Walter B. – Biggest S2S

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bill Crawford] “I’ve loaded the new drivers and formated the drive “fast” across all 5 drives. When writing to the new drive, only the first 4 LEDs light up on 0,1,2,3 drives. Does yours do this?”

As far as activity? Yes, 4 of the drives show activity while the 5th sits dormant as the +1 drive.

We’re not striped as JBOD, we’re still in the 4+1 setup so I would not expect to see the 5 drives show activity. If your “Capacity” is such that it shows hte full amount of all 5 drives, I would not worry about that light and assume it’s working as you have it set up.

That’s about the best I can give you. I’m not an engineer. 🙂

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Bill Crawford]

Thanks for the reply Walter.

Adam from Lacie tech support called back and confirmed that. It was a bit odd to see the 4 lights going when the drive was striped all 5 for fast using the new manager and driver. Didn’t quite seem right. If all 5 were striped together, it would make sense that they would all light up.

In addition, the read / write rates fell to barely 8 bit HD rates. Below what I had before under the old drivers and manager.

Adam had suggested before the call back to make it a jbod and strip under OSX. I did that and the read / write jumped way up. 210 mb/s on the read, and 198 mb/s on the writes. Much better than the internal fast raid setup in the S2S. Apparently the two offer the same – no protection for your data. So if you have a choice, at least as far as my box goes, the jbod wins out hands down in the speed test.

So for now, until they let me know if this is a result of some new bug and have a solution, the array will stay jbod and striped under OSX.

Thanks again,

Bill

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bill Crawford] “Adam had suggested before the call back to make it a jbod and strip under OSX. I did that and the read / write jumped way up. 210 mb/s on the read, and 198 mb/s on the writes. Much better than the internal fast raid setup in the S2S. Apparently the two offer the same – no protection for your data. So if you have a choice, at least as far as my box goes, the jbod wins out hands down in the speed test.”

That’s the same with all drive units. My new CalDigit S2VR HD unit gets 210MB/s Write and 233MB/s Read when in JBOD mode which is 50MB/s faster than anything else. I use FW800 drives right now as a backup for that unit for protection, but I’m going to start looking for other solutions for backup in the near future.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Mat @ lacie]

Hi Bill,
I confirm that the S2S is faster in JBOD (with drives striped through OS X Disk Utility) than in the automatic fast mode.

In JBOD you utilize all 5 drives. Fast mode utilizes only 4.

Thanks for your feedback.
Mat @ LaCie

[Bill Crawford]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for listening in.

I thought the latest drivers were allowing striping fast across all drives – was I mistaken in that note?

Bill

[Mat @ lacie]

Shame on me 🙂 You are correct, the latest driver allows the Fast mode to use the 5 drives. Good thing I am not in tech support 🙂

In that case I don’t know why only 4 LED are blinking – I’ll check with Product Team. Performance is still expected to be better in JBOD mode.

Mat @ LaCie

[Bill Crawford]

Hi Matt,

No problem. Everything is a moving target these days and keeping up is a bear.

Once you have an answer from the product team, feel free to contact me offline.

If not tech – are you on the sales side?

bill_crawford(at)harborpictures(dot)com

Thanks,

Bill