Trouble in Paradise

[Don Smith]

Ah. Remember the part about the Promise website being awful? The Blackmagic Utility is unintuitive as well. I said that the link to the Controller to manage power and spin-down only had a box with the three tabs of information with no hint of how to find the power settings. I close that box of three tabs which revealed two buttons; ‘view’ and ‘settings’. I clicked on settings and NOW I get the options to manage the power.

NewsVideo.com

[Don Smith]

The problem I was having with the Promise website turned out to be a short between the headphones. Partly field by Safari not letting me know it was blocking a popup. Should have thought of that possibility.

Any, got the file uploaded.

As I left this morning my drive was showing normal lights on the two top drives but only the upper lights on the bottom four drives. When scrubbing the timeline of Final Cut only the top two drives showed blinking data lights.

Now to wait to hear back from Promise.

NewsVideo.com

[Joe Marler]

[Don Smith] “And the Promise website is just awful….asked for a service report from the Promise utility and I can get that, but to upload it I have to go to my case on their website. Fine. Except no amount of clicking on the link will do anything.”

The Promise website is poor. It uses a pop-up which Safari blocks by default – without any message or advisory. The behavior is you click on your case number and nothing happens.

To prevent this go to Safari preferences->Security, and clear the box “Block pop-up windows”. Once open, the Promise support case allows you to attach files and system reports.

Re blue vs amber lights, on my R4 each drive has two lights. The top light is status and the bottom activity. I have never seen anything besides two blue lights per drive when it was functioning OK. If a drive fails, the top light turns red. When the failed drive is replaced, I think the top light turns orange/amber while the rebuild is in progress.

Your Black Magic performance results seem pretty good, but you should not have any amber or orange lights on any drive. The performance should generally be consistent. On my R4 I ran a burn-in test for several days using DiskTester, a professional test utility: https://diglloydtools.com/disktester.html

This following is unlikely related to your situation, but performance can be affected by RAID 5 stripe size. For test results of various stripe sizes vs RAID initialization time and performance tests, see this data: https://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=18576138&postcount=1

I’m not suggesting re-striping your disk array to improve performance, this is just FYI. However if in the process of debugging the situation you need to re-initialize the array, you might then consider optimal stripe size.

[Dave Jenkins]

I have an R6 attached to the new MP 2013. All lower blue lights blink when playing back in FCP X. BM speed test says 800 write & 665 read and my 12TB drive is about half full.
HTH for a gauge of what you should be seeing.
Promise told me that you have to use terminal to make changes to manage power and spin-down. The R6 comes preconfigured to spin down. I used terminal to have it NOT spin down because I wasn’t getting great results with FCP X. Still not seeing great playback in FCP X.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
Mac Pro 3.5MHz 6-Core Late 2013
FCP X

[Don Smith]

Dave.. the part where you say that FCPX playback from our Promise RAID is not great is the part that concerns me the most. Yes, my P2 R6 needs attention but from what you say it appears that even if I get the RAID running correctly that I’ll still have troubled playback. I hope that’s not the case. Mine is populated with 3TB drives so the box cost right at three grand. I did it so it wouldn’t hobble my new Mac Pro. Even with good readings indicated by Blackmagic Speed Test my playback isn’t nearly what I expected.

NewsVideo.com

[Dave Jenkins]

I don’t know where the problem lies. Personally I don’t think FCP X is tuned for these new computers. I can’t say it’s the hard drives. I’m just disappointed with the performance I’m getting with this new Macs, superfast hard drives and supposedly tuned software.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
Mac Pro 3.5MHz 6-Core Late 2013
FCP X

[Dave Jenkins]

However I graded 70 minute film in Da Vinci Resolve and it rendered out in 11 minutes so I can see some software is blazing fast. So that leads me to believe it’s not the Pegasus hard drives.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
Mac Pro 3.5MHz 6-Core Late 2013
FCP X

[Don Smith]

I would tend to agree with you Dave, but what about all the videos we’ve seen before getting our own new Mac Pro’s where new Mac Pros are playing smoothly through a load of unrendered effects? Where is that coming from?

NewsVideo.com

[Bret Williams]

If all the drives aren’t blinking at once, there is something awry with your Pegasus. It’s a raid 5. It’s writing to all drives at once, all the time. Could be some LEDs are burnt out or defective. But there’s something not right about it.

Put some media on the internal storage and see how that fares.

[Craig Alan]

Yeah their stuff is not exactly turn key but once its good it’s really good. Call Kristopher Bose. If you can’t find the support number let me know and I’ll dig it up.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.