USB 3.0 external Mac safe 2 bay RAID 0

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

[Fabrizio D'Agnano] “I own a couple of USB 3.0 2 bay arrays, but they keep disconnecting randomly, most of the times after being put to sleep, sometimes during common operations.”
Maybe this can be interesting for anther people having problems with disconnecting USB 3.0 drives. I flashed the firmware on my two 2 bay RAID’s to a version with “no sleep after 15 min”.
I had no problems today, I’ll check them more thoroughly next week.

Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy
early 2008 MacPro, BM Intensity Pro, early 2008 iMac, 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Monitor, FCP7, FCPX, OSX 10.9.4

[Charles Ford]

I recently purchased a new iMac, a very fast machine. I was excited about using the USB 3.0 but then my drives kept dissconnecting. I couldn’t even upload my CF cards without it dissconnecting after four or five files. I searched for a solution and found none. I eventually switched to the USB 2.0 connections.

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

Before asking on the CC forum I searched a lot, and it seems it is a wide problem. Some address it to the OS, some to other reason. I found suggestions pointing to different approaches to the problem, from disabling App Nap to disabling “stop drives when possible”, but no real definitive solution. Today I worked all day with my raid with firmware flashed to “no sleep”, and everything was fine. However I was curious to know from other members of the forum about units that work flawlessly. I can’t believe it’s an OS problem that Apple did not solve after several OS upgrades in such an important area, nor that nobody is using USB 3.0 drives for editing.

Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy
early 2008 MacPro, BM Intensity Pro, early 2008 iMac, 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Monitor, FCP7, FCPX, OSX 10.9.4

[Bill Ravens]

Google “KeepDriveSpinning”. It’s a free app that simply creates a launch agent that tells OS X to touch a hidden file on the selected drive once every minute so that the drive stays awake. Works great for me when a firmware update isn’t available.

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

Thank you Bill.
I’ll try it immediately. By the way, today my flashed firmware RAID failed again, this time while working, so I’m not sure it’s a sleep problem. An external USB 3.0enclosure with a single 2.5″ drive seems not to suffer this issue, and does not get disconnected even if the Mac goes to sleep.
What SB 3.0 unit are you using?

Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy
early 2008 MacPro, BM Intensity Pro, early 2008 iMac, 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Monitor, FCP7, FCPX, OSX 10.9.4

[Gary Adcock]

[Fabrizio D'Agnano] “An external USB 3.0enclosure with a single 2.5″ drive seems not to suffer this issue, and does not get disconnected even if the Mac goes to sleep”

USB3.0 is not designed for use with raid sets, while some manufacturers have had some success,the majority of 3rd party USB3 solutions will not support software raided multi-disc volumes. It’s the best reason to go with Thunderbolt connectivity on newer computers for Video applications.

gary adcock
Studio37

Post and Production Workflow Consultant
Production and Post Stereographer
Chicago, IL

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[Craig Alan]

My understanding is there is no way to use a thunderbolt raid with an older Mac Pro (tower) Processor 2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Memory 28 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC Graphics NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2048 MB

We use pegasus raids and OWCMETB7DH4.OT thunderbolt/ usb 3 raids in our studio and I need to bring projects or files home with me to the Mac Pro.

Would these be an option?:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/CalDigit/FASTA6GU3PRO/

OWCMETB7DH4.OT thunderbolt/ usb 3 raids

AVC-Intra 100 1080p60/30

3 camera multicam clips in FC. Will it be able to handle this?

An internal 2 drive software raid on the mac pro was able to handle it. Not super fast but I could edit the multicam.

But for projects I’m bringing to and from the studio this would get tedious.

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.