Sonnet fusion d800 raid problems

[Bob Zelin]

Adam –
please bear with me. I will do my best to respond to your questions below. Before we get started, please tell me if your drive array has Hitachi or Seagate drives in them.

you write –

I was wondering if anyone out there is running a sonnet fusion d800 raid using DVRAID and an atto r380 card on a quadcore mac pro?

REPLY – you should have used the “Advanced” settings when building your RAID group, instead of DVRAID, but you should still be ok with DVRAID.

you write –
For the last couple of weeks just clicking on the raid icon on the desktop crashes finder and it also crashes the finder of the machine you are copying data from over to the raid. FCP still plays projects referencing data from the raid but it is very slow to do anything.

REPLY – please run AJA System test on your Sonnet drive array. If you don’t own an AJA product, you can still download this for free from the AJA website. Please tell me what your read and write speeds are. You should be getting WAY over 300Mb/sec. When you run the test, select a 1900×1080 file, and a large file like 4 Gigs. Observe the lights on the chassis. Do you see a LED getting “stuck” while others are flashing – or are they all flashing ? Or, do some LED’s not even turn on ?

You write –
When I started to look in to it, the atto config tool warned me that one of the drives was degraded so I got a new one and rebuilt the raid thinking that would be problem solved, but it kept doing the same thing.
REPLY – there is no audio alarm to indicate a failed drive, but you should have a bright RED LED that lights up showing that you have a failed drive. If you go into the NOTIFICIATIONS tab of ATTO Config Tool, select it to WARNING (and not critical), and you will get a popup window on your MAC to show that a drive has failed in the future.

After that I noticed that on playback one of the lights next to the drives in the raid wasn’t coming on on playback so despite the atto config saying the raid was fine I got a new drive and replaced the one that wasn’t showing up [having swapped it around to make sure it was the drive and not the bay]. I have rebuilt the raid again and the same drive is not showing a light on hd playback.

REPLY – let me know what your results are when running AJA System Test, and report back to me.

The desktop only crashes when you click directly on to the raid icon, if you get to it through the grid view in the finder it seems to be ok.
REPLY – If I were you, and if you can afford to do this, I would delete the raid group, and recreate the RAID 5 group, as ADVANCED,
with AutoRebuild, and NOT with DV RAID. I don’t care who told you to do this – they are wrong. Then, in Apple Disk Utility, REPAIR PERMISSIONS on your system drive, and then run Apple Disk First Aid on the Sonnet chassis, once the RAID is rebuilt. You should not get any error messages, or crashes once you do this.

You write –
I’m in contact with the guys from Sonnet but they are a bit puzzled at the moment too.
REPLY – gee, what a surprise !

You write –
I was wondering if anyone has the d800 with DVRAID and if so on playback do all the lights flash as you’d expect or is it something to do with the way the DVRAID works that one light doesn’t flash with the other ones?
REPLY – no comment. Once you reraid your system, when you run AJA system test, please let me know if some of the LED’s DO NOT light up – even if the RAID appears to be working properly. I look foward to this reply of this specific question.

It would be great to work out if it a problem with the actual raid or the atto card/software

REPLY – please respond to my questions.

Bob Zelin

[Doug Beal]

Chase down as Bob says and he’ll get you to the Issue at Hand.

Under the Heading “Personal Experience”
We have a D800 with atto R380. Hitachi drives. We DO NOT run DVraid.
It is Raid5, stock the way it came from Sonnet except for the raid controller updates upon moving to Leopard. works like a champ pushing uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 HdCam no trouble.
It has had a problem twice, back when I ran 10.4.11.
I removed the drive, installed the spare we bought with it, and rebuilt it. No data loss, did not notice any performance hit even when compromised.
reformatted the problem drive on a sled in the macPro pulled it out and the next time there was an issue stuck it back in and rebuilt array. It is still in that configuration, That was little over a year ago.

Doug Beal
Editor / Engineer
Rock Creative Images
Nashville TN

[Adam Jenns]

Hi Bob and Doug,

Thank you so much for taking the time to help me out, it’s really appreciated.

First off, I’m running hitachi ultrastar drives in the raid, I remember the model being on sonnets list of recommended drives. I’ll definitely take your advice about reformatting it as raid 5, but have to wait to get a few back up drives in first.

Ok so I have just run the AJA system test and in the default test I get 500mbs on both read and write. I have also just done the test as you suggested with the 1080 4gb file and I got 557 write and 516 read, which I’m assuming from you post is pretty good. Interestingly all of the lights on the front of the drive are working correctly when the test is running. I still find it really weird that one of them is not working on normal fcp 1080 prores playback.

Do you think this would suggest it’s a software issue or problem with the r380 card?

Thanks, adam

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[Walter Biscardi]

The ATTO needs to be tuned correctly for compressed formats. Even though you’re getting 500MB/s+ speeds, there is a setting in the block size that needs to be optimized if your work is primarily compressed formats like ProRes.

I can’t remember the exact block size that was correct and there might have even been another setting in there that we tuned, but I would check in with ATTO Tech Support and ask them how to re-configure your array correctly. I got the same issues when running DVCPro HD with over 500MB/s speeds, but it was because the RAID was not set up correctly for compressed formats.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Ron Amborn]

Hey Adam,
We are working on some current issues with ATTO R380 and Riad 5 daisy chain solution. Please contact me privately and I can share more information with you. I work very close with Bob Z and we are getting to the bottom of this ASAP. Please send me a photo of the enclosure you have so I know which box it is as Sonnet has OEM from two different companies in the last year or so. I am sure we can help you as we sell and support Sonnet too.

Sincerely,
Ron Amborn President
Maxx Entertainment Digital
21562 Newland Street
Huntington Beach , Ca 92646
Direct 714-374-4944
Cell 714-713-4492 Fax 714-374-3404
ron@maxxdigital.com
http://www.maxxdigital.com

[Peter Dunphy]

Hi guys

I’m about to buy a Sonnet fusion d800 Raid to complement an 8 core MacPro, and was wondering if there are other tips such as setting it up as “Advanced” which was mentioned in this thread that might be useful?

I have never setup a Raid before so would like to be as careful as possible. Any suggestions would be really appreciated.

I intend to use the Raid 5 in connection with Final Cut Studio – am I safe to assume that once the Raid is set-up it will show as a single hard drive on my desktop? If that’s the case, I suppose I would choose that ‘single hard drive’ as my Scratch Disk?

Much thanks in advance for any thoughts you can offer.

Peter Dunphy