RAID ejecting itself while using Premiere CS6

[Kris Merkel]

Yes, it is a bad raid controller and has nothing to do with your NLE. Also you should never let your production drives get more than 80% full. And oh yeah make sure you back everything up ASAP

“Think of everything in terms of building capacity.”

Kris Merkel
twitter: @kris_merkel
Product Manager, Flanders Scientific Inc.
http://www.shopfsi.com
Co-Founder, Atlanta Cutters Post Production User Group
http://www.atlantacutters.com

2.2Ghz MBP core i7
16Gb RAM
CS6/FCP7
AJA T-Tap
AJA IO XT
FSI LM-2461W/CM-170W

[Chris Burns]

So what would you suggest? Should I back-up everything on the RAID to another RAID? Also, should I get rid of the faulty RAID altogether or is it still fine to use? Also, with a company that creates a lot of content during each election cycle, what would you recommend for storage solutions?

[Jeff Meyer]

For backup you either need another RAID of similar capacity, an army of little drives (be sure to double up to protect against drive failure — new drives are as dangerous as two year old drives), or LTO tapes. Be aware that RAID-5 is not a backup solution. It’s redundancy that protects against a drive failure, but it does not protect against a volume failure. It sounds like your drive could be headed down the volume failure route if not sooner then later. Mac OS volumes don’t like hard dismounts.

I would suggest calling the original RAID vendor about your issues. It could be a firmware incompatibility with a Mac OS update, for example. Having your backup in place when you call would be a good practice, as the vendor most certainly won’t guarantee the safety of your data.

As for storage, I would suggest getting ahold of a company with this kind of specialization. Small Tree Communications is a Creative Cow sponsor who installs storage for video editing. Our shop is working with a company called Cutting Edge right now to install a new fiber SAN and Cat DV media management in place of Final Cut Server. We’ll have about 50TB of online storage, 30TB of tier 2 storage, and LTO tapes for deep archive. Deploying a full on SAN is in capital expenditure kind of purchase, but in a sit-down chat one of these firms might be able to assess your workflow and find a cost-effective solution to give you more space and protect your data.

[Bob Slenker]

I having this same problem. Just got a new iMac 27″ and have hooked my iStar Raidage Gage (which is housing two 3TB Barracuda 7200rpm drives – mirrored/seen as one 3TB drive) up to it via USB3. Every time I go to render something, the drive is ejected sometime during the render. This never happened when this Raidage unit was connected to my old Mac Pro via eSATA. It doesn’t seem to happen when the iMac is sitting idle, not working in an app. Encoding a file in AME was fine but rendering in AE causes an immediate ejection of the hard disk and rendering in PPro ejected shortly after the render began. It is as if when the drive is being written to, it can’t handle it. I couldn’t even copy a rendered QT from my desktop to the drive via the Finder. ???? 🙁

[Bob Slenker]

UPDATE: I am optimistic that my problem was due to a faulty 10′ USB3 cable. I had a 3′ USB3 cable that I have replaced it with (sadly it is too short for my physical setup) and things seem to be working fine. No sporadic disk ejections.