[John Davidson]

I decided to bite the bullet and get a 5770 Graphics card for the older mac pro, making it display port friendly. By taking out the two 24″ monitors and replacing them with the 27 and a FSI “17 next to it, it’s pretty great. Adjusting the windows on the screen to get the most out of it, I have to say we all like it better. We can finally make the most of expose and full screen apps now. Editing feels like a more intimate experience as well. Two 27’s just felt like too much width. Here’s a pic of the setup – client monitor is a 32” and is off to the left out of site.

I’m going to try it for a few weeks. So far we all really prefer it to the old way.

Almost looks like a fcpx setup!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

ATTO is not providing me with an RMA. The reseller doesn’t want to take it back without one, but as this was an amazon purchase, it looks like I’m going to have to eat a 20% restocking fee.

I think the worst thing about this is that I was a big ATTO fan. https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/71/861027

So let me show you the performance of the Areca 1882x card, which installed, initialized and worked right out of the gate with no problem.
This is a little off of the 900 Mb/s I was getting on an empty RAID. The RAID now has about 10 Tb’s of data on it.

[John Davidson]

WOW! It’s like watching his career explode in slow motion.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’ve no idea on the limit, but your actual limitations will probably come from reduced speeds across all drives if they’re all working at the same time. What are you trying to do?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Highpoint has no support and a confusing web interface which you’re aware of already.

The Areca has kind of a weird terminal app you have to run before you can get into the web interface to manage the RAID.

ATTO is good on support, but updating their drivers and firmware is kind of a pain.

They’re all different, but I do suggest getting 6Gbs drives and RAID card. Right now I’m liking the Areca 1882x. The benefit to the areca over the ATTO is that it has a built-in fan on the card and doesn’t get as blazing hot as the R680. I’ll be upgrading our enclosure to the 6Gbps one when ProAvio puts it out.

Here’s a real world test for you.
ATTO R380 (3Gbps)
Eight 16 2Tb WD Caviar Blacks (3Gps)
ProAvio 8ms (3Gpbs)
Speeds about 600 Mbps read/write.

Areca 1882x (6Gbps)
Eight Hitachi Deskstars (6gps)
ProAvio 8ms (3Gbps)
Speeds at 930 Mbps read/write.

I can only imagine the faster enclosure coming from ProAvio will increase my speeds even more, especially if I daisy chain two of them, which seems to be possible with the Areca 1882x. Each 6Gpbs drive reads/writes at about 120-140 Mbps alone, so the Areca is absolutely maximizing the speed of seven drives in RAID5 (the 8th drive being redundant, obviously).

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Yesterday we put in the Areca 1882x, which is a little overkill, but we’re getting a pretty awesome solid line on our AJA System Test graph at read/write of about 930Mb/s each. I’ll post a grab to show it off tomorrow when all our media is done copying back to it, because it’s awesome.

I really have to thank Jon and Luis at ProAvio again for their help. They’re responsibility was only with the enclosure which was never the problem, but they were still incredibly helpful in getting me up to speed and even offered to configure the system at their offices! Be sure to hit them up at NAB!

The bright side of all this is that I’ve learned Areca, Highpoint and ATTO setup procedures for RAID cards.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’d suggest you roll with it as Apple gives it to you, at least for a week. You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll get annoyed with unnatural scrolling once you get used to it.

Check this out – if you use the Magic Mouse, two finger tap opens up mission control. Two finger swipe on the mouse switches between spaces, and you can get your library folder back via a terminal command that google will provide you.

I’ve been rolling with Lion since the first beta and really like it a lot. For an OS that’s at .3, it’s pretty awesome. It’s also becoming more and more apparent that those who wish to customize and reject the apple way (logitech mice, DIY RAIDS, etc., are going to miss some of the most obvious and super easy features Apple products provide. So many folks reject the magic mouse, but man it’s so addictive. I never thought it would replace my logitech, but it did. Do yourself a favor and get ‘better touch tool’ for the trackpad. I added a five finger tap to CMD-W (close window) and 3 finger tape to ‘open in reader’ for Safari. You can also make app specific ones for the trackpad for things like insert edit, overwrite, etc. So so awesome.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Last night at 2am the initialization completed with only a single error requiring a restart to continue. I then ran the RAID maintenance utility from ATTO to confirm it was healthy. The utility said the RAID was healthy. Then I ran AJA System test – and on the 2,4,6 and 8 gig tests results were somewhat erratic, but halfway through every single 16g test, the RAID would unmount, I’d get a warning about improperly ejected disk, and then a minute or two later it would remount.

So I went into the office at 2am to swap out the RAID card with the older Highpoint 4322 that had been in the system for a year until last weeks “upgrade”.

Initializing didn’t work on the Highpoint for some odd reason, but all drives were seen and reported excellent temperatures and healthy smart status. So today I took out each drive, dropped them into a mac pro one at a time, and formatted/tested individually to see if there was a problem. Each drive has it’s own ‘personality’ on AJA system test, but all were essentially normal. I have screen grabs of each.

