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X-serve raid settings help
I’m having problems with my X-serve raid capturing uncompressed HD. When I try to capture Media 100HD gives me an error message and asks me to capture to a faster drive. Can anyone offer some advice on my settings that might enable me to capture uncompressed HD? For my test I tried capturing from the standard def SDI input and tried to capture as both 8 bit and 10 bit uncompressed HD. It would appear the raid is fast enough to playback uncompressed HD. I converted some DVC Pro HD samples to uncompressed 10 bit and they playback just fine.
I have an X-serve raid with 14, 500 GB drives. The drives are set up as a 2 raid 5s on each channel in Raid Admin and then both channels are striped together as raid level 0 is disk utility giving me one 5.5TB volume. I used the default settings for everything.
In Raid Admin under the Performance tabs the default setting gave me the following settings:
Use controller write cache (on)
Allow host cache flushing (on)
Use drive write cache (on)
Use steady stream more (off)
Read Prefetch is set to (8 stripes 512 kb/disk)Under the fibre channel tab, speed and topology are both set to automatic. The “enable hard loop” box is not checked.
My first thought is to disable Controller write cache, cache flushing, and drive write cache. Any words of advice from those of you successfully using an X-raid?
Thanks
Wayne
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6 Replies
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It is something about the XServe RAID settings with Firmware 1.5. When I tried to install 1.5 on our RAID I ran into the same performance problem, and since I had no time to troubleshoot and no reason to upgrade I downgraded to 1.32 (or whatever the last version before 1.5 was) and everything is fine. I think I read somewhere (probably here) about a possible solution for this problem. Try searching the archives, maybe somethings shows up. Btw., which FC controller do you use?
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Thnaks Flo
I searched the archives but didn’t find anything that pertains to my situation.
I’m using the Apple fibre channel controller. I’m using Raid Admin 1.5 and have firmware 1.5 installed. I just downloaded firmware 1.3.3 and I’ll give that a try.
Thanks
Wayne
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Floh;
Downgrading the Raid firmware to 1.3.2 worked. But while I was downgrading I found this article at Apple’s site:
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302780
So I upgraded the firmware back to 1.5 and turned off
“Allow Host Cache Flushing” and everything appears to work as it should now, at least for my 6 minute capture test.I don’t have an immediate need for HD but it’s nice to know it works now.
Thanks
Wayne
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Yes, I think that was the setting; as I said, I did not try it but it is said to fix the performance problems.
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Wayne,
Did you try benchmarking the drives in each configuration?
Was one “fix” was better than the other?
fhgwgads
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I don’t have any benchmarking applications installed on my G-5. Do you know of a good one I could download and try?
The extent of my testing was capturing a couple of uncompressed HD 10 bit clips including one that was 6 minutes long. When I was having problems I couldn’t capture for more than 10 or 20 seconds without an error.
When I downgraded to firmware 1.3.2 I was still using Raid Admin 1.5. Thus when I launched raid admin, it gave me a warning that some features of the software did not match the current firmware installed on the raid. The option to allow host cache flushing was disabled and grayed out under firmware 1.3.2 and that’s why I believe that combo worked. When I upgraded the firmware back to 1.5 I turned off allow host cache flushing (it was on by default and that was the problem) and everything worked again.
While I was downgrading to 1.3.2 I found this article at Apple’s site which recommended turning off host cache flushing.
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302780Of course now that I can capture uncompressed HD Media 100 will let me start capturing compressed HD with version 11 right? O well. I’m just glad the raid is working as it should.
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