Gspeed ES Pro RAID keeps disappearing from Mac, have to re-initialize!

[Walter Soyka]

I recommend you take this query over to the Arrays & RAID Set-up forum [link] — there are some ridiculously smart storage experts there.

Is the ATTO card really not reporting any errors? My first inclination would be inclined to swap out either the RAID controller or the enclosure to see if it solves the problem, but I’d be curious to see what someone like Bob or Alex would say in the RAID forum.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jesse Schluntz]

Will do. Thanks!

[Jesse Schluntz]

OKAY, HERE IS AN UPDATED VERSION OF MY ISSUE:

MAC PRO KEEPS LOSING CONNECTION TO RAID DRIVE.

After 9 months of organizing a documentary film edit on an external RAID drive (12TB, Raid 0. Yes, I have 2 layers of backup), I purchased the PNY Nvidia Quadro 4000 video card for the primary edit. Soon after, I began having boot up issues. The screen would freeze at various points during the startup process, requiring manual power-downs.

Over the past two months, my computer has lost communication with the RAID 3 times, forcing me to rebuild it from my backup drives (10TB). One tech at Diskwarrior said my computer lost the partition, and that the 1s and 0s had been largely replaced with gibberish.

The Raid becomes unrecognized by my computer in one of two ways:

1- After two days of copying data back over to the raid (rebuilding it), I get an error code -36, saying a file cannot be read or written, then the Raid partition disappears from disk utility and the next time I start up the computer says it doesn’t recognize my drive. The ATTO configuration tool (the card that attaches my raid to the computer) sees the drive, but my computer does not. I have to re-initialize it and start over again.

2- The Raid will go from being recognized to not being recognized when I reboot one day. Again, I have to re-initialize and rebuild.

I removed the PNY Graphics card and put in the stock ATI Radeon HD 5770 it came with. On day 2 of rebuilding the RAID, I got the error -36 and the Raid disappeared from disk utility again. When I opened the raid folder, which seconds before had 10 TB of data on it, it read as zero items. So the PNY Nvidia card was NOT the problem.

Apple has worked on the computer 3 times, running extensive hardware tests, but the same problem persists. At one point they said my blackmagic card was the problem, and more recently they said I probably have bad ram. I tried separate ram (the old 6GB my computer came with), and my computer seemed to begin booting up okay, but one day later I had the -36 error, the RAID couldn’t be recognized again and I lost the data during another rebuild. Apple even replaced the Ram Tray, but the same problem persists.

G technology says my RAID’s hardware is fine, and ATTO, who makes the Raid card, says it looks fine to them too. This does not mean they are 100% not the problem though.

Yesterday as I was attempting to rebuild the RAID again, I saw the -36 error come up, and files stopped copying. I immediately made a screenshot and noted the time.

Today I spoke with a really cool tech at Apple named Ron who helped me investigate the Kernel log, and this is what it said (the RAID is called FadingWest):

Dec 6 17:05:36 Jesses-Mac-Pro kernel[0]: hfs_swap_BTNode: invalid forward link (0xbb739311 >= 0x0000df00)
Dec 6 17:05:36 Jesses-Mac-Pro kernel[0]: hfs: node=2717 fileID=4 volume=FadingWest device=/dev/disk3s2
Dec 6 17:05:36 Jesses-Mac-Pro kernel[0]: hfs: Runtime corruption detected on FadingWest, fsck will be forced on next mount.

Ron believes my problem is with the RAID card. He thinks it’s dropping the connection. So I’ve got an RMA going with ATTO for a new one.

Here are the final things I can troubleshoot at this point:

• New RAID card (ATTO)
• New RAID drive (G-Technology)
• Motherboard / PCI lanes (Apple).
• NEW COMPUTER (Apple)

Any ideas are appreciated. Here are the items in question:

• Mac Pro mid 2010 2×2.66 Ghz 6 core Intel Xeon OS X Lion 10.7.5
• G speed ES Pro (G Technology) – 12TB @ RAID 0
• ATTO R680 RAID card

[Joseph Fisher]

Hey Jesse,

Small world after all. I recently began working as an assistant editor on this MOW where we’re shooting at least 1TB/day of footage which I then transcode to ProRes LT. My problem arose with my 16TB EsPro connected via (sas) once I had roughly near 10TB of footy stored away. Unfortunately in my case, I didn’t get the chance to screen capture the error message however, like you.. I too can see the RAID and have done checks through the atto controller app and all systems read fine. My mac pro will not read the drive and I’ve got the same error message about initializing the drive. I’m curious, did the new ATTO card help you?

Cheers..
Joe

[Jesse Schluntz]

Prepare yourself my friend….

The good news is I’m the ultimate guinea pig for this issue, as in I tried absolutely everything. Replaced the raid, the cable, the card, the ram, and Apple even gave me a new computer! Unfortunately everyone (Apple / Atto / G tech) passed the buck and nobody ultimately claimed responsibility. I was warned this would happen, and sadly it did.

The bad news is your data is not accessible.

The hard fact is that G tech’s Gspeed eS Pro’s 12 TB model, when configured at Raid 0, cannot handle being filled up to within 3.2 TB of being full. It freaks out and takes an unfixable dump.

I’m not sure if this issue occurs when using a more traditional configuration, and due to my experience with this issue, I’m not confident that G tech could give me a definite answer on that.

I’m thankful to Apple and G Tech for their help with swap-out hardware to help me figure out my issue, but the lack of answers and blaming each other was very troubling. Hopefully my future business with them goes better!

jesse