I put everything back in, went back into the highpoint manager to create a new RAID, skipped initialization and used old data, and instantly the drive was there and ready to rock. Speed tests were slower than the R680 when it works, but were more consistent than I’ve actually ever gotten from this highpoint card. For whatever reason, the Highpoint wouldn’t complete the initializing, but at least I knew the drives were fine. I’m not interested in using the Highpoint any more anyways.

I also switched the cables with another room and added a new one, just to rule out the cables.

The resolution to this snipe hunt is that I grabbed the ProAvio box w/ drives, plugged it into the other edit suite with a R380, and lo and behold all my drives look good and it easily and swiftly began the initialization process via Express Initialization, which lets you mount a drive and use it at a slower rate when initializing. The RAID works great now. No dropping. No faults.

Obviously, I got a bad R680. It’s a bit annoying that “do I have a bad card” was the first thing I asked ATTO before they told me my problem was possibly related to the heat warnings. Ironically, their software that isn’t capable of telling the actual temperature of a drive (even Highpoint seems to have that down). These 3Tb Hitachis have been out a while, are recommended for RAID by Hitachi, and ATTO should know that their system erroneously reports wrong temperatures for this very common drive. Further, I got no answer when I asked what could possibly be knocking the RAID offline, presumably because the answer is “You got a bad card”. This could have also been a bit easier if the download link for the R680 driver and maintenance utility had actually worked on the ATTO website last weekend. I understand faulty products get put out all the time by every manufacturer, but if I made RAID cards, I’d test it with virtually every drive in the world – there are only 2 or 3 companies that make hard drives, after all.

The process of building a DIY RAID is always a bit challenging, but I did my homework and still got hammered by it. Areca, here I come.

For what it’s worth, our editing iMac w/ Promise Pegasus RAID5 came pre striped and worked right out of the gate, no configuration required. I hope ProAvio has a Thunderbolt enclosure coming down the pipes soon. Their tech support is fantastic.

[John Davidson]

So, new drivers came out, I installed them, my RAID faulted, then rebuilding crashed, and now I’m just reinitializing the entire RAID and hoping that it doesn’t report ‘faulted’ during initialization and require system restart over and over again as it did last night.

I installed the 64 bit flash firmware, and then noticed that my Lion kernel was at 32 bit, so I changed that and am now officially running 64bit kernel. I was not aware that Lion still ran 32 bit kernel.

ATTO said some people had problems with the firmware released in December. The new firmware is dated 1/24/12.

Hitachi has no idea how their drives report smart temperature. None. I’m not actually surprised about this. Big corporations are awesome.

Luis and Jon at ProAvio are awesome, as always. Thank you for helping me!!! Steven from ATTO has also been really good about directing me to potential issues. Hopefully their new firmware fixes all.

As a last resort I still have the old Highpoint RAID card laying around. If I get more faults on the current initializing (right now at 12% with no faults yet) I’m going to rebuild the RAID using that card to make sure it’s not a bad drive (I’ve replaced three already, but I don’t even know if they were really bad). If it weren’t for the fact that ProAvio gets such excellent performance from the combo (Read/write is 1000 and the graph line is beautiful) I’d have run for the hills.

At this point it’s entirely possible that I have a wonky R680. While hard drives are definitely in short supply, I just can’t imagine that I’d get so many bad drives in a single delivery. After the next initialization and running the RAID Maintinance App from ATTO, if there are STILL issues, I’ll take out each drive and put them inside a mac pro. At least that way I’ll be able to officially rule out the drives as the culprit.

Here’s a grab of the AJA speed test results I was getting. If I used the 16Gb test, sometimes it would just knock the RAID offline. Lame.

This is what Luis at ProAvio is getting with the same setup. Look at that gorgeous line!

Forgive the length of this, I’m merely trying to document as much as possible for other readers who encounter issues in the future. I’ll continue documenting further developments.

[John Davidson]

My understanding is that the ATTO cards are supposed to crank up the internal fans to full blast to compensate for the lack of on board fan. My issue is related to drives in a RAID 5 ProAvio enclosure. As we had a second room with WD drives and a second identical 8MS enclosure, this is what we’ve done to isolate the issue:

1. Swapped enclosures. It’s not a faulty enclosure issue, drives still claim to be hot.
2. Plugged the RAID into a R380 card. Drives still look hot ( ATTO Config SMART says 211 degrees on some drives, even when cold).
3. Swapped drives with 2Tb WD Caviar Black into the R680, all chilling at a nice 111 degrees. It’s not an ATTO issue.

At best I can isolate the issue to being specific to how Hitachi Drives report SMART status temperature, as in real life they are not hot. With this in mind, I’m just disabling SMART status monitoring, as it seems to be only really good at giving incorrect information.

We just got two new drives in. I’ll be removing the drive claiming to be the hottest and rebuilding the array tonight. With a little luck, we’ll be back to nice even read / write lines and can move on to deal with other looming disasters.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.