FCP/OSX crashing, drives do not appear on reboot

Pretty strange problem that developed over the last two days or so. After editing on FCP 7 for about 20-30 minutes I get the spinning wheel and either FCP crashes or the Mac itself crashes. When I reboot the computer, the volumes from our Facilis server do not appear. I need to reboot the Facilis and the Mac in order for these volumes to appear. Then I get about 20 minutes of editing before it crashes again.

The volume I'm editing on has about 250GB of free space out of 2TB. The FCP file is fairly large but only about 19MB. I tried editing with a new blank project and it still crashes.

Any ideas? Andy place I should start? Any more information I should provide?

Mac OS X 10.6.4
Processor: 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Server: Facilis Terrablock 4.5.3

THANKS!

"When I reboot the computer, the volumes from our Facilis server do not appear. I need to reboot the Facilis and the Mac in order for these volumes to appear."

At the very least, this is a problem. If your machine kernel panics when accessing the Facilis volume, and the volumes don't reappear until the Facilis is rebooted, that sounds like it may be the source of the problem.

Some more information would help:

1. When the Facilis volumes fail to appear, are you still seeing the Facilis Tools volume(s), or is everything gone? Do any of the volumes appear in Disk Utility but are just unmounted?

2. Have you tried swapping your Atto 41/42es for a different card from another machine on your Facilis SAN? This would be a good way to see if the problem follows the card. Have you tried swapping the fibre cable or SFPs going to the host from the Facilis or the Fibre switch?

3. Try removing the Atto card entirely and setting capture scratch to a local drive and work that way for a bit. Does the issue occur again?

You may just have a bad Atto card, cable, or some other Facilis issue. I would start there. Having a large project file or a media volume filled too much wouldn't cause your Facilis volumes to disappear on reboot. Besides, the way Facilis writes its data to disk is a sort of controlled fragmentation algorithm, making free space less relevant. They do this so performance remains the same regardless of free space.