VFC: drive health excessive writes to the SATADOM
Potential Symptoms
- Power loss / Power recovery function enabled.
- Controller is showing low drive health.
- Controller is non responsive.
Environment
- Product: Vanguard display
- Component: VFC controller
- Control system: Vanguard Professional software power loss / power recovery setting, travel time or real time data add-in
Cause
- What does the Drive Health Tile in the DMP dashboard point to?
- NTCIP has two event activations defined as "ShortPowerLoss" and "LongPowerLoss" along with a threshold that indicates what is short vs. long. When these activations are configured, the controller must determine, after power is restored, how long power was down. If it was down for less time than the threshold, then it plays the ShortPowerLoss message. If it is down for longer, then it plays the LongPowerLoss. The reasoning behind this is that if you are playing travel times or some other type of real-time data, you likely want to keep playing it if you only lose power for a few minutes, but if you lose power for a few hours, you'd want to play something else because those travel times are likely not correct any more. In order for the VFC to keep track of when it was last online, it needs to keep track of the current time somewhere that is power safe (i.e. on disk, not in memory). To do this, the VFC flushes the database, which causes it's timestamp to be updated. Now when the VFC boots back up, it compares the current time to the last time the database was flushed, and the difference is used to determine which activation to play. NTCIP allows this time threshold to be configured between 0 and 65,535 seconds. In order to calculate this correctly, we needed to be accurate down to the second, which means flushing the database every second. This is what is eating up the drive lifetime.
Resolution
- How to see the Dashboard tiles in the VFC web UI
- The long term solution we took was to change the interval this database flush occurs to 15 seconds. In theory that should make the drive last 10-15 times longer. Since the VFC takes about 2 minutes to boot up, and it can vary from boot to boot, our thinking is that we don't need to be accurate to the second on the power loss/recovery timespan. Firmware version 8.104 has this change to 15 second write intervals.
- Update firmware on the VFC controller (DMP & VIP) & the VCB board inside the sign.
- Another item that would help for some customers going forward is to disable the power recovery activations feature. If using Vanguard software is to choose No when it asks if you want to use short-term power recovery activations. The VFC cannot boot in less than 60 seconds, the customer will be hitting the Long-term activation every time, no matter what.
- Vanguard Software Event Activations
- Alternatively if you arent using Vanguard software and you were doing this through a native NTCIP software, you would set the threshold value to 0.
KB ID: 000027217
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