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Sonnet tempo E4P and Fussion D500P
Hi Guys
the D800 sounds great, unfortunately i still have the fusion D500P (which until now i’ve loved).
To get the details out of the way i have a Mac Pro with 5gig of ram, a kona LHe card and sonnet E4p with three Sonnet Fusion 500s filled with 500gig drives (Seagate baracuda). I also have 3 firewire drives, 2 raided and one daisy chained (i have disconnected these to eliminate any firewire issues) i also have 3 500gig drives internally 2 of which are raided together (softraid). Graphics card is ATI Radeon X1900.
Sonnet tempo e4p card in slot 4 (x4); AJA Kona in slot 3 (x8); Graphics card in slot 1 (x16); expansion slot utility is configured correctly.
I only have FCP studio 2 on my system.
I have just read a thread on this forum dated november 2006 hoping it would answer my problems but alas no.
I purchased the 2 sonnet Fusion D500P and E4p cards about 16months ago and have never had a problem – i filled them with 10 drives and raided them Zero.
Admittedly they have always been on my powermacG5 Quad but 2-3 months ago i moved them over to my mac Pro due to the ProRes 422 issue on the powermac.
i had just completed something for channel 4 in the UK and on the very next job i started to have problems. i couln’t play back DVCPROHD which was strange as the job before was 10bit uncompressed SD and that was fine.
my raid must have been fragmented so i brought a third D500P, emptied the raid, broke the raid set-up and reinitialized.
When i did the aja system test for Pal, the write speeds fluctuated from 450 Megabites per second down to 19 Megabites per second which is crazy on an empty 4.5 Terabite raid. When i tested HD 1920 X 1080 i got a good throughput at around 260-460 meg per second.
ive tried the raid at a block size of 128K and at 32K with no luck. i’ve had one of the blue lights on one of the units go out and has been out for some time, so i swapped the drives around, but the light is still off. i’ve removed the drives and tested each one of them and they are fine.
i’ve split the raid into two raids one for each encasment and they both have the same problem on the smaller file sizes – they have massive fluctuations. On the larger files they are fine-ish but start off quite slow and occasionally the speed drops to 19meg per second or less.
i have played back and downconverted HD into SD onto a digi deck no problem but now even pal or 10bit SD will drop frames.
thank for your suggestions in advance.
Nick
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35 Replies
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Hi Nick –
your post has a lot of information in it, and it is confusing to me (even though you probabaly specified the answers to the questions I am going to ask).I use these exact products all the time, as well as RAID 0 arrays from Cal Digit and Firmtek, so I am well acquanted with all the issues that these products have (even when all of these companies will tell you that you are the only one having these problems).
1) you are crazy for striping 10 drives together RAID 0. You are just begging for trouble. There is NO REASON TO DO THIS unless you are doing 10 bit uncompressed HD (and I believe that you are doing uncompressed SD and DVCProHD). You should be using these arrays as SEPERATE VOLUMES – which means that you should have one 5 bay box as one RAID 0 drive array, and the other 5 bay box as another RAID 0 drive array. DO NOT STRIPE ACROSS THE TWO BOXES FOR 10 DRIVES RAID 0 !. This is great for doing demonstrations to show off, but things never work out too well in the long term (as you have seen). Again, 5 drives will be MORE than enough for DVCProHD, uncompressed 10 bit SD, ProRes422, AVID DNxHD – basically everything except uncompressed HD.
2) once you have the boxes seperated, do a nice boring AJA Kona System test on each box. Depending on your block size (lets say you use the default of 32K), you should get 172mb/sec – 180mb/sec. If you get more (over 200mb/sec), then you are lucky, and it’s your drive type (or your block size which you moved to 128k). If its SLOWER than 170mb/sec, you have a bad drive. Test each drive one at a time – each drive should give you over 65mb/sec (test your boot drive as a good example of this in your MAC).
3) OK, so assuming that your drives are all testing ok, and that you have about 180mb/sec in the 5 drive RAID 0 box with a 32k block size, start digiting your DVCProHD or 10 bit uncompressed SD. Everything should be working just fine.
If it’s not – DISCONNECT ALL THE OTHER DRIVES ON YOUR SYSTEM, because something else is loading it down. Do you have any cards in slot 2 (like a slow firewire card). Because if you have no other drives on your system other than the one RAID 0 5 bay Sonnet, and you can get 180mb/sec, then LET ME ASSURE YOU that you can do DVCProHD and 10 bit uncompressed SD all day long.4) you now say “I disconnected all my other drives, and I am trying to digitize DVCProHD, and I am STILL getting dropped frames, even though AJA Kona System test reports 175mb/sec on read and write”. The answer is YOUR CURRENT FCP PROJECT IS CORRUPT. Simply close this project, open up a new project, and try it again (with no other drives on the system). It will work just fine.
OTHER COMMENTS –
your blue LED light – this may simply be a dead LED in the chassis. It also can indicate a dead disk drive, but if you had a dead disk drive, your entire RAID 0 array would not show up on your MAC desktop.I will not bore you with other potential problems with port multipler chassis, because you are apparantly re-initializing these arrays (you said you tried 128k and 32k block sizes in the options folder – which means that you had to recreate the RAID 0 to get this ability) –
SO, try what I said, and let me know your results. The Sonnet E4P and 500P are fine products, but like other port multipler products that are reliant on the Silicon Image 3124 chipset, there are known issues with all the manufacturers.
