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2 separate RAID systems suddenly slow, buggy??
Two editors, one cutting on a G5 Quadcore tower, one cutting on a Macbook Pro.
Two sets of 2x4TB G-Raid drives RAIDed into 8TB each, one set for each editor, connected via FW800.We’ve been editing for a month with occasional crashes, to be expected. FCP on the tower was also experiencing jittery playback issues after the project being open for a few hours. It would start to happen and I would just quit FCP and restart and it would clear it up. A minor annoyance and I just worked through it. In other words, we’ve both been editing relatively smoothly for a month.
Two days ago, after FCP started having jittery playback problems after the project being open for a few hours, I decided to try and solve that problem for good so I swapped out the tower with a different tower from another editing bay.
As soon as I introduced the new tower into the mix, I started having varying problems accessing the external FW drives:
– Couldn’t access either drive system with either the new tower, old tower, or the MB Pro. Finder saw them and their root folders but when I tried to click on any of the root folders to access the contents, the little “working” wheel in the lower right-hand corner of the finder window would just spin. Sometimes, if I let it spin for a few minutes, it would show me the contents.
– Copying anything from the drives took an extraordinarily long time (like 5 minutes for a 1mb file)
– FCP would take an extraordinarily LONG time to open
– If I could get FCP to open and connect with all the media on either RAID, it would hang when I tried to play anything back and I would get the SBOD. Sometimes it would resolve itself after a few minutes but then I would just get the SBOD again upon playback.
– Now, the MBpro isn’t mounting one of the RAID systems.
Things I have tried to do to resolve the situation:
– Repair disks (the system disks on the computers and the RAIDs)… no problems/ repairs reported
– Repair permissions on system drives…some java permissions repaired
– Antivirus scan…nothing detectedAll signs point to the drives but the chronology of it is perplexing. Is it possible that BOTH sets of RAIDS started having problems simultaneously by pure coincidence? Is it possible that the introduction of the new tower into the mix somehow caused problems for both sets of RAIDs and now they are damaged? Even going back to the original setup isn’t working. Something has happened.
Please help! Thank you! I will reply immediately to provide more info/ feedback/ etc if needed.
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2 Replies
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Maybe the projects are getting too big – try making a new project and just copying the working sequence into it and see if that helps (having one very big project with loads of saved sequences in it can slow things down).
Chronology does seem to put the new tower into suspicion, but correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. Have you copied anything between systems/drives in the process of switching towers?
This might be a bit of a long shot, but one time I had a drive suddenly go slow and cause crashes it turned out to be because of a corrupted media file. Found that by unlinking the media and relinking a section at a time, so it worked and worked again then suddenly ground to a halt when the next bunch of files to be reconnected included the corrupted one. You could also try deleting render files (if it is corrupted files, and I’m not saying it is, just that it might possibly be that, it’s as likely to be render files as source media).
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We’ve got a setup at work that’s a bit different, but perhaps it would be good to share.
I sit at a tower with 2x G-Speed RAID-5. There’s another tower with a G-Speed RAID-5 and the internal MacPro RAID-5. The media lives on these two towers, and they connect to each other. There are also 3x editors that tie in using MBPs, but they edit a few hours a week. Maybe 50 between all three of them.
As for accessing the drives, the computers are all connected over a gigabit network. Make sure you’re using CAT6 cables. From there it’s going into your Sharing settings on the “server” tower and turning on File Sharing, then adding the folders (drives) that you want to share. After that go to the Network settings and see what the computer’s IP address is. Write it down. Go to the “Clent” computer, select the Finder application, hit butterfly-K and type in afp://IP-ADDRESS-HERE. Put in the username/password for the computer, and you can mount the network volumes. Gigabit is about 12x faster than Firewire 800. If you’re on a hard wire network give it a try. You can mount volumes over a wireless network this way, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to edit over wifi.
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