Conflicts with AJA and Sonnet Technologies SATA Products?

[Digihead]

I’m thrilled with my Sonnet SATA Port Multiplier drive set-up.

I have been using a Sonnet X4P, 2 Sonnet Fusion 500P’s, with 10 Seagate 7200.10 320GB hard drives striped Raid 0 with SoftRaid 3.5. I have the KonaLH in a dual 2.7 G5 with 3.5GB Ram. It’s performed flawlessly for me with 10Bit Uncompressed 1080i. Never drops frames. The 10 drive Raid never fails to mount (no restart necessary), although you have to be patient, it takes a minute as the system goes through each of the 10 drives one by one before it mounts the Raid Set on your desktop. I too had one of the enclosures with the noisy power supply. Sonnet support was very good about replacing it with a new super quiet 500P enclosure. I just bought a third Fusion500P enclosure I’m so pleased with the performance.

Sorry to hear about your problems. If you are not using all the drives in both cases, try creating raid sets that span the two enclosures. You’ll get higher speed spanning the raid set over two ports of your port multiplier.

Good luck trouble-shooting.
Tony

[David Telling]

Thanks Tony…

Would you mind telling me – when you start or restart your system, do the drive(s) in the Fusion 500P enclosure appear on the desktop at the same time as your internal system drive(s) – or does it take a while longer for the drives in the enclosure to show up on the desktop?

I’ve noticed that with my set up, all the green lights appear when I power up the Fusion 500P (but no blue light activity) – Then after starting up the computer, it takes approx. 45 seconds before the blue light for the drive in the bottom bay flashes briefly followed by the next bay up approx 15 seconds later, then the next 15 seconds later…and so on. This means that when my drives do show up, it’s a lot later than any other drives inside or attached to the system. Having been used to SCSI and Firewire RAIDS that have always appeared on the desktop simultaneously with the internal drives, I thought that the late appearance of my Fusion 500P drives may be cause fo concern? What’s your thought?

Thanks so much.

[Digihead]

Hi David,
If I start up or restart, the drives on the port multiplier mount after the two internal drives–one minute later, in fact.
If I’m close to the Fusion 500P enclosures I can hear the individual disks spinning up one by one, then once all the disks have spun up, the raid icon appears on the desktop. It always behaves this way, it’s been reliable, so I feel it’s normal.

Try reseating your X4p, try a different pci slot, you might need to reload your Final Cut Pro, or even OSX software. If that doesn’t work you might have to wonder about a hard drive(s) in you set-up. If you’re not using Softraid, you might want try it. I prefer it to Disk Utility for creating raid sets. Better control and monitoring of the raid set.

All I can say is — if it’s any consolation — my Sonnet Raid set has been rock solid. (knock on wood)

[Tim Langston]

It must be common, I wait for my 8 drives for about a minute…or sometimes a bit longer.

Tim

Tim Langston
Cryin’ Out Loud Productions
Fort Wayne, IN
http://www.colproductions.com

[Shane Ross]

I have the Kona LH in a Dual 2Ghz G5, and a Tempo 4+4 card. My 2TB SATA RAID is internal (I call it the Popsicle Raid as three drives are held together by popsicle sticks) and they mount fine. When I first installed the card the machine wouldn’t even power up (the Kona card)…but when I reseated it things went fine.

But my situation seems very different from yours. I don’t have the port multiplier card, my RAID is internal…I think Digi is a good example as he has exactly what you have.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Bob Zelin]

David –
I work with SATA all day long, and install Sonnet products on a weekly basis. I would like to discuss your issues with you. As you see from others, Sonnet products are ROCK STABLE and have no conflicts with AJA (or any one elses) products.

If your Sonnet X4P card is in slot 2 or 3, your Kona card must be in slot 4. You cannot have your storage card, and your AJA card in slot 2 and 3. One of these cards must be in the PCI-X slot (slot 4).

All port multiplier chassis – (I don’t care who they come from) use the Silicon Image chip set, and they all work the same. On the back of your Sonnet Fusion 500P, you will see 5 Blue LED lights in a horizontal row. Shut down your computer, and start it back up again, and you will see these blue LED’s cycle up one at a time. It takes about 15 seconds per LED (per drive) for them to cycle up, or mount. Once all the LED’s are lit, your drive array is mounted. It does not mount instantly. This is the nature of the chip set, not the metal box, or your SATA drives. You can see that if your drive array is not mounted, look at these LED’s on the rear of the chassis. If all 5 are not lit, your drives are not mounted on your desktop. The whole process takes between 60-90 seconds. This is perfectly normal.

As you know, there is NO SOFTWARE to install for the Sonnet X4P. The E4P needs the current driver for the Mac Pro, but other than that, it’s plug and play with the MAC products.

Once your drive array is mounted, run AJA Kona System Test. You should get about 178mb/sec write speed, and about 220mb/sec read speed with 5 drives stripped RAID 0 using Apple Disk Utility. If you do not, you have an issue with one or more of your drives.

This “delay” behavior is normal, and happens with EVERY PORT MULTIPLIER CHASSIS from every manufacturer.

NOW, as for your other chassis that seems to disappear – eSATA cables suck – they get loose very easily. To prove this to yourself, open up the side of your MAC while it is running and look at the Sonnet X4P card. You will see tiny little LED’s right on the board. Feel free to yank out your eSATA cable HOT while both the drive and computer are running. The LED’s go out for that port. Now plug it in. You will see that you have to REALLY GET THE eSATA CABLE FULLY SEATED to get those LED’s to light up. As for your “disappearing drives” – either you have a bad eSATA cable, or you don’t have the cable plugged in all the way. If you feel the cable is good, next time it disappears, pop open the side of the MAC, and look at the X4P card – are the LED’s on. Push in on your eSATA cable – I bet the LED’s come on, and the drives mount.