Let me know your results.
Bob Zelin
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Hi Bob
thanks for your reply.
Ok i do use 10 bit uncompressed HD for certain projects (high end compositing) and the sytem has been working fine for the last 16 months and always with the 10 HDD raided at Zero. I break up the raids regularly and try and fill them up then take off what i need and then delet the raid and start again so as not to fragment the drives.
i have split the 10 drive raid into 2 5drive raids one for each enclosure. the read write speads you have mentiond are a little lower than i get but that is not the issue.
the problem i’m having is that on the smaller file type dv pal (and this is on the 5 drive raid as well) even though i get an average of 220meg per second it does drop on the graph and text (aja system test) down to as little as 10meg per second and this is whats causing my problem. even on 10 bit Sd i have the same problem.
i have checked all the hard drives and they seem ok i have removed my internal raid which was in bay 3 and 4 incase it was affecting the performance and i’ve removed my media drive in bay 2, but still no joy.
at the moment i have only my aja kona lhe card my sonnet tempo e4p card my Ati radeon X1900 card and my system drive conected to the Mac
any thoughts?
Nick
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Hi Bob
also i forgot to mention i have NO Card in slot two. i hope i’ve given you enough info i’ve. if my responce was brief it’s becaus i had deleted a the internal raid withdata on it by accident, fortunatly i have the material backed up on tape but it scared the hell out of me.
Nick
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Nick writes –
i have split the 10 drive raid into 2 5drive raids one for each enclosure. the read write speads you have mentiond are a little lower than i get but that is not the issueREPLY –
good. We can work with TWO DIFFERENT chassis. I assume that you have the correct driver software from Sonnet loaded into your MAC Pro, that you have downloaded from their website, and not used the CD that came with your E4P.I am going to ASSUME that just one of these 2 chassis is not working – am I correct about this ? One chassis should be able to do 10 bit uncompressed SD (and DV) with no issues – am I correct about this ? If this is true, then your other chassis has ONE DEAD DRIVE in it, or you have an intermittent slot in that chassis (possibly the one with the bad LED – I am guessing here). You can do uncompressed 8 bit SDI with one single SATA drive, so I suggest that in your “bad chassis”, you test EACH DRIVE ONE AT A TIME by digitizing 8 bit uncompressed. Hopefully, one of these drives will fail. You only need 2 drives stripped RAID 0 to do 10 bit uncompresssed SD or DVCProHD, so if this is an intermittent problem, you can stripe 2 of the drives RAID 0, and stripe the other 3 drives RAID 0, and hopefully, you can go back to work, and see which one of these 2 groups fails (drop frame error) – this will help track down the faulty SATA drive.
The more details you post, the quicker we can identify this problem. From back in the SCSI days, identifying faulty disk drives has always been a headache – especially when they are partially dead or dying. I have found that even using Seagates and Hitachi’s exerciser software can still show a drive working fine, and IT STILL FAILS in real life application. You need to continue doing these tests, and reporting back what you find. We will find the problem.
AGAIN, I ASSUME that only one of these two 500P chassis is showing this problem.
Bob Zelin
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Thanks Bob
I’ll try your suggestion and report back. i have orderd a new sonnet E4P card just incase and i can always use it in my other setup if the card is ok
Nick
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Hi Bob
further to your reply ealier. i have now gone through every single drive and tested them again. i’ve had varing speads throughoutfrom 49MB/s to 71MB/s
i have not been able to test the 10bit uncompressed as i have nothing to play out to and thats when the problem usualy happens. however my next task is to try a FCP prject and see what happens.
i did buy a new Fusion D500P and i put the raid set into it and it works much better i put the raid set in the old enclosure 1 and and old enclosure 2 and they both as bad as each other. i will test them again using different ports on the E4P card and do the tests you have recomended.
just thought i’d fill you in on whats happening i’ll keep you posted
thanks
Nick
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Hi Bob
ok i think i know what the problem is.
i’ve just connected the raid set to the last port on the E4P card and only 3 of the drives showed the blue light and the raid was off line. only one disk showed up in disk utility.
i then swapped the cable back to where it was originaly and the raid came on line again.
sounds like it’s the E4p Card?
would that be logical?
Nick
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Potentially. Or the cable. Try all 4 ports first. In reality the port multiplier handles the distribution of signal, so it seems odd that one port on the card showed 3 drives and another showed 5. If the port were bad it should be all or none. Possibly two of your drives are starting to die and that they had not spun up yet by the time you plugged it into the 4th port.
Try all 4 ports with the “problem” enclosure, report back.
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Hi Bob
i’ve tried all 4 ports with the enclosure and they all work, which is strange as when i tried it the 1st time the 4th port didin’t work.
i have a new sata cable i can try. i’ll give it a go
Nick
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[nick Franco] “Hi Bob
“I’m not bob.
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