New Mac Pro, fast drives, dropped frames on playback

[John Foley]

Worry NOT! This was a problem first discovered by BareFeats, several months ago. It has since been resolved. Go to http://www.barefeats.com to see the reviews on 750 GB drives inside a macPro.

[David Roth weiss]

[Mike Parfit] “People have been telling me for months on this forum and others to get rid of the firewire stuff and invest in an array of Seagates”

Mike,

Moving to a SATA array is indeed the way to go. The only reason I mentioned a possible problem with your Seagates is that there are very few variables in your system that seem like the probable cause of your troubles. And, given your throughput as measured by the AJA speed test, you really should not be having this issue.

If it were my system, I would try to isolate the problem. Try removing your Kona card and see if that has an impact on throughput. If it does, then you need to do some deeper testing on your PCI configuration and PCI card placement.

DRW

[Shane Ross]

[Mike Parfit] “People have been telling me for months on this forum and others to get rid of the firewire stuff and invest in an array of Seagates, and now this? I thought everyone was using these drives in their Sonnet and CalDigit arrays.”

This phenomena only occurs with 3 Seagate 750GB drives raided….doesn’t happen when you have 2 or 4 or 5. That is why it is odd.

Barefeats.com did tests with 3 drive raids.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Mike Parfit]

Thanks for all the responses.

Went to barefeats, which I’ve always liked. Saw they’d revised their Seagate assessment, but couldn’t find the original comment on the three-drive array.

Here’s a possible clue and question: My Kona system test of the raid array shows high speed transfer, but the chart and text versions show significant downward spikes of much slower data delivery in the frame-by-frame analysis. Is this significant, or does the cache on the drive, which I’ve disabled in the Kona test, take care of those spikes? If it doesn’t, then that could account for the dropped frames. The additional single Seagate 750 that is also on my system does not show such dramatic drops.

Thanks,

Mike

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Roth Weiss] “Try removing your Kona card and see if that has an impact on throughput. If it does, then you need to do some deeper testing on your PCI configuration and PCI card placement.”

This is a good point here. Is the Kona card in the right slot? Did you set up the PCI Express Slot Configuration as specified in the Kona Manual?

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Mark Maness]

Before you go much further… and I know everyone here is probably tired of listening to me on this….

BUT… How is your memory configured? Do you still have the original two 512 bars that Apple installed? How much totaly memory does your system have installed?

I constantly ask all of this because the Mac Pro is so very picky when it comes to the memory requirements. Here’s the Apple doc on this very issue:

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304492

Look at this and see if this doesn’t clear up your problem. Memory issues can lead to all sorts of issues that exhibit the wierdness that you are experiencing.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Mike Parfit]

Thanks, Wayne,

Our memory is OK: It’s 4GB of original Apple memory installed as specified in the article you cite. So that’s probably not it. Certainly makes sense to check, though.

Mike

[Mark Maness]

Good!

Just had to check because so many people miss this one with the new Mac Pros.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Gary Adcock]

[Mike Parfit] “Our memory is OK: It’s 4GB of original Apple memory installed as specified in the article you cite. So that’s probably not it. Certainly makes sense to check, though.”

you would not be the first with bad RAM from apple.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows