[Cesar Hashimoto]

Thanks all for the help. Including the BlackMagic Design support team.

After many, many trials, we’ve come to the fact that one of the controllers was misbehaving. It is now working full power.

Cheers!

Cesar

[Cesar Hashimoto]

Hey, thanks for the follow up, guys.

We have reinstalled fresh system, sticked with QT 7.0.4 (I have the installer with me!), Mac OS X 10.4.5, tried a series of drivers and guess what. Shame sh**. No deal.

We’re gonna test the very same workstation with a different RAID array tomorrow, so we can tell if the problem is within the workstation or the storage itself.

This time it seems that QT is not the bad guy. :o)

I’ll post the results here.

Thanks!

Cesar

[Cesar Hashimoto]

Hey, I’m not THAT dumb. ;o)

The 2 arrays were striped together as ONE big 5.5TB volume using disk utility. So it is a RAID 50 setup. In fact it has the same configuration as many other uncompressed HD FCP workstations I’ve setup. But none of them were PCIe with QuickTime 7.1. They were AJA Kona 2, actually.

I did run the Blackmagic drive speed test and it returned about 300MBps for read and about 250MBps for write (not exactly but it was pretty much like that). That is well beyond the minimum througput necessary for 10-bit 4:2:2 uncompressed HD @ 1080p24 (which is about 125MBps). In fact, the results showed “25fps” for disk write @ 1080p24. And because the volume is fresh new, there shouldn’t be any bottleneck. Not for 30 seconds!

Did you read where I say the array wasn’t able to write the 100Mbps DVCPRO HD stream, and the internal SATA drive did handle it well? It isn’t just a matter of throughput.

There are many variables, unfortunately: QuickTime 7.1, Mac OS X 10.4.6, and the new PCIe bus, which is a big bet here. And I also read that Blackmagic Design didn’t test QuickTime 7.1 yet, so we’ll try to step down and do it again.

Back to work! :o) Any other tips?

Thanks anyway, Bob.

Cheers!

Cesar Hashimoto