Compatability with Avid.
by Bruce Rawlings
on
May 23, 2001 at 8:08:53 pm
Why are all my drives Avid? I have an Express and a MC1000 - both NT.
My answer is fear! What happens when non avids don't work? I once had some Tyrell drives - not entirely a happy experience! in fact these are now used as door stops.
I need extra capacity to add to my Avid drives, where would I go from here Medea wise?
Re: Compatability with Avid. by Dennis Kutchera on May 23, 2001 at 9:43:49 pm
I am not sure I would even go there. First, on NT the raid info is stored in the registry and not on the drives. If anything happens to this info or you move your drives to another NT Avid, the raid info is gone and you cannot access your data. Avid branded drives use a utility found in your start menu under Avid called Disk Mounter that will store the raid info outside of the NT registry on the raided drives and they will mount again. I just went through this successfully. The utility will not work with non-Avid drives.
As far as Medea goes, I believe their quality control and tech support is suspect. I discussed someone else's experiences with a Medea rep at NAB as a concerned potential customer. He was real defensive, but not too reassuring. And since NAB a dealer in our area received a Medea RT drive that was DOA. It scared off his customer to buy something else. Medea now wants a to charge them a 10% re-stocking fee for a DOA drive.
Sorry, but this does not sound like a road I would care to travel.
Re: Compatability with Avid. by Bob Russo on May 24, 2001 at 1:10:43 am
I can discuss my experiences with Medea drives. I have not had any problems with the Medea drives I used with an Avid Media Composer.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I am stunned that you feel that Medea Tech support and QC is suspect.
I did have a drive go down, and Medea tech support was excellent! They turned the repair around in 24 hours. They must have received the drive in the morning, repaired it and sent it out that night, with all my media intact!
This is a link from Medea's website about using Medea drives with an Avid. http://www.medeacorp.com/web3.1/Files/Whats_New/Avid.htm
I would second Bob's words that Medea's customer support is excellent. I have heard the very occasional horror story (hey, stuff happens and nobody's perfect) but overall, Medea is a very responsive and first class company.
In the early days, there were some issues left unresolved with support for Avid systems but Medea is an aggressive company and I think they resolved any issues some time ago. I could be wrong but that's the story as I am aware of it. I am always willing to be corrected if I am wrong.
Re: The link liveth! It's alive! Alive! :o) by Dan DeBruno on Jun 12, 2001 at 8:19:54 pm
That is great news....if by any chance you do have any issues, please feel free to contact us here at Medea and we will be more then happy to help you along the way.
Re: Compatability with Avid. by The Search on Jun 8, 2001 at 11:59:21 pm
Well it sounds as if you made an assumtion about the Medea team without ever talking with them...we all know what happens when we ASS-U-M...Bad News Bears.....
Look a little closer at your so-called AVID util that somehow saves the data to the RAID and not the boot registry only on AVID drives. First off the Medea array's are a hardware based raid zero...to NT it is just one drive... (no raid parameters need to be save in the register)...can we say opps...I stuck my foot in my mouth, again....
Okay lets say for instance that you do set up a raid zero with two Medea arrays together under NT and that this stripe info is saved to the boot registry....well Homer, under disk admin there is a little pull down menu that is labeled "Partition"..and if you go down to "Configuration" then to "Save"..okay here is the rocket science part Dennise...you can save this information to a diskette, another hard drive, etc....
okay I will pause here so you can catch up................I know you AVID people always seem to have your blinders on...Now let me tell you about the brilliant engineers at AVID...they wrote a very small utility that short cuts those 3 steps I outlined earlier, and made it look for only drives that have an "AVID" in their inquiry string. Okay so now they spent maybe 10 minutes writing this little utility and for some reason people eat it up and pay these big bucks for such engineering.....not to mention the price they charge for their storage....
I don't know about you Dennis but I like to make money for the stuff I work on not give it back to AVID...go with the Medea array's you will not be let down...
Re: Compatability with Avid. by Dennis Kutchera on Jun 12, 2001 at 5:23:02 pm
Gosh,
Here'a a real man. He makes a lot of assumptions about me and is too scared to identify himself because he would rather hurl verbal assaults than to show a little respect to another human being. Don't worry, I recognize the tone and style. But then you got where you are with that attitude and big mouth, didn't you?
And gee Marg, I am well aware of how to save striping information with any drives. Not everyone is prepared to play computer nerd when they have an editing job to do. So the convenience of the Avid untility is appreciated by some of us. I will admit that it is a cheap shot on Avid's part to not make it work with other drives.
I like to make money too. I don't like waiting 2 to 3 weeks for Medea to fix my drives and return them with my data intact. I would rather deal with anyone who will offer an advance exchange so I can redigitize and get back to work. My meter doesn't tick while I am down.
If you had read my post, you will not that I did talk to the Medea team. But I have also talked to one local dealer who has had more than one bad experience and a few users who have not been happy. So, what do you suggest? Based on information from people I trust and a beligerant Medea rep at NAB, I should waste my money on the chance it is all a fairy tale? Or would you suggest that I not have an open dialog because it is contrary to your opinion. I could at least take your opinion seriously if you had the intestinal fortitude to at least identify yourself. Otherwise we read the rantings of a man who is mad at the world. Cut the anger and live longer.
So yes, my friend, we all know what happens when we ASS U M... and I believe if you look in the mirror, you may find some hindsight.
Re: Just to clarify... by Ron LIndeboom on Jun 12, 2001 at 7:13:17 pm
Like you, Dennis, I don't mind people using the anonymous function and participating except when they use it to make bold, sweeping statements and hurl insults...
But that said, I want to address some of the points you made in your post:
1. I don't like waiting 2 to 3 weeks for Medea to fix my drives and return them with my data intact. I would rather deal with anyone who will offer an advance exchange so I can redigitize and get back to work.
At the difference in price, you could buy two, have one sitting there in your shop and consider it your "advance exchange" drive in the event you ever need it. There is a huge difference between the Avid drives and the Medeas.
The "three weeks" comment is kind of out of line as I know people who have gotten their drives recovered and repaired in far less time than that. Medea is a very aggressive company and is wanting to capture much more of the market and they understand that they have to be aggressive to do so.
2. Regarding beligerent reps at NAB, I have met with both Roger and Dan numerous times at numerous shows and they've always been very courteous and take the time to answer even the most mundane of questions from me.
To me, I learned long ago that everyone's entitled to have a bad day and that even the most perfect of people sometimes find their "idiot twin" showing up to take part...
My real question regarding your dealer's experience is that it is far from the norm. I know of no other dealer I can point to that says this and I know people that sell hundreds of Medea drives a month.
I am not grinding on you Dennis, so please don't consider this that way. If I was going to grind on anyone, it would be directed at "The Search" but something tells me I'd be pissing into the wind and I don't do that much anymore...
:o)
Have fun, Dennis and it's always great to see you interacting on the Net. I always learn something when you are kicking ideas around.
