Areca ARC-8050 Thunderbolt RAID ISSUES

[Lindsay Mann]

So I upgraded my Hack motherboard to a Gigabyte Intel Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX Motherboard with BT4.0/Wi-Fi (GA-Z77X-UP5-TH). Just so I could use this Areca 8-bay RAID unit via Thunderbolt and speed up my rendering. After some initial trouble with setting up the unit in RAID 5, and some pretty unhelpful support from Areca, I'm up and running and it's fast - when it's working.

I notice hangups with the unit specifically when I'm transcoding in RED Cine. I'll get 1/3 of the way through a batch and RED Cine will freeze and the Areca is stuck. Sometimes it will let me access files outside the R3D folders on the drive, sometimes it will completely hang and cause the OS to hang as well. Force quit RED Cine, force quit FCP, try to relaunch the finder, but the Hack will freeze and I'll have to force restart. The annoying thing is the Areca doesn't have a manual switch on it, it turns on when the thunderbolt is connected. And I can't hot swap thunderbolt connections with this setup which means it's lots of back and forth, trial and error to get the drive to mount again. Ugh.

Anyone having any issues with their Areca's? Anyone doing just fine with a real Mac Pro? That could be my solution in the near future. Should I have just ponied up for the Pegasus to avoid all this hassle? Probably.

 

[Matt Doane]

I've had this one from MacGuru's for over a year now without any problems. Knock on wood.

EDIT: It's connected to a Mid 2011 iMac.

 

[Patrick Hogue]

I also have one from Burly Storage/Mac Gurus. Have been using with both a Mac Mini and a 15" MBPRetina in RAID 6 with no issues. Fast and reliable. What did Areca say about using it with a Hackintosh?

 

[Lindsay Mann]

Yeah that's what I have. I might call the gurus to ask about it. The people I talked to at Areca barely spoke English, so I doubt they have heard of or support a Hackintosh. I dug my own grave there. It could also be an issue with the new RED Cine and/or my GeForce GTX 570 (which should be updated anyway).

 

[jimhare]

Since the max speed is still under 10Gb/s am I right to assume there is no benefit waiting for a TB2 RAID?

 

[Paul Watt]

Are you able test another thunderbolt drive (of any sort) to see if it's your hardware setup, or something to do with the Areca? Or test doing the same thing with a macbook pro with your areca unit? That might help narrow down the problem. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but does the increase in speed of the areca actually speed up transcodes? I thought the bottleneck would be with your GPU/CPU unless you had a rocket. I'm interested, because Ive got the non-thunderbolt version of the same board, and was going to upgrade to a newer Gigbayte motherboard soon to take advantage of our Areca 8050, which is currently just hooked up to laptops.

 

[Lindsay Mann]

Yeah, Paul, you're probably right about the GPU limiting it. Considering a Titan or similar. But the Areca definitely has faster write speeds than the old single drives I had been using. Until I figure it out I'm writing to the internal SSD's, which seems pretty stable. I thought about waiting for TB2, but figured I could sacrifice some potential speed.

Now I'm considering a Matrox h.264 encoder just to speed up client reviews!

 

[Ricardo Reyes]

Lindsey,

Are you still having trouble with the Areca ARC-8050? If so, I would be happy to step in and try to troubleshoot the issue. There hasn't been many issues reported with the ARC-8050, especially hang ups as you've reported. Please feel free to contact me at Ricardo@ArecaUS.com

BTW - The Areca ARC-8050 does have a manual power switch on the backside. It's actually labeled as a reset button. But if you hold it for 3 seconds, it will turn the unit on or off manually. We labeled it reset because it's recommended to have the host computer automatically power on/off the unit so the user doesn't have to worry about the on/off sequence of the Storage/Host units

 

[Michael McCaffrey]

ARC-8050 Raid System & Premiere CC Freezing

ARC-8050 Raid System & Premiere CC Freezing

Sometimes when I play the Premiere timeline, my entire computer will freeze to the point where I can do nothing except move the mouse cursor. Aside from that, absolutely nothing works from the keyboard, no force quit or anything, and after the computer freezes, Premiere will continue to play video and audio from the timeline on and on and on until I hard power down the MacPro. Is this a premiere issue or something with the ARC-8050 Raid??

2013 MacPro 8-Core
OS 10.9.2
64GB RAM
Dual D700s
Working with 4K .R3D Media.

 

[Isaac Marchionna]

It's a premiere issue from what I've experienced.

 

[Michael McCaffrey]

Have you experienced the same thing? Any fixes or work-arounds?