MAC PRO KONA 3 External SATA

[Walter Biscardi]

[marcus] “My question is why and how do I fix this.
Could I ever use these drives from PROMAX on the MACPRO and perform the above task?”

Have you called ProMax? They’re generally very responsive to tech support calls and have been building FCP systems pretty much since the day it was released.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
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“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Bob Zelin]

Marcus –
this is the answer to all of your questions. You own a ProMax SATA array with 8 SATA drives. This is in a KANO Technologies enclosure – this is a very nice product, but I am not exactly sure which KANO enclosure you have. Kano makes a 4 bay and 5 bay PORT MULTIPLIER enclosure for your existing SATA drives, that will allow you to use the correct SATA host card in your MAC Pro. The correct SATA Host card for the MAC Pro is the
Cal-Digit FASTA-4e, which ProMax can sell you. You will put your drives into these enclosures, plug them into the Cal-Digit FASTA-4e, and re-raid your 8 drives (yes, you will lose your media) – using Apple Disk Utility, but when you do the RAID, you will click on OPTIONS, and change the Block Size from the default of 32k to 256K. You let the Apple Disk Utility create the RAID 0, and now you can do uncompressed HD. The Cal-Digit FASTA-4e will cost you about $299. I don’t know how much ProMax charges for their port multipler chassis, but they are probably under $499 each (you will need 2, because you have 8 drives). This will ABSOLUTELY work for uncompressed HD.

NOW, as for your tests with the Apple XServe RAID, that failed after 2 minutes. You MUST upgrade the firmware for the XServe RAID to V1.5, and after you do this, you run the Apple RAID ADMIN, and in the “settings” menu, change the settings preferences so that CACHE FLUSHING is turned off. If you do not do this, you will not be able to record uncompressed HD on the XServe RAID (I am assuming that this is a 14 drive Apple XServe RAID in a RAID 50 configuration – if you have 4-7 drives, you aint’ gonna to uncompressed HD on an XServe RAID).

The most important question here is “how come you have to know all of this stuff to make it work”. This is what SYSTEMS INTEGRATION is all about, and why it’s good to have a good dealer that you work with . If you bought from ProMax, they are a GREAT DEALER, and they would have helped you with this, if you had the brains to simply ask them.

Bob Zelin

[Marcus Ionis]

Thank You for Your Reply.
I do appreciate the detail in your response but don

[Marcus Ionis]

I’ve called two business days ago and haven’t received a call back.
Thank You

[Debbi Mita]

[marcus] “Just want to confirm if you have been able to capture 10bit Uncompress without a hitch, if not please explain.”

with CalDigit’s S2VR HD 5-bay SATA RAID, capture, playback, no problem.

[Marcus Ionis]

Thank You for the update
It’s great to receive a professional response and follow up from a fellow peer.

Best Wishes & Happy Holidays

Marcus