Mac Pro Possessed

[Martin Nelson]

I successfully ran FCP this morning with all the external drives (that is, all media) offline. I played a long sequence, I jumped around, I basically did the sort of things that would cause it to wig out if the media were online. No problem. I then mounted the two most recent, most important, drives —Let’s call them Ted and Quentin— and figured, before launching FCP again, I’d run Disk Utility on them. I noticed something interesting, but possibly not relevant.

When Quentin is mounted, it shows up as it should in the left column of Disc Utility. But also showing up in that left column is the following:

931.5 GB LaCie d2Next-Quadra Media
disk5s2
disk5s3
disk5s4

These disks are all grayed out and if I attempt to mount them, I get a could not be mounted error. These phantom disks are in some way associated with Quentin as they don’t come up if I only mount Ted.

Is this at all relevant? I have no idea. But having opened my Pandora’s box on you generous few, I fear closing it and sealing in hope.

Geez, that was vague and flowery. Maybe I need some sleep.

Martin

2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
That’s how a three-disk raid-set might show up….
You would need to create a new single Partition to get rid of all the junk – an Erase isn’t enough.

[Martin Nelson]

“That’s how a three-disk raid-set might show up….
You would need to create a new single Partition to get rid of all the junk – an Erase isn’t enough.”

Thanks, Paul. You have any reason to think that would be creating any problems?

Martin

2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
In my experience FCP beachballing is always a disk-access problem…

[Steve Gustafson]

Steve here. I’m Martin’s tech support guy. Thanks for all the replies. We both want to get this system fixed and out the door.

I think that removing the Lacie externals and using all-new internal drives might be the way to go. I’ve seen the Lacie power supply failure a bunch of times, but couldn’t find a problem drive when I looked at the system a couple weeks ago.

The reason we used SoftRAID was to slice the 3 disk RAID into six partitions – Avid Media Composer still requires small, non-TB partitions. I couldn’t find a way to split the RAID using Apple’s Disk Utility.

Even though the RAM passed memtest and Apple Hardware Test, I’m tempted to replace it too with a new 12GB kit.

What about the video card? Any chance it’s a video card failure, or a motherboard problem?

[Bj Ahlen]

[Steve Gustafson] “I think that removing the Lacie externals and using all-new internal drives might be the way to go. I’ve seen the Lacie power supply failure a bunch of times, but couldn’t find a problem drive when I looked at the system a couple weeks ago.
“

The error messages indicate a problem with the FW external drives. The setup is begging for trouble.

LaCie has been committing suicide the last few years, they used to be good but seem to have lost their way.

No matter what video format you’re editing, just put an eSATA card in the Mac Pro and get a proper drive box such as what’s advertised in the margins here.

My personal favorite is FirmTek with drives I buy myself. For the moment I favor WD drives from Newegg (after Seagate lost control of their Chinese factory QA last fall), but Hitachi are also good.

See for example https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-5pm/ for a 5-bay enclosure that is rock solid.

It’s about $540 naked (with no drives and no eSATA card). Add a hardware RAID card and five 2TB drives in RAID 5 to get about 7.5 TB net net usable disk space with reasonable (but not absolute!) protection against one drive failure, and good performance.

Your existing media drives are probably fine, it’s just the clunky FW connection that is making trouble.

I don’t think you’ll gain anything by switching to a 12 GB RAM kit, other than if you use After Effects in which case that is just short of a must-do. Go to OWC to get top Apple-spec RAM for a fraction of the “FOB Cupertino” price.

[Philippe Perrot]

I agree with Mr Ahlen, LaCie drives daisy chained (or not) is a real source of unstability because LaCie uses some special drive firmware or drivers.
I’ve recently installed on a 2×2.26 macpro 4 samsung internal drives formatted in Raid 0 with apple raid card, but without card it’s running fine in 2 other mac pro I’ve installed before and formatted with apple disk utility.
You tried to use your external drives plugged with sata, but if they still are in their LaCie enclosure, thats a good reason of non-working.
Why don’t you use as external drives some products Sonnet-like, sata or sas enclosures ? It’s fast and pretty stable….
Good luck

[Martin Nelson]

Thanks B.J. and Philippe,

Tomorrow we’re stuffing my CPU like a Thanksgiving turkey. We’re putting four Hitachi 2TB drives inside and moving the original internal drive to the hidden slot under the optical drive. I know we can’t RAID them internally, but I have a full set of backup drives and once I’ve copied all the LaCies, they’ll be a second set of backups. When the project is over, my producer can buy an enclosure for those drives and RAID them for her next project.

Just for overkill, we’re also upping my RAM to 12GB (from OWC, as are the drives) and installing the ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics card. We’re hitting this from every possible direction; I’ve got to get back up and running.

Martin

2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20

[David Roth weiss]

[Martin Nelson] ” I know we can’t RAID them internally”

Why the heck can’t you Martin?

Are you thinking that Just because your backups are not identical in size that that would keep you from striping the internals as RAID 0?

David Roth Weiss
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[Philippe Perrot]

You can’t raid internaly because of Avid ?
A raid 0 with the four 2tB could reach 400-500MB in read write and accelerate renders, but it’s only a scratch volume without securing datas