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Help! Raid issues with Final Cut Pro 6…
Well against my better judgement, I decided to try out my first software raid with SATA drives on my latest feature. The files are DVCPRO HD 1080p24 files and the media takes up 3.1 terabytes. So I already have a Sonnet tempo e4i card and I bought a four drive SATA enclosure with built in fan and monitoring LED’s that’s made to be internal and then ran my power cables and SATA cables through an empty PCIe slot cover in the back of my computer to the enclosure which sits on top (g5 2.3 dual core tower). I did a search for the best rated SATA terabyte drives and based on barefeats, went with the WD line because they’re slightly cheaper than the seagates but still fast. Then I initialized all of them for a mac and went through the disk utility program and setup a raid0 with all four terabyte drives in one array and set the block size to 256k which is what I read was the best thing to do for video files. I checked the drive temperature by hand and the drives are almost cool to the touch even after a full 10 hour day of editing, there’s a big fan right next to them built in the enclosure that moves serious air so that’s not the issue.
SO, copying the data over was fine and editing was fine until now. It freezes up about once per day or every couple of days and FCP won’t force quit properly so I have to power down my machine manually which I’m sure isn’t the best thing in the world. Also the only way for me to get it back working properly is to swap the order of my SATA cables into the drives which seems bizarre to me. So, is there a solution here? Should I just go back to having four seperate SATA drives and say screw this software raid thing? Thanks in advance…
FCP 6
G5 dual core 2.3
osx 10.4.1
2.5 gigs of ram4, 1 terabyte WD drives in a 4 drive SATA “backplane” with built in fan and monitoring LED’s…
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7 Replies
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Bryan,
1. Be certain to look in Energy Saver in System Preferences and make certain that all power saving features and all drive sleep features are disabled. Find anything???
2. Just for the record, not all SATA hard drives work well with all SATA host controller cards. It is possible that by winging this setup you have in fact procurred a bad combination. Its always a good idea to check with the manufacturer of the controller card to see what drives they recommend. Plus, its possible that you may have to set the drives manually to run as SATA I rather than SATA II, have you checked with Western Digital?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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I’ve had very good luck running Hitachi drives in Firmtek enclosures as RAID 0 arrays. Never so much as a hiccup in over two years.
The Hitachi drives have been very reliable over the years and offer twice the warranty of most other drives manufacturers.
I’ll be building another small RAID in a week or two for a smaller system at home and that’s the route I plan on taking again.
FWIW
Tom -
Tom,
Yep, I have the same setup, and it was the folks at Firmtek who recommended the Hitachi drives, specifically because Seagates weren’t doing as well with their controller in their tests. I’ve learned that if you use exactly what the manufacturer used in their testing you can’t go wrong.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Damn, well I think I’m stuck with these drives – I didn’t go Hitachi because they performed so sluggishly in all the speed tests on barefeats and they were almost talking negatively about them, and they cost more.
With a software raid, is it more processor intensive or memory intensive? Maybe scrolling around 4 tb of data in a software raid requires more ram than 2.5 gigs?
Also on a side note, I had to remove that big clear plastic piece with the bubble thing on it that goes behind the metal side of the case because of clearance issues with the SATA cables coming off the sonnet card and I didn’t want to buy 4 more cables with angled connectors. That piece isn’t essential for cooling the computer is it? I could see how it would funnel air more effectively from the fans but it didn’t seem essential…
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What about the Energy Saver thing and what about setting the drives to SATA I??? Did you look into those?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Oh I’m sorry I didn’t mention that – yes they are definitely at SATA II and energy saver stuff is off.
I just received a reply from Sonnet (took them only a couple hours to respond, wow). Turns out I needed to update the firmware on the Sonnet card but they said the WD terabyte drives should have no issue…
Awesome, 4tb Raid0 in a compact case with led indicator lights and independent fan for cooling all for $1200. That’s pretty amazing…
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Actually I think that the plastic duct that you removed is important to the proper cooling of your machine…but if it’s running OK, I could be wrong???
Tom
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