Update – Conflict with AJA/Fusion 500P/TEMPO X4P

[David Telling]

Please could I get some help deciphering this email and it’s practical application to what I have been experiencing…

This is the email the Engineer at Sonnet (who looked over my System Logs sent) to their tech support phone people (who couldn’t really tell me what it meant).

“Ouch. The most obvious thing is the high number of errors on channel 0 – I don’t see any errors on Channel 2 at all (which is where he apparently has his second enclosure). He’s probably not going to like it, but can we detach the fusion 500 from port 0 – I don’t know why it would be problematic, but it just seems odd that all the errors are happening on that line – and a lot of errors it is. Almost every time the machines restarts, there are significant numbers of errors on channel 0.”

For clarification:
When he speaks of “errors” – where are these coming from?
Does this consequently translate to corrupt files being saved/stored on the drives?
Would these “errors” be transferred in the process of backing up from drive to drive?
I know I’m able to play back media files, and projects – but are these errors “in” those files and have therefore permanently screwed them up?
Am I in deep trouble here?

What should be my next step having received this feedback.

Thanks for helping to clear this up.

[Bob Zelin]

David –
this is not a SATA forum, nor is it a Sonnet Forum. I thank AJA and Creative Cow for not objecting to all this “OT” that does not relate to AJA products on their forum.

This is my opinion. You actually answered your own questions here when you said –

“And yes, after all of this, I did put the 5 x 500 Media RAID drives in the other enclosure to test that – Unfortunately…SAME PROBLEMS! ”

REPLY – you are in the middle of a big, important project, and you can’t reformat your drives, and you are crashing no matter what you do. I use SATA like this all day long without these problems. You have followed the correct steps – you have a 2nd computer, you have a second X4P card, you have a second Sonnet 500P chassis – AND IT IS STILL FAILING. You feel that this whole SATA thing is flakey.

But you have NOT REFORMATED – I can only ASSUME that there is something wrong with your media, and I don’t know what it is. In my OPINION, if you were to stick different drives in your system (or dedicate two drives for this test), and digitize NEW MATERIAL (not copy old media) onto these new drives, you would have NO PROBLEMS. This is easy for me to say, as I am not in the middle of a big paying job, that pays your bills – but this is how you will identify your issues. I was about to write “if I am wrong about this, you will need to do a ground zero reinstall of your OS, and FCP and try again” – but I am wrong, and you do not have to do this, as you have a SECOND MAC there, which serves the same purpose. I can ONLY ASSUME that there is something wrong with your media – and even though you transfer this material to other drives, and take the drives and put it into a second chassis, with a second X4P card, and a second eSATA cable, in a second computer, AND STILL HAVE PROBLEMS – it’s got to be your media.

The only other assumption anyone could have is that this entire Sonnet SATA think is a piece of flakey crap, and I can assure you that this is not the case (as many others on this list can confirm). In my opinion, you should not proceed any further without dedicating a couple of drives to REDIGITIZING media, to see if it works, or locks up. I don’t know what you have on the drive array with 2 drives striped RAID 0, and the 3 that are single drives, but if you can, I would reinit this array to RAID 0 all 5 drives, and REDIG YOUR MATERIAL (easier said than done) – and you will see that nothing locks up or crashes.

I RESOLVED THIS SIMILAR PROBLEM ON AN AVID THE OTHER DAY. AVID Meridian System MAC OS-X 10.2.6. System would not boot up – 4 Seagate SCSI 73 Gig drives. We play with the cables, and eventually get the system to boot. We can play material back from the drives, but we can’t write to them. They try to transfer the media off these drives, and the system crashes. As they continue to use the system, it keeps crashing, and the drives keep hanging up. I finally convince them to reinit the drives, where we split the RAID 0 of 4 drives into 2 groups of 2. I figure that one of the 2 groups will fail, and then I will identify which one is the bad drive. Once we reinit the drives, and they redigitize their media, THERE ARE NO MORE PROBLEMS ! No drives have failed for 4 days now. I don’t understand why corrupt media can make a drive fail, so that it even stops the system from booting up some times, but it did.

Pick 2 drives, take ALL OTHER DRIVES off system, redig, see how stable it is. I bet you have no problems.

I feel your pain.

If you wish to take this further, please email me off this forum at maxavid@cfl.rr.com.

Bob Zelin

[David Telling]

You are right Bob, I did initially think this could be an AJA/Tempo SATA compatibility issue but it’s clearly gone beyond that. I thank the forum leaders for not objecting to this thread, but I will now close it.

Thanks everyone….signing off!

[David Smith]

David,

While I certainly see Bob’s point about not continuing the OT thread here, I doubt I’m alone in saying I’ve followed the thread with great interest and a lot of wincing in empathy at your situation. When you have resolved things I sure would like to know what the problem(s) turned out to be.

I would also like to say, as one who once snapped back pretty strongly when Bob’s “old” style of reply was directed at me, that we all here are very lucky to have such a knowledgeable and generous person taking a great amount of his time to help people on these forums. The fact that such system building and troubleshooting is how Bob makes his living (or so I gather) and yet he spends such a great amount of time advising people for free here, is truly impressive and a testimony to his nature. Thank you Mr. Zelin.

Regards,
David