[Chris Gordon]

OS X normally mounts removable drives with the “noowners” option. This ignores any file ownerships on the entire volume. From “Get Info” on the drive, uncheck the “Ignore ownership on this volume” option in “Sharing & Permissions”. The following article has some discussion on this. Hopefully this will help some. I’m also assuming you’ve formatted the drives as HFS+. FAT does not have permissions/owners.

https://www.peachpit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=mac&seqNum=256

[Chris Gordon]

Technically you should be able to. Just get a Parallel ATA (PATA) drive and it should just plug right in. You may also see these labeled as ATA or some version of ATA100, ATA133, etc. A number of years ago, everyone started moving to serial ATA (SATA) and these are going to be the drives you will find everywhere now and that is NOT what you want. Here’s a link from Newegg of PATA drives:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007603%20600003442&IsNodeId=1&name=IDE%20Ultra%20ATA100%20%2f%20ATA-6

Now the question is why? Depending on what your use case is for this drive and enclosure, you may get better bang for your buck just getting all new (something with SATA drive(s) inside). Just something to consider.

Disclaimer: You really need to check the details of the Lacie enclosure to know what it can take. You didn’t post the exact model of the enclosure, so my answer above is based on what I’ve generally seen across other similar enclosures.

[Chris Gordon]

I have an epson 2400 and found that it can be a bit finicky with some USB hubs. Plugging it into an onboard USB port resolved the problem. I experienced the same types of issues you described above. My scanner doesn’t have firewire, so I can’t comment on that.

Good luck.

Chris

[Chris Gordon]

If it’s the same image you want on the different monitors — exact mirrors of each other — look for something called a display splitter. These will take one video input, say from your computer, and duplicate the output to some number of ports (2 and 4 port are very common) where you can plug in monitors. This is fare more simple and far cheaper than trying to use many discrete video cards or multiple computers.

Hope that helps.

[Chris Gordon]

Like John said, the mailbox going on and offline a lot is probably some kind of network issue or problem with the server (service) you are using.

If you really want to “trash prefs”, you can. You need to get two different places (where ~ is your home directory, typically /Users/[username]):
~/Library/Prefrences/com.apple.mail.plist
~/Library/Mail/
This will also nuke any mail you have stored locally and indexes and cached mail for remotely stored (IMAP, Exchange) accounts.

Though “trashing prefs” seems to be something that makes Final Cut less grumpy at times, I’ve not run into a case where that is really needed or useful for Mail or any thing else (maybe I’ve just been lucky).

If you have other questions or want to be more precise about what gets trashed, let me know and i can help dig those details out.

[Chris Gordon]

Have you tried now.netapp.com? Assuming your array is under support, you should be able to get an account and get access to all of the technical documentation and other support items. NetApp support or your sales rep should be able to help you get an account if you’re having trouble.

Considering you weren’t aware of now.netapp.com and that NetApp pushes this pretty hard, I would HIGHLY encourage you to either pay NetApp professional services to come do the work or otherwise hire an experienced consultant to come do the work. NetApps are pretty easy to work on, but like anything, if you don’t know what you’re doing you could end up with big time data loss.

If you’re gong to run this and other arrays, do the following:
– Make sure they are under vendor support
– Go to the vendor’s training and learn how the things work
– When you’re not sure what you’re doing or have doubts, get someone that does know. This may cost money, but better than losing data and losing your job (and possibly jeopardizing others’ jobs)!

[Chris Gordon]

Thank you! That seems to solve the problem, at least in the bit of testing I’ve done so far.

[Chris Gordon]

When you’re thinking of long term archival storage, don’t forget you need to make sure you have equipment and software that can actually read and use the data you’ve archived. Do you end up keeping your own inventory of parts and equipment to access the older formats or do you do data migrations to new formats? Both can be expensive. Also, don’t forget you need to periodically check the media and make sure everything is still ok on it. Over time there are various things that will happen that will render that digital archive useless. This can again, be expensive to do — periodically go through the media and make sure everything is ok, writing data to new media (may be same type, but just media that isn’t worn out from reads/writes) to be ahead of failures. Archiving can be very expensive well beyond just the cost of the media used.

As for 3 years, that is a very common “lifespan” for equipment. You find that after 3 years, failure rates will start increasing as things wear out. For equipment you buy support for, 3 years is often the initial term you can buy. After that you’re buying another round of support that is sometimes more expensive than buying new gear (not blaming a vendor selling support — if failures are far more likely, they need to cover that cost). At work, we put a 3 year life on the vast majority of the servers we buy. After 3 years of operation, we replace them. This helps avoid failures of aging machines, keeps with modern hardware that is supported by newer software, and is tied to our financials (depreciation schedules, etc). For some select gear, we use a 5 year schedule. These numbers are very common throughout the IT industry, so it’s not surprising that the numbers work out that way for your scenario.

But to your initial assertion, archiving is expensive especially when you have a constantly growing archive requirement. There’s no way around that. Storage has gotten far far cheaper over time, but if rate of your archive growth is greater than the rate of storage cost reductions, you’re on the expensive side of the equation.

Chris

[Chris Gordon]

Just for comparison, I have no extra FX installed from anywhere. Just what came with the demo of FCP X.

[Chris Gordon]

Media (I’ve had issues with both):
– h.264 from Canon 60D at 1080p 29.97 fps with 48 kHz PCM audio. Transcoded by FCP X to ProRes (both full ProRes and Proxy files). Both are in Quicktime containers as expected.
– DV (16:9 anamorphic) at 29.97 fps with 48 kHz PCM audio in a Quicktime container. FCP X did create proxy files for this, I’m guessing since I have that selected in preferences (just playing with FCP X to see how it works, so no specific reason for this).

My machine:
– 2088 Mac Pro
– 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad Core CPU
– 10 GB RAM
– NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB Video
– OS X 10.7.1

I’m just using the trial of FCP X 10.0.1). The crashes only occur when using effects. Sometimes I can add effects and not get a crash, but after a couple of effects I always get a crash. Once I get a crash, anytime I select that clip in the storyline, I get the crash.

I’ve submitted bug reports to Apple on this. I really like the program, but I’m not going to pay for it until it’s stable. When it is stable, though, I do plan to purchase it and Motion.