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Storage Stumper- apple raid utility slower than unstriped drives
I have a project containing mostly stills with scaling effects Ken Burns style.
I just bought 4 of the latest greatest Maxtor 7200 RPM drives 300GB each.
The drives are striped using Apple RAID utility creating 1TB.
The drives are connected to a FirmTek four port SATA PCI card in slot 4.
Testing with Xbench produces a phenomenal score. PHENOMENAL.
When I play the DV program frames are dropped randomly. Can’t seem to play back more than 30 seconds.
I thought one of the drives may be defective so I broke up the RAID and put the media on each drive individually.
Individually all four drives play back the program flawlessly. No drives are faulty.
I then restripe using Apple RAID- again- frames are dropped.
I increased the Data Block Size and repartitioned- better but still drops frames randomly.For the first time in 9 years of solving voodoo- I am truly stumped.
Any ideas?
OS 10.4.2
QT 7 -
7 Replies
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I should add that I always render the entire program before posting here.
So yes- the program is fully, fully rendered and still the RAID drops frames. -
Oh and yes- I have mixed down the audio too.
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Justin,
Call Maxtor and ask them if the new drives might need a firmware upgrade. While I myself am a Maxtor user and fan, others have reported compatility issues with various SATA controller cards.
DRW
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Have you made sure your viewer and canvas windows are set to “fit to window”?
If not this can cause dropped frames. -
Have you checked the scratch disk for the render files? That is, its not putting the render files somewhere wierd (like your hard drive).
DWR
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First off, try lowering your block size. Make it 64k. If that doesn’t work, return the drives and get another brand. These Maxtor SATA drives are crap. That’s the simplest way I can put it. I guess they have extremely sensitive timing.
At our place, we have all Maxtor with Firmtek cards. Two systems use a 4 disk array (like yours) and one uses an 8 disk. Everything is fine now after getting the latest revision models, but it wasn’t always the case. The tech support guy at Firmtek knows a lot about these. Unfortunately, he’s a bit insecure and way to “rah-rah” over his cards. The reality is that the Firmtek cards don’t work well with the older revision Maxtors (300Gb models) and cause issues when in a software RAID.
One editor here had constant unexplained crashes and dropped frames. His array didn’t even mount most of the time when he powered on his G5. He had that Firmtek external enclosure, and the cables it came with – and yet the Firmtek support guy was still convinced that it was our fault somehow because his card is the ONLY one in existence that worked with Maxtors in an external SATA setup. He’s actually right about that because the Sonnet cards we used previously don’t work at all and that was a much, much bigger headache for me.
Of the 16 Maxtors we’re using, 8 of them had to gradually be replaced because they were an older revision. I use them now as signle drives for backups and stuff (and that works just fine). But hours upon hours of this voodoo mystery would have been avoided if I had went with any other brand of hard drive (except Hitachi which also is supposed to have problems).
I know you said yours are brand new, but they could have sat on a store shelf for a long time. I would send them back pronto. Go with Western Digital or Seagate.
Sean
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Let me rephrase that one part (I hate how you can’t edit posts in an editors forum).
The support guy at Firmtek knows that their Seritek cards and his driver is the only working external SATA solution for Maxtor drives on a Mac. So because of this, he seemed a bit egotistical about it and felt little responsibility in helping with my problem (since his was the only game in town).
Sean
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