[Steve Modica]

It’s probably safe to assume that this is a sonnet driver bug. The next step would be to set keep_syms to 1 in nvram (google for the exact syntax). Then you’ll see the stack trace get filled in rather than being a bunch of hex addresses. Send this to sonnet for review. (what you have not isn’t very useful to them).
The kernel log may have other useful information (/var/log/kernel.log).

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

[Thomas Morter-Laing] “Very very interesting, so the ones at work may indeed have slightly better internals, even if the difference is only tiny. Do you randomly know if there’s a utility (windows or mac) that can give me some indication about what the internal drives are of these G-RAIDs? There a warranty sticker covering one of the screws :S”

The main difference is the rotational vibration sensor. That’s what allows the drive to keep its latency down while operating in a ganged environment. One day, we’ll all have SSDs and it won’t matter 🙂

To figure the drives out, it depends on the hardware setup. If the drives are *on* the SATA bus and the OS can see them as individual drives (that are software striped) you can see them in the system profile. If they are sitting on their own bus (hardware raid), then the OS can’t see them and no utility will be able to see them either. You’ll need the RAID vendors utility. Atto will show you the drive info for example.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Hitachi’s disk stuff was bought by WD. They are still running separately (making hitachi drives), but they are a WD company.

I’d open the chassis and see what you have in there.

Desktop (non-ES) drives will have issues with vibration. Other drives working in close proximity will cause latency issues for the heads. You will see this if you run “iosnoop -D” and watch the average latency on the reads.

If the drives aren’t Hitachi, then you’ll have higher latency relative to Hitachi Ultras. They are the best.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

In my opinion, the main difference is pricing. Apple’s cut the pricing so low, that the old style platform companies are struggling to compete. Sure, they might have better features or better match existing workflows, but new editors and new businesses are going to be attracted to the low price. In this context, “good enough” always wins.

So ultimately, if you can field a product that costs $299 that good enough and supportable, you are going to gut the companies who’s business models require a $1500 product.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

If you run “uname -a” in the terminal, does the output line end with x86_64 or i386? If it’s the latter, then you are booting 32 bit and that would explain some performance issues. You can force a 64 bit boot by holding down the 6 and 4 key at power up. (there are nvram settings to make it permanent)

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

One way to debug stuff like this is to open a terminal and run iosnoop:

$ sudo iosnoop -D

You’ll see a ton of stuff like this:

409 502 58833 R 141752216 28672 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
603 502 58833 R 141749976 53248 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
459 502 58833 R 141749736 24576 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
264 502 58833 R 141752360 4096 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview
400 502 58833 R 177961592 24576 Preview ??/A/MediaUI/..namedfork/rsrc
286 502 58833 R 175560496 4096 Preview ??/Fonts/Noteworthy.ttc/..namedfork/rsrc
273 502 58833 R 178331992 4096 Preview ??/Resources/TB_contentAndThumbs.pdf/..namedfork/rsrc
294 502 58833 R 178332488 8192 Preview ??/Resources/TB_zoomOut.pdf/..namedfork/rsrc
318 502 58833 R 141749624 8192 Preview ??/MacOS/Preview

This shows you what’s being read from where. Column 6 is the IO size. Column 7 is the app and column 8 is the filename. You can use this to be sure there’s nothing funny going on. The first column is the time (in usecs) that it took to complete the IO.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

I’ve used quickbooks for mac (currently 2009) for quite some time, although I don’t do bank downloads with it. I also use quicken essentials for mac (I hate it, but I don’t want the hassle of going to the new 2007 Mountain Lion supported version either).

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Small Tree has lots. It’s taken off since 10GbaseT came out. We do it to Titanium as well.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Have you built in the indirect costs? What percentage of your studio rent, phone bill, software costs, machine costs, healthcare, vacation time etc are you building into this? Don’t forget those overhead items. Your pricing sounds a lot like simple direct costs.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Doing military work at Small Tree, we learned an awful lot about accounting. The government makes us use a model called “cost plus fixed fee”. The way it works is like this:

You get a budget to do some work. You can submit an invoice against that budget each month.
On that invoice you will have:

Direct costs (labor, materials and things spent directly on the contract)
Fringe (a pro rated amount of your vacation, sick, healthcare etc based on the percentage of revenue derived from govt work multiplied by your labor hours)
Indirect/Independent R&D (a pro rated amount based on the “overhead” in your business not tied directly to the contract. You use a ratio of govt vs all business and multiply this percentage by all direct costs)
Fee (this is a pre-negotiated profit you get to add on)

I mention this because I think most independent contractors use a cost plus model. They figure it’ll take them X hours to do the job and they want $Y per hour. Ultimately, they are saying it’ll cost me X, so I’ll charge them X+(what I think is fair).

There’s a serious problem with this. If you only have one customer, it’s unlikely the X hours will fill all your time and a large portion of your indirect (and fringe) costs will go unmet.

To do it right, you must calculate all those costs and get them built in so you’re making enough money to survive and your customers are paying the true cost of the work. What’s covering your rent, property taxes, phone bill, machine depreciation, software costs etc? What happens when your machine is obsolete and you need a new one? Have you built up capital to buy one?

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications