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Slow read/write speeds – problem inside the mac
This is a follow-up post on a thread from a few weeks ago when all these problems began arising…
I’ve been having a lot of problems with random dropouts (flashing pixels, flashing lines). These problems are always computer-generated and not tape-based (if I go back over the spot where the dropout was – everything looks fine). After much hair-pulling and gnashing of teeth, we’ve traced this problem down the following road (hopefully this problem, perhaps we’re tracing an entirely different problem that doesn’t have anything to do with this).
After expirimentation with Final Cut, I determined that the dropouts seem to be related to the amount of data the computer is asked to process (this makes sense). A complete reformat/reinstall didn’t help anything. Another gig of RAM didn’t help anything. Three layers of unrendered DV video can produce problems, as can one layer of unrendered DV with a title on the 2nd layer, or just one lonely layer of Uncompressed 8-bit (rendered or unrendered).
We downloaded and ran AJAs system test utility, which mimicks reading and writing a video file. We set the test size to 1GB. My read/write speads are around 175MB/s and 65MB/s – way slow.
When either of the two other editors in my department ran the test on their systems, they’re getting read/write speeds at over 200MB/s. We thought the problem lay in my Medea array (SCSI connection), so we took my G5 and plugged it into another editors array – read and write speeds still painfully slow. We took another editors G5 and brought it over to my array – lightning fast read/writes.
So, the problem appears to lie within my G5 itself. The only things we can think of at this point are software conflicts, or a bad hardware component – but we’ve really got no idea from here.
Does anyone, anyone, have any ideas? We’re calling Medea on Monday to see if they have any suggestions.
Nick
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4 Replies
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Wouldn’t it be better to call apple instead of Medea?
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Probably… I think the IT department is trying to avoid paying for help, but it may come to that.
Nick
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SCSI card issue? try switching cards from one of the other G5’s
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Forgot to mention that… Swapped out the SCSI card with one from one of the other systems – nothing changed.
Nick
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