PCI-E config on Intel Mac

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Glennser,

It is important to ensure that both the drivers and the firmware of the ATTO cards are up to date. If you don’t have the latest firmware for the ATTO cards, they may not perform correctly even though you may have installed the latest ATTO drivers.

Please get both of these up to date and then see if both cards coexist happily. Also ensure you are running the DeckLink 6.1 drivers.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Simon Blackledge]

You can run a extremeHD card in a 1x slot and it will capture upto 720P 60 in 8bit. As we found out :-/

Using the number 2 config in the expansion slot utility should suffice. Both cards require x4.

It should work. If you remove one card and the other is happy in it’s given slot its a card conflict so would suggest as above. Get the latest drivers and firmware.

[Ruslan Akmanov]

Hi Glennser,

I had same trouble with ATTO FC-44ES and BMD Mutibridge/AJA Kona 3. Problem is ATTO FC board. I use lates firmware and drivers for this board. But cann’t got some stable situation. I can reccomend You to do so: install ATTO FC board in slot 4 and BMD or AJA board in slot 3. Then use Slot Utility mode 2 – 16x-1x-4x-4x. Restart. After that ATTO board don’t see in MacPro. Shoot down all system (MacPro, RAIDs and etc) and disconnect power cables from them for 15-30 minutes. After that turn on all things and check System Profile/PCI Cards. You most see both boatds in slots 3 and 4. Work. But if You will reboot and extremelly shut down system You may lost Your ATTO board. Turn off all things and disconnect power cables for 15-30 minutes again.

I changed our ATTO FC-44ES board to Apple 4Gb 4 Port board for this reasons . . .

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

Thanks Guys,
I did flash the firmware on the card and install all the latest drivers when I was trying to get it to work before NAB, I know new ones were coming out pretty quickly then which led me to believe it was an Apple-ATTO problem, I’ll check again as soon as I get back in the office.

ruslan_3d, has everything been OK since you switched to the Apple fibre card? Damn those things aren’t cheap, if there is a known problem with the ATTO cards I wish I’d heard about it before buying it.

Luke do you think the ATTO really is the problem? Is it another case of Apple screwing over 3rd party developers and just a matter of time before ATTO get up to speed? As it is I’m pretty annoyed that they didn’t even put one legacy PCI slot on the mainboard so we wouldn’t have to purchase all new boards when upgrading the machine, it adds up as we have 5 stations to do, new fibre and decklink cards for each…. typical Apple mentality

It’s definitely some PCI-e conflict as it would sometimes work for a couple of hours but the machine would eventually lock up and lose one of the cards when it came back up, unfortunately the only way I could get it to show up was reseat the card but it looks like a complete shutdown might work too, thank goodness that bloody card as been in and out like a yo-yo trying to get this to work, the whole thing is in rack too which doesn’t make it any easier (sorry I know you don’t want to hear my whinging and crying…).

Thanks again,
Glennser

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Glennser,

Have you been through the ATTO troubleshooting steps for Fibre Channel cards?

I don’t think Apple are doing anything funny here and have even seen differences in behaviour between different models of Apple FC cards. For example, we use a 2 Gb/s Apple FC card in a Mac Pro and it connects with no problems to a disk array. However if we replace it with a 4 Gb/s Apple FC card and start up the Mac Pro, a message appears asking if we want to initialize the disk array. For some reason we can’t get the disk array to mount with the 4 Gb/s card even though it works fine with the 2 Gb/s card. Both are Apple branded FC cards. I’m going to test this further before bringing it up with Apple as I’m using a third party disk array and it’s possible that other disk arrays from Apple or third parties might work fine with the 4 Gb/s card.

The point of telling you this is that I don’t think there is any conspiracy and it’s worth following ATTO’s troubleshooting steps and also contacting them to see if they know a solution to your problem. These forums can be very helpful but if you’re specifically having a problem with an ATTO card, I’d recommend you contact them before replacing the card with something else.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Ruslan Akmanov]

Hi Luke and Glennser,

About ATTOO FC Card. In my case it was exactly ATTO/MacPro problem. This cadr work fine with Quard G5. May be it very old – about 2 years and have some hardware problems inside. I spend a lot of time with ATTO and Ciprico support to understand what happens with it. At last only we can find – we need send ATTO FC-44ES to RMA in ATTO headquard. Again, but it work fine with G5 🙂

About Apple FC 4GB 4Port board. I hade some troubles with this board too. But it work better than ATTO board in my case. But I got stable work with My Apple FC Board (it is LSI FC board) and our Ciprico MediaVault units. I Download Apple Fibre Cahnnel Utility 2.1.4 and force put all 4 ports from Automatic mode to 4GB mode. Luke< can You try on Your systems this stuff too? It can help You . . .

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Glennser,

It turns out that on our booth at NAB, we were mostly using the ATTO Celerity FC-42ES (4 Gb/s dual-channel PCI Express). They were all working fine with our hardware on both Mac Pro and PC’s. In all cases, the Blackmagic card was in the top slot (slot 4) and the ATTO Celerity FC-42ES was in the next slot down, ie slot 3. The PCI Express profile was set to the second option, ie x16 Lane Graphics Slot + Two x4 Lane and One x1 Lane Slots.

If you have followed the ATTO troubleshooting steps for Fibre Channel cards and are still having problems, then I recommend you contact ATTO Technology Support to see if they can help you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Thanks for the tip with the 4 Gb/s Apple FC card. We’ll try that.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design