B&R‘s real-time operating system, Automation Runtime, now automatically logs data about storage media’s health to provide machine operators, technicians and service personnel early warnings of impending failure. Storage media can therefore be replaced before a crash causes lost data and costly downtime. B&R is among the first to bring this commercial-grade feature to industrial embedded runtime systems.
“Failure of a storage device can be devastating – affirms B&R product manager Varad Darji -. Even with a backup, a certain amount of recently changed data and settings are always lost foverer. It can even bring down the entire machine, resulting in expensive lost productivity until an engineer replaces the drive and restores the settings”.
The new Storage Health Data function is available with an easy update to B&R’s Automation Studio engineering environment. Without any additional programming, Storage Health Data can be viewed in B&R’s web-based System Diagnostics Manager tool, allowing service personnel to recommend storage media replacement during scheduled downtime proactively.
It is also possible to program HMI functions that notify operators directly on their HMI screen when a drive reaches a defined threshold, such as 80% of its lifespan.