2x RED Drives 320 on 1x Mac Pro Tower - PROBLEM!

[Leo Reyes]

I just purchased a new Mac Pro tower.

Specs:
3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xenon
4GB's RAM
2TB Hard Drive Space
LaCies 4Port eSata PCI Express Card
Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
R3D Data Manager

I've tried connecting two RED drives to the tower via FW800 (tower has two ports, front and back). But once I have one mounted and I connect the second one, the first one un-mounts. Yes, I'm using the power supply for both drives.

Am I only allowed to connect 1x RED drive at once?

I'm working on a feature that has 2x RED MX cameras shooting 4.5k WS RC42.
In order to keep up with file managing I purchased this tower as a 2nd system.

Does anyone know why it would unmount?

I'd love to be able to connect both RED Drives and be copying the media over to my GRAID drives all at once.

-Leo

 

[Jay Gannon]

Never been able to get this to work myself either.
I just work around it., usually with an extra MacPro if its absolutely needed to keep up with the shooting (Only happened once)

 

[James Burton]

Hi Leo,
As you hint, the one power supply for both drives is a suspect.
I suggest first trying with two decent separate power supplies.
If that don't work, then maybe its a naming conflict when the second drive attempts to mount.
To find out where your drives mount, open the mac's terminal utility and enter "mount" on a new line. This will list where your drives are mounted in your file system. Obviously, each drive needs to map to a different location.
You can manually mount drives to other locations with the mount command, it's just an old all too brief unix command, but is well documented on the net.
cheers
james

 

[TANYA MORUGY]

Hi,

You said that you used the fire-wire 800 interface but the LaCies 4Port eSata PCI Express Card has only 4 esata connections, so
are using a raid system on the Express card at the same time?.
These are my genaral experiances with two external esata drives in a raid enclosure.
I have had numerous problems with two esata drives at a time both P.C and Mac.
They would mount ok then after a time the second one would drop out
I think that the e-sata cable interface design is very weak.
I notice that when I pressed the dropped drives cable in it would some times remount.
I also had a single power supply for both drives and although the tec spec say it should be ok I think each drive should have its own supply.
I think when both drives are working hard there is a power supply shortage.
Take a look at your cables and see if they are flimmsy like all the ones I have seen.
I was told that the connections are either gold or gold plated and because of the high price of gold the coatings are now very thin and dont connect properly(nearly all my external drive problems have been with cables, there is a lot of poor quality cables out there).I buy new cables regularly.
I slipped in a thin piece of stiff paper and it improved reliability(not suggesting you do this).
I have also noticed that because of the week design of the esata port/connection
continued pluging in and unpluging it soon deteriorates.
To check that its not the file structure on the drop out drive change the order in which you connect and see if the one or two drive drops,
This test worked with my external raid setup but may not be conclusive with yours, if not then two different red drives would do assuming
that you have such facilities.
For drive reliabilty I always format before each new project, some people dont.

Tanya

 

[Leo Reyes]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Hi Leo,
As you hint, the one power supply for both drives is a suspect.

Actually, what I meant was. I'm using a power supply for each drive.
A001 has its own power supply and B001 has its own power supply.

James, I will look into this terminal mounting suggestion.

Hi,
You said that you used the fire-wire 800 interface but the LaCies 4Port eSata PCI Express Card has only 4 esata connections, so
are using a raid system on the Express card at the same time?.

Tanya

Tanya, Yes, I have 2 GRaid Drives connected to the system via LaCie's 4port eSata connections.

I've uninstalled the card and still gave me the same problems.

Once again to clarify.

I plug drive A into FW800 (front of Mac Pro) with its own power cable.
This mounts properly as it should. Then...
I plug drive B into FW800 (rear of Mac Pro) with its own power cable.

This is when drive A un-mounts unexpectedly.

 

[sander kamp]

Have the same problem and never been able to mount more than one red drive. Really annoying when one drive disappears in the middle of copying.

 

[TANYA MORUGY]

Hi,
I know that you dont want to use usb(slow) but I would connect the Red drives via usb to test mounting and file structure at the same time eliminating possible Fw8 problems.

You can shoot me if I am wrong but I thought that the Reds hardives were configured in a raid 0.

