[Mark Crabtree]

We have an Atto 8500 8gig fiber san. Three edit stations and one dedicated metadata master. The master is an 8 core intel machine running win xp 64 and the edit systems are 8 core intel machines running windows 7 64 bit. We are editing with Adobe cs4 Premiere and After Effects. We were getting a problem when all machines were running xp 64 that when you saved a project it would not really save. We upgraded one of the three edit stations to windows 7 as part of our beta testing cs5. We noticed that the windows 7 machine did not have this problem. So we decided to update all of our machines to widows 7. We had huge issues with slow file transfers, slow file reading with all machines as window 7, so we rolled back our metadata master to xp 64. This solved most of our problems but it is far from perfect. We get sometimes slow to connect to the san, we get sometimes slow file reads. We did search the web on windows 7 issues and found certain “fixes”, like the best drivers for using legacy hardware like firewire drives, and like setting windows explorer not show too much detail when looking at file structures, but nothing really fixes all our issues. There seems to be a lot of agreement that windows 7 has issues with large files. This is why we moved our metadata master back to xp 64. We also made a separate ethernet network using each computers second ethernet connection and a separate business class switch to keep all the metadata away from our internet traffic. Still we have issues connecting and we have issues running at performance speeds. When only one edit machine is running, making it the metadata master, we have NO problems. We’ve talked to Tiger as well, even letting them be a remote user, but they have not found any problems. Anyone have any ideas?