Conflicts with AJA and Sonnet Technologies SATA Products?

[Bob Zelin]

If I was there, the only thing I would do would be to open up the side of the MAC, and observe the LED’s on the X4P card. You should (since you are having trouble) – see how the LED’s behave on the card, when a drive is plugged in, and when a drive is not plugged in. If you have an intermittent eSATA cable, or a bad port on the card (but you just changed the card – right ?) – you can tell from watching the status lights right on the X4P card.

And change out that chassis before you start wiping out your computer !

Bob Zelin

[David Telling]

Hi Bob,

I’ve had the side panel of the G5 open since last night (with the see through plastic still inserted).

Here’s a run down of what I see from the lights (this is for the 5 x 500GB Raid 0 media “drive”):

Starting with the G5 and 500P enclosure powered down,

1. Power up the enclosure – grey power light appears at bottom front of enclosure – all 5 green bay lights light, no lights on back of enclosure
2. Power up computer –
On pressing the computers power button, immediately the green and amber lights flash on the Tempo X4P and then a moment later settle on 4 solid green lights and 3 solid amber lights (I know there is an additional amber light, which flashes immediately on start up, but this does not stay lit for some reason – this was the same with the other Tempo card).

As the computer begins its start up process – after approx. 30 seconds, those 3 amber and 4 green lights change to a single green light. Approx. 10 seconds later the amber light next to this green light flashes as the blue light in the bottom bay of the enclosure flashes. The amber light on the X4P stays on and will flash once as each subsequent blue bay light flashes on the enclosure. After each blue bay light flashes, its corresponding blue light on the back of the enclosure stays lit. When all bay lights have flashed once (taking approx. 1 minute total), they all start to flash on and off rapidly, the blue light next to the eSATA cable on the back of the enclosure comes on, and the icon for the raid appears on the desktop. The amber light on the Tempo card goes out, leaving just the single green light.

From that point onwards, the amber light flashes only when there is activity to or from the drives, as do the individual blue bay lights on the enclosure.

During operation, I really see no activity that deviates from this.

However, I do notice that the blue light activity on the front of the enclosure can be somewhat erratic as data goes back and forth, it’s not like they all flash on and off simultaneously all of the time, or in any particular sequence… there’s just a lot of light activity, some that look synchronized, some that doesn’t.

Does this all seem fairly normal?

Sorry if I’m impacting your Sunday, but it really does help having someone to bounce things off. It’s stopping me from bouncing off the walls right now.

Cheers,
David

[Bob Zelin]

The single green light on the Tempo X4P card indicates that is connected to that particular port on the X4P card. If you were to yank out the eSATA cable, that light would go out. And yes, the amber light is drive activity. Everything you described is normal.

When your drive “disappears”, you must see if the green LED on the X4P board goes off. This will indicate that your array has disconnected itself from the X4P card (bad cable, loose connection, etc.). If it’s on, then the cable is ok, but you have another issue.

You have not said if you swapped out the 500P chassis yet.

bob Zelin

[David Telling]

Hi Bob,

I do not believe this is a loose connection/bad cable issue. Every time the system has frozen up, the green light has still been lit on the X4P card.

Before trying the other chassis, I have been looking to exhaust all other possibilities on this existing chassis. As you know, the Tempo card and cable are new. I also exchanged the power cable. Since we last spoke, the system has frozen a number of times and the problem isn’t just limited to being in a Final Cut Project. I opened a movie within Quick Time, had no problem playing it or swiping through the timeline, but when I left it for a while and returned back to it, merely moving the mouse, caused the rainbow wheel to return.

The first time this happened the blue lights were lit in bays 1, 2, 4, and 5 leading me to believe that the problem was following the drive which I had moved from bay 2 to bay 3. However, the next time this happened, only the blue lights in bays 1 and 4 stayed lit, with 2, 3 and 5 missing from the front, but lit in the back, so i’m still not quite sure if this is specific drive related or not.

What do you think based on this information?

I’ve also tried replicating the freezing problem without any enclosures attached and opening/playing/scanning/leaving QT files from my second internal drive. But as yet no problems have occurred.

I’m way behind on work right now and trying to scrape together media files to put on a firewire disk and edit together a draft presentation for a client. But I will be putting these 5 drives into the other enclosure and testing later tonight. I’ll keep you updated.

Thanks again.
David

[Ken Hon]

Aloha David,

I don’t have much to add beyond what Bob’s advice is, only that I had a nasty problem with a new Mac Quad a year ago with a SATA and Kona 3 card. It had the reboot problem and also froze during playback. I was totally focused on the SATA card, which was in fact bad, but by doing so overlooked other problems. Turned out my playback problem was the Kona 3 card. Both of these cards went bad within the first month of having this system. Anyway, the only way I figured this out was to make a smaller subset project that reliably caused the problem and then move this onto both an internal drive and a firewire drive. I then pulled all the cards and all my memory except for 1GB. I then switched the memory in and out and tried to recreate the problem. That wasn’t my problem. Then I began substituting cards 1 at a time and it was only then that I could separate the problems with both cards. I talked to the folks at AJA and they confirmed the problem with me over the phone and sent me a new card right away. Same with the SATA card. But this was a major pain in the rear. Again, I’m not saying this is your issue, but it sounds like you could be having more than one problem like I was.

Aloha,

Ken

[Digihead]

Hi David,

Ken’s suggestion is a good one. You need to systematically (it’s a painfully slow process) isolate every possible factor. Swapping enclosures would be my 1st– it’s a quick test with hot swap trays. If it really looks not to be the enclosure, try moving the files to firewire drives, see what happens then.
I’d also get a small firewire drive and do a fresh install of OSX and FCP from the bottom up. Boot off that drive and see what happens.Start with a brand new Final Cut Pro Session. Import P2 media not associated with your problem job, if all is good then open the problem job–copy the clips in your timeline and paste into new project. If the problem goes away — software is your culprit.

I have to put up a vote for using softraid. It monitors the i/o’s and will warn of i/o errors if one occurs while you are working. The nice thing is if you have an error you can see which drive in a raid exhibited the i/o error. Huge time saver when you are troubleshooting.

Good luck working this out

[Joe Murray]

I have a completely different drive setup than yours, but I have had the exact same symptoms and they have always been because of corrupted media. Once it was a Quicktime file that was exported by a client from iMovie that I was using as a reference clip in a project. Re-exporting that clip in Quicktime was the fix there, but other times I’ve simply had to redigitize or rerender the clip that’s causing the problem.

This has only happened 3-4 times in the last couple of years, but when it does it can send you off in all sorts of directions trying to fix the problem. I’ve even reinstalled EVERYTHING on the computer including the OS, only to have the same problem once I opened up the project.

I can’t tell you for sure that this is your problem, but it sounds very familiar. Hope this is helpful.

Joe Murray