Sonnet Raid D800 – have I set this right?

[Peter Dunphy]

Thanks Jeremy

I’ve posted an email I received from Sonnet just after you mentioned to stick with Raid 5 – what do you think? I’m a bit confused about which of the read/write options I should choose in order to get maximum performance for FCP6.

Peter

[Jeremy Garchow]

[peter dunphy] “I’m a bit confused about which of the read/write options I should choose in order to get maximum performance for FCP6. “

Either way you will be fine. I’d go for maximum read speeds as more often than not you will be playing back footage rather than capturing, right?

Jeremy

[Peter Dunphy]

Hi Jeremy

Ah yes, totally – makes sense. Thanks!

128k interleave and prefetch set to 5 it is then.

Peter

[Bob Zelin]

Peter,
you are making all of this way too confusing. This was designed to be easy, and you are reading way too much into this. You can edit in FCP6 with a single internal SATA drive. You have a drive array that is currently running fast enough to do uncompressed HD, and if you redo it, it will operate at speeds that can handle 2K. Do do not need to overanalyze any of this. but this is exactly what you are doing. What you will find, is that as you ask about “each little detail”, everyone has a different opinion. Sonnet says to interleave at 128k, but AVID (in the VideoRaid ST manual – same product) says to use 256k. And some experts say to use 512k. Bottom line – they all work.

When you make changes, you will “destroy” your raid, and have to start over again. This is the process (as an overview). Go to ATTO Configruation Utility, click on RAID MANAGEMENT, hightlight your raid group (with 7 members), and click on DELETE GROUP. This will kill your RAID. Close ATTO config too, and reopen it. Its like starting from scratch. Go back into RAID Managements and CREATE RAID GROUP. Choose CUSTOM RAID, not DVRAID. Make it RAID 5, 128k (or 256k), leave all the other defaults the way they are. MAKE SURE TO CLICK ON AUTO REBUILD or when a drive fails in the future, it won’t auto rebuild when you put in a replacement. When you are done with the menu’s (which are all self explanatory – the techno details of the things you don’t understand should be left to their default position from ATTO) – it will ask you if you are sure you want to create the RAID 5 group – you say YES, and now it takes about 5 hours to create the RAID 5 group (with all 8 drive members).

When it’s done (it will show you the progress in the ATTO window), you simply open up Apple Disk Utility, and PARTITION the drive as one single volume, OS-X Extended (Journaled), and you are done. Your drive will mount on the desktop, and you can use AJA System Test to test your drive array speed.

BobZelin

[Peter Dunphy]

I am on the verge of partitioning my Raid 5 as one drive in Apple Disk Utility.

I don’t plan to use my Raid 5 as a boot drive.

There is an option to ‘Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers’ – do I need to tick ‘yes’ for this?

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5

[David Roth weiss]

[peter dunphy] ” am on the verge of partitioning my Raid 5 as one drive in Apple Disk Utility.”

That doesn’t sound right. You shouldn’t need to create a partition.

[peter dunphy] “There is an option to ‘Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers’ – do I need to tick ‘yes’ for this?”

Absolutely not.

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

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[Jeremy Garchow]

[peter dunphy] “There is an option to ‘Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers’ – do I need to tick ‘yes’ for this? “

No, only if you were to hook up that raid to OS9 (which I think is physically impossible) or share that raid via network to a computer that has OS9.

Jeremy

[Peter Dunphy]

Thanks Jeremy and David

Aha! Solved it – had to erase the volume as per Sonnet instructions and then the single Raid Drive auto-configured and appeared on my desktop.

Pretty scary that you have to ‘erase’ it for it to appear properly!

Thanks as always!

I’ve now got a Raid 5 (128k interleave, prefetch 5) which uses all 8 drives. Will setup my Atto alerts now, and use FCP remover to prepare for a fresh install of FCP. Before installing though, I’ll update my OSX and repair all permissions. Backup drive already cloned. I’m learning fast on these forums thanks to you guys, I can tell ya!

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5

[Peter Dunphy]

Aja Raid 5/DiskWhackTest – 8192.0 MB

Write: 502.1 MB/s
Read: 612.9 MB/s

Happy days – a speed improvement thanks to all your kind suggestions.

When I moved the Raid card from slot 3 into slot 4, I noticed for the first time that the word ‘Raid’ was printed only next to slot 4 – I don’t know how I didn’t spot that the first time. My eyes were probably watery with nerves as I tried to install the PCI card – might account for it!

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5

[Peter Dunphy]

Just got a failure on the Seagate NL35 1.0TB SATA 3.5 7200rpm 32MB Cache – ST31000340NS.

Running on the 7 drives now and have ordered a replacement which will arrive on Monday.

Will have to request a replacement from Seagate once I’ve removed the faulted the faulted drive (to obtain its serial number)

Am hastily copying the contents of the Raid 5 (just over 1TB) onto 2 spare 1Tb drives I have.

I dread to think where I’d be if I had, say, 6TB of data on the Raid 5 and only 2TB of backup drives.

Am crossing my fingers right now praying that another of the Raid 5 drives doesn’t go down, especially after hearing how unreliable Seagate drives can be on this forum!

As per 23 in the instruction booklet, I haven’t been able to see an LED light to represent the faulted drive on the Fusion enclosure, which has me worried as I’m not sure which faulted drive I should remove. It’s index number is 4. However, in the Raid 5 list it states under Usage Raid 5 (5) because it’s fifth-down on that list.

Will contact Sonnet but if any of you can enlighten me in the meantime with any tips I’d really appreciate it.

Update: Email I sent to Sonnet (a guy called David there has been helpful in the past)

“Is there an alternative way for me to discover which is the faulted drive that I should remove and replace?

I unfortunately had a drive failure of one of the Seagate NL35 1.0TB SATA 3.5 7200rpm 32MB Cache – ST31000340NS drives.

As per 23 in the D800 instruction booklet, I haven’t been able to see an LED light to represent the faulted drive on the Fusion enclosure, which has me worried as I’m not sure which faulted drive I should remove.

Its index number is 4.

However, in the Raid 5 list it states under Usage Raid 5 (5) because it’s fifth-down on that list.

I’ve tried the Raid CLI tab and typed Blockdevidentify 4 but the bottom LED light on the enclosure remains off while the rest of the enclosure LEDs (all except the bottom) remain lit.

When I try Blockevidstop the bottom LED light still remains off. Again, the rest of the LEDs (all except the bottom) on the enclosure remain lit.

Any tips would be really appreciated – my heart’s in my mouth with worry! :o)

Warm regards

Peter”

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5