Tanya

 

[Herring]

As far as I know all Firewire ports on a Mac are routed via the same controller. I solved a similar problem by connecting two drives on two different Firewire controllers. You can do this by installing an extra PCI board with additional Firewire800 ports.
A Firewire PCI Express card is only $75, it's worth the try.

Cheers,
Joost van Herwijnen

 

[Gunleik Groven]

It does for som reason not work.

Another FW bu solves it.

Copy to eSATA speeds things up considerably. USB2 for the second disk is sorta unusable, but faster han serial downloadning of the disks.

G

 

[PaulClements]

I believe the Red Drives have the same signature. Probably something to do with the formatting that Red do internally to the drives (It seems you can't simply put two new HDD's in and format on a camera). As such if put on the same bus the Mac rejects it as being the same drive.

This can actually cause massive corruption to the files on those drives. Avoid Avoid Avoid!

Paul

 

[Gunleik Groven]

I believe the Red Drives have the same signature. Probably something to do with the formatting that Red do internally to the drives (It seems you can't simply put two new HDD's in and format on a camera). As such if put on the same bus the Mac rejects it as being the same drive.

This can actually cause massive corruption to the files on those drives. Avoid Avoid Avoid!

Paul

Is this also the case when connected through different bus'es?

I tried to use an ethernet connection from a laptop to be able to copy from more drives/cards simultaniously, but the copies were not verifyable.
Any ideas why?
But copying from usb/fw at the same time has given good results...

Seems the drives are a bit individual as to what USB copy-speed they give, though (having a new 640, a newish/late 320 and a first gen 320 to choose from)

The 640 def gives the best USB copy speeds.

 

[Frederick Giles]

You need to install a PCI Firewire bus too connect two red drives. This is the only way you will get both drives to mount as the same time using firewire. Your other option is to buy a red drive esata cable to connect the second drive, this would be more expensive but you would have faster transfers than through Firewire 800.

Rock on

 

[Leo Reyes]

Hi,
I know that you dont want to use usb(slow) but I would connect the Red drives via usb to test mounting and file structure at the same time eliminating possible Fw8 problems.

Tanya

No, USB2.0 is way out of the question. Very slow!

As far as I know all Firewire ports on a Mac are routed via the same controller. I solved a similar problem by connecting two drives on two different Firewire controllers. You can do this by installing an extra PCI board with additional Firewire800 ports.
A Firewire PCI Express card is only $75, it's worth the try.

Cheers,
Joost van Herwijnen

Joost, I might have to try and add more FW800. That's an idea.

I believe the Red Drives have the same signature. Probably something to do with the formatting that Red do internally to the drives (It seems you can't simply put two new HDD's in and format on a camera). As such if put on the same bus the Mac rejects it as being the same drive.

This can actually cause massive corruption to the files on those drives. Avoid Avoid Avoid!

Paul

Paul, I've tried doing it with drives that have been downloaded and backed up. Thanks for the heads up though!


Overall, I think I'm going to stick to 1 drive per download station.

 

[Leo Reyes]

You need to install a PCI Firewire bus too connect two red drives. This is the only way you will get both drives to mount as the same time using firewire. Your other option is to buy a red drive esata cable to connect the second drive, this would be more expensive but you would have faster transfers than through Firewire 800.

Rock on

I looked into this. B&H has one. I haven't reached that point where I'll spend the $250 for the cable. http://tinyurl.com/2umhfj7

I'll try adding another PCI-E FW800 card first.

 

[TANYA MORUGY]

Hi
I didnt mean use usb for editing, only to test file structure and mounting so as to
eliminate these posibilities.
If these two drives have been part of a raid o setup it would be possible that they
could never work this way.
From what info I have seen about red drives they are set in a raid 0.
I have never seen a Red drive but usually in a raid 0 set up the two drives are seen as one,they are designated as one drive(one name for both) but hardware or software identifies them seperately, if this were the case, unless you have hardware or software to interpret what info belongs to what drive, you cannot seperately connect the two together as external drives.
If these drives have been on a raid 0 you must not change the designated drive name or number as the data on that drive could become unreadable and be a pain to reconnect.
Slower is sometimes quicker.
Tanya