the only way to get screws is to buy a screw kit which has enough replacement screws for the laptop or whatever you are working on.

I found a few suppliers on AliExpress who sell screw kits but they are not well labeled and if you want a particular M size screw, it can be a bit of trial and error to find the right one.

The larger size of the USFF HP, Lenovo or Dell computers are about the size of four NUCs stuck together, but about 75% of the hight.  Some of the refurbs have brackets and 256GB SSD and some have M.2 SSD slots, but looking at the motherboards of the Elitedesk G4 and G5 which have in front of me right now, one is a 8500 i7 not sure of the CPU speed but it would WAY fast enough, the G4 Elitedesk 800 Mini came with a 256GB 2.5" SATA Drive on a bracket, but the motherboard has room for a 2280 M.2 SSD slot and another smaller slot for Bluetooth and Wifi, which lucky enough this one does.

So I took the old 2.5" 256GB SSD out I had to remove the bracket to get to a few other things, and put in a Samsung 880 Pro M.2 1TB Drive, and had to mark a BIOS setting so that it recognised it had different storage, it away we were going, and installed Windows 11 24H2 and Windows update picked up every single driver available for that G4

With the G5 Elitedesk 800 Mini - that has a Gen 9th i5, but the speed between the units is hard to tell on everyday work - but the Gen 8 i7, its got cooling mesh and a massive fan, and if I push that to download Usenet, then the fan comes on and the SSD will hit high 60s, sometimes low 70s depending on the size of the files I am grabbing.

The cooling fan is very effective, but its a noisy bast*rad when you push it.

The G5 Elitedesk 800 Mini, I put in a 512GB Evo 870 as the M.2 SSD slot is only PCIe 3.0 so it, the three Elitebooks all have 880 Pro or 890 Pro Samsung SSD - yes, I am a bit of a hardcore Samsung fan only because I have about 2 dozen of them going back to 850s and not one has failed, the oldest drive would be the 850 and that is in a GBRIX or Gigabyte NUC Clone but it only has a Celeron CPU, and is so slow it makes you want to tear your hair out, but once it has booted, as long as Windows 10 and 11 have 16GB they perform pretty well, regardless of what you throw at them.

The except is Gen 2, Gen 3, Gen 4 and Gen 5 CPUs - in fact since I started using Gen 8 i5 and i7, trying to use an old Gen 5 with Windows 10 even with SATA SSDs in all of these machines, they are SLOOOOOOOOOOW.

You find lots of ex-lease gear on eBay if you know the quality refurbish vendors, they usually will thoroughly check everything, one company sent me a 256GB SSD, which I wasn't planning on using, but it's WEAR LEVEL was doing 40% and there is no way I would use an SSD with a WEAR LEVEL that low - TBW is a good measure of how much data a SSD has moved in its life, but with video files, they tend to be larger, say 1GB for an hour of HD.

So I check other SMART variables to keep an eye on them, but I've argued with a few refurbishes that I doubt that many corporates would allow their SSD drives to be resold, as I've been involved with upgrades with spinning drives, and we either send them to a shredder who gives us a certificate on every drive they shred, there is a reburbisher that takes old drives for parts for people trying to recover the controller and get their data back. They too give a certificate of DOD wipe on the SSD or HDD.

I have directed a few people with HDD Spindle motors or Controller boards which have failed. and they need the data back, but I've never heard anything back whether they were able to recover the drive.

There are no HDD Clean 10 rooms in AU afaik, or at least there wasn't in the 2000s as I had to recover a 120MB SATA Drive which ended up going to five recovery places in Melbourne before I found someone who said, your actuator arm is probably broken, and if the drive is opened outside a clean 10 room I think he called it, a partial of dust is usually bigger than the space between the read/write heads and the surface as it floats nanometers above the surface.

SSD failure, I've personally had almost 2% success with one Crucial SSD, I managed to read the contents of the drive, but the controller chip as soon as it hit about 40C, it failed.

I passed on to a colleague who does SMD/SMR board level repair with a heat gun and microscope and his assessment was after removing and resoldering he lost all ability to communicate with with the SSD, but I'm not sure of what hardware he was using to read it.


Sorry, got off track again, but I think those USFF Ex-Lease PCs would do the job, just need to do a fair amount of reading and make sure I've got suitable hardware - but I suspect those ICE TV Dual Tuners are rebadged somethings and they are probably good quality.

So that may be my plan from here - I managed to disable Tuner A via software in the Beyonwiz T4, and am now using Tuner B as the Priority and Main Tuner, the biggest issue I am seeing is that the signal strength feeling those T4 is way higher than what the T4 says its getting in terms of dBm.

However, I believe this is a known issue and was always a problem for people.

So I get a few dropouts, but rescanning all the five transponders and getting actual names took me half a day and a change of RG6 Quad quite a few times to get enough single into the Beyonwiz Tuner B - but its recording, with the occasional macroblock dropout - despite me trying to boost the signal, originally, I had to put attenuation on that when I lived in Melbourne - the problem I have here is the hill in the way of the Mt Alexander Transmission tower and the moving trees, that even a Phase Array and a Masthead Antenna can't help me - I'd need 40-50 metres in high to "see" over the hill and everyone around me has an array of different antennas, from basic log periodic right through to Phase Array to get a signal.

I have enough signal, but the Beyonwiz seems like it needs double and most devices don't want that much signal - so I think it was a design flaw and probably has been spoken about for years.

Thanks again Raymond - I appreciate your help and comments, and looks like I might be doing BYO but I've gotta find some components that are suitable to put into a unit before I try build my own Ice Box.

Thanks everyone for your advice.

Cheers, Darren

[IanL-S]

I have seen 2.5" WD Purple advertised, they are a niche product, like the 2.5" WD Red (NAS). The main consideration is the continuous writing to, and reading from, the disk - particularly if you have a live buffer. Standard SATA (either HDD or SSD) throughput is more than enough to record 12+ simultaneous recordings on an IceBox.

For 2.5" WD HDD most now seem to be SMR rather than CMR - almost impossible to find 2.5" CMR disks.

Looks like the cost of SATA SSD and HDD have increased significantly since I last looked. Fortunately I am not in the market at the moment.