[John Davidson]

According to the engineers an Enhance (as of last week), the ATTO R380 does not work well with Western Digital 2Tb drives Something about the intel chipset not getting along well with the card. Go with Hitachi perhaps, or get the Areca card. Just put together my system on a 12 core and it’s great. The Kona 3 is very happy.

[John Davidson]

OWC (macsales.com) has some interesting esata connection kits that might work. Probably easiest thing for you to do would be to get a FW800 4TB GRaid hard drive off Amazon. I have one and it’s pretty good. If you get two, you can run time machine as a backup of the other.

[John Davidson]

Here’s something crazy. I’m building a new edit system now that the 12 Cores are out. I picked up the ATTO R380 and 8 Caviar Black 2Tb drives to go in my ProAvio 8MS box (upgrades from 1Tb Caviar blacks). Unfortunately, Enhance’s engineer Louis told me that the WD Caviar Black 2Tb drives won’t work well with the ATTO R380 controller – but will work GREAT with the Highpoint or Areca cards. Apparently the issue is in the intel chip the controller uses – it doesn’t like the WD 2Tb drives. Hitachi Ultrastars would be a fine substitution.

I have to say, the Enhance guys got back to me by 10:30am – within 2 hours of getting my email. And yes, we all had a good laugh about Highpoint’s non-existant tech support. Terrible though they are, the highpoint card has worked solid for me for almost 2 years now. That said, I think I’m going to go with the Areca because at least they have a phone that rings when my drives inevitably die.

So the lesson is, it’s always good to ask.

[John Davidson]

I’m in the process of teaching my nephew about all this stuff in a kind of mentoring capacity. I was trying to look for a book that would teach all the stuff he’d need to know just to turn on final cut and not be thwarted by a red line in a sequence. Frame rates, codecs, data rates, RAIDs, uploading, etc. I don’t think that book exists, and if it did, you’d have to rewrite it every 2 weeks.

I guess you just gotta scrape your knees and learn things the hard way – or find an master/apprentice scenario like in the days of old.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[John Davidson]

I for one think the industry is fantastic right now. Our income is better than ever, we’re winning awards, our clients are happier than ever with our work, and the future is very bright. It is not all gloom and doom. The storyteller has more and better options than he’s ever had before. Embrace that!

If you’re starting out, it might be smart to find a job outside of the larger markets that lets you experiment in lots of various realms within the industry (Nashville, Atlanta, Denver). Shooting, graphics, editing, etc – the roles are merging and the more you know the better off you’ll be. Build up an aesthetic sense – find the people who really know their stuff (they’ll usually be the quiet ones that aren’t talking about how great they are), and learn from them. Experiment. Have fun.

Even in a bad economy, cream still rises to the top. Nobody ever makes good money starting out, so plan on having roomates, a crappy car, and near squalor living conditions for a few years. You’ll look back on those days with fondness. Top Ramen tastes good when flavored with hope and dreams.

[John Davidson]

I’ve actually given up on everyone, young and old. See you in Galt’s Gulch, Nick!

[John Davidson]

Sorry, it’s called DMG Chop.
Check it out.
https://www.soft32.com/download_192750.html

The torrent idea won’t work – you’d need several hosts across multiple locations feeding simultaneously, not multiple computers at a single location. Chop DMG will break a 3 gig file into multiple files of whatever size you want. All you have to do is make a disk image out your file in Disk Utility (a DMG), then run DMG Chop on it to break it into as many smaller files as you need. Upload your files via YSI. When all files are downloaded on the other end, the user only has to click the first file (which should have a name like 30spot-open me) and their mac will rebuild the original file – nobody on the receiver end has to install anything. This works – and you don’t have to get some insanely expensive T1 line.

If you’re on a PC, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t do PC’s. Try kicking it.

ps- I have no idea why my subject changed earlier to that HDW subject. Sorry!

[John Davidson]

I don’t think I’ll ever buy Seagate again from that experience. Their drives froze and had major issues, especially in a RAID, and Seagate ignored the problem for the longest time. I won’t buy internal seagate drives if I can help it because of this experience.

WD isn’t much better though. They put this smartware crap on their external drives that require an act of God and the sacrifice of your firstborn to remove. Even then, I still couldn’t get it off. That smartware stuff screws with Time Machine. I wish drive manufacturers would focus on their hardware and leave the software to the OS.

The 2TB greenpower WD drive has been great as an internal Time Machine backup in the Mac Pro, for what it’s worth.

[John Davidson]

If a 700 meg file with YSI (you send it) comes in at 11 minutes, a two gig file comes in at about 25 minutes. This is on regular old Time Warner / road runner southern california internet.

Here are some handy questions for slow receivers to troubleshoot their download speed if you send a file.

1. Are you on DSL? DSL is the worst.
2. Do you use comcast and pay for super fast speed? Well, Comcast in your area might be throttling specific sites like ‘you send it’ (Google ‘net neutrality’).
3. Are you using a wireless internet connection on the computer you’re downloading? Try using an ethernet connection to the router/modem rather than wireless. It can make a HUGE difference.
4. What speed results does ‘speedtest.net’ give you? It will help identify slow connections quickly.
5. Are you on a mac and most of your IT guys are pc people? PC IT guys are notorious for handicapping macs – because they can’t admit they have no idea what they’re doing.

Most FTP hosts (like host gator, etc) can almost hit 1 meg per second on a download, but since those systems are feeding multiple sites off of one or two servers, they will rarely go faster than that (most go much slower actually – in the 100kbps – 600kpbs range). With YSI I’m hitting 1.3 mbps consistently. I believe my nephew in Bucheon, SKorea had 80mbps download speeds and was able to go even faster than 1.3. I’d be interested in seeing what speeds you guys get on your downloads.

Many networks I’ve worked with have their own internal ftp. One network has a fantastic one. Downloads came off their server ridiculously fast, and uploads fully maximized my upload bandwidth. Large files didn’t have a limit on size. Another network’s is throttled to a specific speed and if you go over 1 gig in file size, the upload will drop. Their internet speeds internally are also slower, so when I send a YSI file, it takes nearly an hour for them to download a 1 gig file.

There’s not going to be a perfect system unfortunately. I like You Send It because it’s fast and easy. Net Neutrality isn’t going to happen it looks like, so I doubt it’s going to get easier for us to find a consistent method of online delivery. We will all have to have multiple options for uploading and transferring files. I currently use mobile me (slowest), 2 FTP services, and You Send It.

[John Davidson]

Thanks. I was one of the first to build a RAID out of those 2Tb Green Power drives from WD and ended up returning them all as their spin speeds were never declared (turned out to be around 5400 instead of 7200, with a delay when spinning up that sucked). I also built a RAID with 1.5 Tb Seagates which, surprise, sucked as well and had some nasty issues. After those two burns, I let the 2TB Caviar Blacks sit on the market for a while. There’s nothing worse than having to RMA 10 or 12 hard drives, twice. Well…except sending them back in a third time.