Again, you ALWAYS can look at the back of the chassis, to those blue LED’s to see the status of the drives, to see if all 5 are lit, and your array is mounted.

Let me know if there are any further issues. I do this stuff all day long.

Bob Zelin

[Kevin Wild]

Very interesting. I just recently have been having very similar problems, too. I have the Fusion 500P with 5 500Gig drives and the E4P card.

It worked flawlessly for the past 6-8 months and just suddenly started going off line on us. It happens when copying media and the RAID will disappear from the the desktop and say “device unexpectantly went offline.” It seems to do it consistantly on copying certain files. Bob, does this sound more like a drive failure if it does it each time I try to copy a same file? We called Sonnet and they said to break the RAID and test each drive, but that would mean killing everything on the drives, right? Not sure I’m that desperate yet.

Anyways, for a while the RAID was getting worse and worse. It would appear on the desktop for about 5 seconds and then pop off. I used Disk Warrior and it repaired the directory so now it stays on. However, it still goes off on certain files.

Thoughts?

I will check the cables, so thanks for that tip.

KW

[Bob Zelin]

KEVIN WRITES –
It worked flawlessly for the past 6-8 months and just suddenly started going off line on us. It happens when copying media and the RAID will disappear from the the desktop and say “device unexpectantly went offline.” It seems to do it consistantly on copying certain files. Bob, does this sound more like a drive failure if it does it each time I try to copy a same file? We called Sonnet and they said to break the RAID and test each drive, but that would mean killing everything on the drives, right? Not sure I’m that desperate yet.

Anyways, for a while the RAID was getting worse and worse. It would appear on the desktop for about 5 seconds and then pop off. I used Disk Warrior and it repaired the directory so now it stays on. However, it still goes off on certain files.

REPLY –
Until you said “I used Disk Warrior and now it stays on” – I would have only guessed a flakey eSATA cable. I have never seen a problem like this, but if you have corrupt media, I dont’ know what might be happening. When you kill the stripe, you can test each drive seperately, but I have still NEVER seen a dead SATA drive, but I certainly have seen flakey SATA cables, and cables that unseat themselves from the SATA card (the SATA I cables were MUCH better – they didn’t fall out like Firewire and USB).

I bet you do NOT have a dying SATA drive, and I am sure that you don’t want to lose your media. It would be great if you could identify the corrupt media, and get it off the array, and redig it (but I have no idea of why this would make the volume disappear from the desktop). CERTAINLY it is cheap enough to REPLACE your eSATA cable, to eliminate this potential problem. When your drive disappears on you again, pop the side of your MAC, and look at the LED’s, to see the status of the array. You actually should do this NOW while things are working, so you can see what it is like when a drive is connected, and disconnected. You can do this HOT (as long as you are not writing to the drive) with everything turned on. You will not blow anything up.

Bob Zelin

[David Telling]

Tony and Bob…
Thanks so much for your input. At least that helps clear up my concerns on the restart although I still seem to have no luck with mounting from an initial start up. Last night I tried the set up on a second G5 Dual 2gb Power PC and again the drives don’t appear on start up – however long I wait.
When I first installed the Tempo X4P on my system it was not plug and play. My system did not recognize it and it did not show up in the system profiler. As there was no software or literature in the package and it was past Sonnet Support times on a Friday evening – I downloaded the latest driver from the Sonnet site (version 2.0.4b9) but that didn’t work either. On the Monday tech support told me I should have used version 2.03, which did make it show up.
Yes, the Kona 2 Card is in slot 4 – Tempo X4P in slot 3. I am getting the types of speeds Bob mentions, although I did have to remove a Mark of the Unicorn PCI 424 Audio Card from slot 2 because it drastically cut down on the speed of the SATA system (which is a bit of a pain).
It’s not vital, but what would happen if I put the Tempo X4P in slot 4 and have the Kona 2 and MOTU Audio card share the 2 and 3 slots – would that cause complications with the Kona’s performance, too?
I’ve checked the cables numerous times, but will keep an even closer eye on them, or buy new ones. I actually purchased a new X4p which is coming today (just in case that could be the cause).

Kevin…
Interesting you should make your comments. My most recent problems have included erratic freezing within a specific Final Cut Project. I’d make a move in the timeline or try and open a clip, and up would come the rainbow wheel indefinately!! Final Cut would not force quit, and a hard, button restart would be required. Then it got worse. Every time I tried to save that project from within FCP to the RAID in the Fusion 500P, the system would completely hang!!! -Desperate – basically ending my ability to continue working!!!!
Then, even more confusing… Thinking I might have a corrupted project file, I went to the Autosave files I store on my internal system drives. Even though these files can copy correctly between internal drives (or some externally connected Firewire Drives I tested) – every time I tried to copy one of those Autosave files to the RAID in the Fusion 500P it would again freeze (saying 0kb copied of 1.9Mb copied – and just not progressing). Did change the location of the cable in the X4P card, and this time the file would copy – BUT Final Cut would freeze when I tried to open the file!!! AAGHHH!! Other files seem to copy and play without a problem – mind boggling and gut wrenching! That is where I was up to on Thursday night, pulling my hair out!! Since then I have had some more sleep, feel much better about having you guys to communicate with and will be trying to sort this all out this weekend. Just trying to get a system and I can truly have some confidence in (which was the reason for buying these enclosures in the first place).

Thanks for all your help, guys. Any additional comments welcomed and I will keep you updated.

David

[David Telling]

Sorry, I forgot to thank Tim and Shane, as well