Avid Adrenaline and Upgrading Storage
by Mark Crenshaw
on
Apr 7, 2008 at 5:00:27 pm
Hello all,
I am currently upgrading the storage on our Avid MCA. I have some questions about Ciprico MediaVault and the host computer I am using.
We are coming off of a blistering production pace that has lasted almost 3 years...good problem to have...but we have not upgraded much of anything, except Adobe apps, along the way.
My current system is as follows:
Avid MCA V2.0, HP XW8000 host computer, NVIDIA Quadro4 980 XGL graphics, Integrated LSI Ultra 320 SCSI contoller, Win XP pro SP2. Pyro64 FW card in slot 3.
I have purchased a MediaVault U320-S Dual Max (MV) and it seems to have issues with something in my system. I had it striped across both channels in 1/4 TB partitions, to keep the OMFI databases under control, and it performed well for a few days. Then I started getting DIO errors in the Avid during capture. Then when copying OMFI files to it from my older "rack & stack" Avid drives, the MediaVault crashed hard and disk managment showed all the partitions as "failed". After talking with Ciprico and running failed tests on the MV, I sent it back to Ciprico, as it was only 2 weeks old, and they tested the drives and controllers and everything was fine...their tech support is awesome by the way. Thanks Victor!!!
It seems to be a communication issue between the computer and the MV that caused the problem. I have thought about purchasing an ATTO SCSI controller but due to conflicts with internal components that use certain segments of the PCI resources and compatiblity with the older HP, I'm not sure if I can use an add-in card and if I can, which do I need? I am thinking that the ATTO UL3D U160 is the card that is compatable with the HP XW8000 but the UL4D U320 may also work...not sure. If I do use either of these cards, which slot of the HP would it go into?
Re: Avid Adrenaline and Upgrading Storage by chad wallace on Apr 7, 2008 at 5:18:48 pm
Mark,
The Atto UL3D card is a U160 card and would only work at half the speed of the UL4D. The Media Vault itself is a U320 product, for optimum performance the best choice in cards would be the UL4D.
The UL4D is a PCIX card and runs 133 MHZ, for optimal performance you would want to install in a PCIX 133 slot but the card is backward compatible.
Give us a call in support if you want to talk in more detail
