[Vincent Robinson]

I’ve run into this in a Lab situation — 4 of 10 machines hit with it. All iMacs (iMac 7,1; 2.4ghz, 4gbRAM; CS6). Haven’t tried the intriguing fixes in this thread yet, but found a sequence that worked with at least one of the machines (will be trying it on the others next week): Projects are normally edited in a “standard” account, where the error was cropping up. Tried opening and playing clips under an “administrator” account and they played properly. Then, trying them under the standard account, they suddenly worked.

What I don’t yet know is whether whatever was rectified by the operating in the enhanced permissions environment only fixes that particular project (in this case, on an external FW drive), or whether the issue is fixed for the machine as a whole. I’ll report back to this thread what I find.

Hope this helps others, too.

[Vincent Robinson]

Thank you, Alex. Yes, I’d have hoped to have run across this issue if it were common to this combination, so it’s heartening to hear of at least one specific instance where they’re working well (and your client’s setup is indeed *very* similar to mine — only real difference would seem to be the backplane, but I think I’ve established that’s not the issue in my case).

Vincent

[Vincent Robinson]

As it stands, I *hope* it’s the expander controller, though I can’t see that it’s anything else at this point. It’s just such a strange — and consistent — pattern that I’m worried it’s a very obscure incompatibility rather than a bad board. But if so, I’d be pretty surprised, since were talking about (essentially), an Areca-to-Areca communication. It does underscore that these systems are not off-the-shelf combinations, and hence the role of folks who do higher-end configuration regularly. The cost in my time, unfortunately, would have paid for the difference. Couldn’t have known that, though — felt I’d done due diligence, in terms of research.

Thank you for the response. I’ll update this when I have a more definitive conclusion.

Vincent

[Vincent Robinson]

This will be a wordy post, but this thread, and this forum, seem by far the most apropos for my situation of any source I’ve found in scouring the web. Thanks in advance if you make it all the way through.

I’m using a similar setup to folks here, but am a little further back in process due to a very strange issue. The setup is a Mac Pro 1,1 with a pristine install of 10.6.8, an ARC-1882x and a 24-bay SAS-expander enclosure. The enclosure is powered by an ARC-8026, with 6 internal connections to each of the 6 rows of 4 disks apiece. Populated the enclosure with brand new WDC Red drives (2TB, 3 yr warranty — not desktop, but not entirely enterprise either; best I could do on a non-profit budget). Connection from host is with a single mini-SAS cable, as you’d expect.

First spinup, all drives seen by the host card. Initialized a test array (RAID 5) using all 24 disks. After perhaps 5 minutes of an unresponsive interface (the Areca web interface everyone’s familiar with), found the raid set created, but controller had marked 6 drives as “failed.” Seemed incredible that fully 1/6th of a batch of newly minted drives could truly be bad. Tried swapping drives to different bay positions, marked everything as “unfailed,” power cycled, etc. and got the same result. After several variations with the same outcome, noticed a bizarre pattern: failures were always at same position: the left-most drive of each row (enclosure has 4 columns, 6 rows) would always “fail.” Could, in the end, successfully create an 18 drive RAID 5 volume if I avoided the 1st column of drives (1 per row — also 1 per backplane subcontroller). Filled that volume to the brim with test data without any issues. Tried setting the recalcitrant 6 as pass-throughs, each still failed out.

I’ve been talking with Areca, an Areca distributor, and the enclosure manufacturer, all of whom have been reasonably responsive — but no one has had a clear answer. I’ve tried a second ARC-1882x with the same results. I’m now in the midst of trying to bypass the enclosure’s ARC-8026 (sas-expander controller) and connect the ARC-1882x directly to each backplane sets (4 drives each), one at a time. So far (2 tests of 6 available rows of drives), it’s working (i.e., can intialize and read & write to the resulting RAID 5 volumes). If that pattern persists, it points to the ARC-8026 in the enclosure.

But — has anyone come across anything remotely like this? It’s strange — and as you can imagine, been frustrating and incredibly time consuming.

thanks,

Vincent