Sonnet Raid D800 – have I set this right?

[Peter Dunphy]

Ken,

Scary! I’ll keep my fingers crossed then!

All the best, and thanks again for your input into my dilemma!

Peter

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Talking of failures. I have to warn you about a spate of recent Seagate drive failures. I’ve seen 3 SATA internal Barracuda 1 Tb drives fail within days of each other. The dreaded 7200.11 drives.

And last week, I bought 4 new 1.5 Tb eSATA Seagate FreeAgent Extreme drives connected to a MacPro via a Sonnet Tempo e4p card. 3 of these drives failed over 3 weeks, but after I had done a XDCam transfer of over 4 Tb on them.

Symptoms excessive click and whirr. Mac hangs. Force quit and restart – drives don’t mount any more.

So beware with Seagate drives. If they fail like that, there is no protection even in RAID5.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Peter Dunphy]

Hi Neil

The drives I’m using are the “Seagate OEM ST31000340NS 1TB Barracuda ES-2,7200RPM 32MB Cache,Enterprise Hard Drive”

‘Symptoms excessive click and whirr. Mac hangs. ‘ Strikes a chord with me!

“3 of these drives failed over 3 weeks, but after I had done a XDCam transfer of over 4 Tb on them. ”

That’s just horrible. I hope you’ve managed to bounce back from that okay!

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll keep an eagle eye on these drives!

Peter

[Jeremy Garchow]

[peter dunphy] “The drives I’m using are the “Seagate OEM ST31000340NS 1TB Barracuda ES-2,7200RPM 32MB Cache,Enterprise Hard Drive” “

Are these the drives that came with your Sonnet unit? if so, they are tested to work properly. If you bought them yourself, then you should ask Sonnet if they qualify. I recommend getting the drives from Sonnet.

Jeremy

[Peter Dunphy]

Hi Jeremy

I bought them from a different retailer than Sonnet (here in United Kingdom).

On the d800 detail page it lists the drives as being compatible – I checked the stickers on each of the drives and they all have the latest firmware:

• Seagate Barracuda ES.2, # ST31000340NS(4)
(4) Seagate ES.2 drives only with firmware versions SN06 and newer are compatible. Seagate ES.2 drives with firmware versions SN03, SN04, or SN05 are NOT compatible. Click here to view location of firmware number on hard drive.

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiond800raid.html

Peter

[David Roth weiss]

[Neil Sadwelkar] “I have to warn you about a spate of recent Seagate drive failures. I’ve seen 3 SATA internal Barracuda 1 Tb drives fail within days of each other. The dreaded 7200.11 drives. “

Neil,

I got tell ya, I switched over to Hitachi drives about four years ago on the recommendation of the two Raid manufacturers that I completely rely upon for the backbone of my business, and every Hitachi drive I’ve ever owned is still running perfectly, except one which was dead on arrival from the factory.

Of course, everyone tends to love the brand of hard drives they’ve used the longest, so you may be in love with Seagate. However, as you’ve noticed, they have been suffering from a few QC issues in the past few years.

David

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Bob Zelin]

Hi –
boy, I hate the fact that these disk drive posts are buried in the massive FCP forum.

Sonnet should be ashamed of themselves for putting in Seagate drives into this drive array. The product you own is an ATTO R380 card with a JMR 888 BluStor chassis – all fine products. Both ATTO and JMR warn everyone (and I am sure they warned Sonnet) NOT to use Seagate drives, and to use Hitachi or Western Digital drives.

You have SN06 Firmware on your Seagates – the “death drives” were the SN05 drives (that failed on nearly 100% of my clients that had them). I am sure that Seagate has begged Sonnet to “retry” the new SN06 firmware.

I NEVER EVER use a hot spare – especially with the ATTO R380 card. There is no good warning indication on the ATTO R380 (like a beeper to say you have a dead drive). Open your ATTO Configuration Tool, and before you get to the SASR380 triangle, open up NOTIFICATIONS. Change this to WARNING instead of CRITICAL, and hit COMMIT. This is the ONLY WAY to get a window to pop up if you have a drive failure. If you leave it on critical, you will never know if you have a failed disk drive.

You need EIGHT MEMBERS in a JMR BlueStor888 chassis (your Sonnet) – not 7. 7 will reduce the speed. Depending on the version of disk drives you have, you will see anywhere from 300 – 700 Mb/sec with eight disk drives and the ATTO/JMR combination. I know how frustrating it is to read this, but I have seen these massive variations in speed, depending on what disk drives I have in my system. These days with Hitachi Saturn enterprise drives, I get about 600Mb/sec with 8 drives and the ATTO R380. But that is with new Hitachi’s.

It’s a shame that Creative Cow doesn’t have a dedicated drive forum -companies like G-Tech, Cal Digit and Maxx Digital all have their own forums, but smaller operations like Sonnet (who is not a small company) has no forum, and it would be nice to have a home for it, instead of getting burried on the FCP forum.

PS – so as not to give you any fantasy of our industry – I just saw a brand new Hitachi Saturn Enterprise drive fail 1 week after being installed. Drives fail – some brands more than others.

Bob Zelin

[Peter Dunphy]

Hi Bob

Thanks for your excellent, informative feedback.

For now I’m stuck with the Seagates I’m afraid – I just dearly hope they aren’t ‘bad seeds’ and cause me any further issues.

Would you suggest that I persist with a Raid 5 (on all 8 drives though) to get good performance out of Final Cut? Or might Raid 4 or something be better?

Peter

[Peter Dunphy]

I just received this email from Sonnet – I’m not exactly sure which of the settings they are recommending I go with (for Final Cut Pro6):

“Peter,

Our testing of an 8 TB raid indicated we got the best read speeds with a 128k interleave and prefetch set to 5.
Our best write speed was had with an interleave of 1 MB and a prefetch of 6.

Changing the interleave will require rebuilding the raid from scratch, thus erasing all data.
Changing the prefetch can be done by right clicking on the group in the RAID tab and
selecting “Properties”.

Regards,”

Bit confused!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[peter dunphy] “Or might Raid 4 or something be bett”

Stick with raid 5. It distributes the parity instead of writing it to one drive, which may cause a ‘bottleneck’, although very slight.

Jeremy