MAYDAY!!! Raided Drives issues and I need advice ASAP

Gey guys, I'm in post production hell on my first feature.

On set, we used the HVX 200 with an 800gig RAIDED drive set up.

My partner, one day, unhooked the raided drives and loaded some stills onto the one drive which UNRAIDED the pair.

For the remainder of the shoot, we dumped footage to one drive, and then manually copied the footage to the next drive to keep them identical.

Now the problem, each drive, bu itself, thinks it's still paired with the other drive. Getting info on one drive tells me that there is 1.36 terrabytes total. With 500 gigs available.

The bottom line is that each drive claims to have 888.55 gigs on it. But each drive is only 800 gigs total. I've tried to move the 888.55 gigs to a new DUAL 800 raided drive(s) and it says there's not enough room on the new drive to take the footage.

How do I have 888.55 gigs of footage on an 800 gig drive?

Please help ASAP with some possible ideas. I'm now just dragging folder by folder to the new drive in hopes that I get most if not all the footage onto this new correctly raided drive set up.

Has anyone ever seen this or does anyone have any thoughts?

Much appreciated thanks in advance.

Geno

I have never heard of someone breaking a raid, then re-pairing. What kind of raid was it? RAID 0, stripped? RAID 1 mirrored?

What created the raid, hardware in the drive case or OSX disk utiltiy?

How much material did you create on just one drive then manually "mirror" to the other?

-Vance

Great questions and I'm in over my head with my effort to answer.

We bought 2 800 gig drives from OWC. (I understand that both drives are dual 400s) They came paired so that when I mounted them (out of the box) it showed up on the desktop as a single icon. The total gig capacity was 1.35 terrabytes. Confusing to me, cause I would have figured two 800s mirroring each other would still show a maximum capacity of 800 gigs.

So every day we dumped our footage from the firestore to this drive. One day 15 of our 17 day shoot, my partner dumped still images onto ONE of the drives that he plugged into his lap top. oops. The next day when we set up the laptop, we now had TWO hard drive icons on the desktop.

At that point nothing was being mirrored anymore. Whatever we put to drive one, we had to copy over to drive two as backup.

But here's the weird part. BOTH DRIVES are holding the exact same footage. Both drives say that footage equals 888.55 gigs. BOTH DRIVES say they have 500 gigs available. So they think there still hooked up to the other. Yet I only mount ONE of the two and it still says its got a capacity of 1.35 terrabytes with 500 gigs available AFTER having 888.55 gigs already on it.

I'm now very carefully taking the files off this drive and copying them to a brand new DUAL 800 mirrored drive. I tried to just drag over the folder with the footage (850 gigs) but the copy dialogue box says there's not enough room on the new drive. So it's one file at a time til I remove all 888.55 gigs from this 800 gig drive. ANd that's what's got my head spinning. Is it possible that the SoftRaid 3 software actually found more than 800 gigs on the drive in which to store footage?

To answer your last question, it was day 15 of the shoot so I'm guessing it was near 700 gigs when we started dragging and dropping and copying footage manually.

Any thoughts? Prayers? Last rites?

g-

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We bought 2 800 gig drives from OWC. (I understand that both drives are dual 400s)

You are not making sense, mate. You bought 2 800 Gig drives...each drive is a pair?? If the folks who sold you the drives (or your partner) knew what they were doing, the entire RAID would be one icon. That's what "A" in "RAID" stands for = "ARRAY"...a collection of drives forming ONE VOLUME.

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But here's the weird part. BOTH DRIVES are holding the exact same footage.

Maybe I am missing something but again...not making sense. By BOTH DRIVES, you mean both "PAIRS" of drives or both drives in each pair?

I'm confused...I'm gonna lay down now

What I would like to know is why you aren't screaming at OWC and asking your partner how he dumped files onto HALF A RAID?? A RAID shows up as one icon, so how did your partner split it up?

Joey

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

This is just a hunch and comes without warranty but if the finder copying isn't working why do you not try to copy using the UNIX Terminal.app in the "Utilities" folder.

Given how important these files are I would categorically recommend that you hire or find someone who knows their way around a UNIX command line and can attempt a copy the files in question for you.

Great thoughts guys.

I did scream at him. He's been well shamed. They are two different 800s. So he just used the one drive to load his images.

Can't yell at OWC. DOn't know enough about this world yet to yell properly.

I am moving the files off the single 800 drive as we speak. (the single 800 is a dual four in the same case, just for clarification)

What I REALLY want to know, is how in the world an 800 gig drive can say it has 888.55 gigs on it. Has that ever happened?

Still moving files. WOuld love any thoughts on that last one.

g-

Ok so it sounds as if you have a total of 4 400 gig drives here. That would be a raw capacity of about 1.6 tera (4x4). It sounds like the two housings each have two drives that are put together as RAID 0. That is called striping. What you have is what ever you write to that box being split in half and recorded on the two drives. Not duplicated, tho. The idea behind RAID 0 is speed, not protection.

So if you took two of those units and put them on a Mac you could use the OSX disk utility to take your two RAIDs and RAID them together again. You can decide when you do thist to use RAID O again, or RAID 1. If you pick RAID 0 you again double your bandwidth, but still don't have a backup. Even worse if ANY of the 4 drives gets damaged ALL you footage is gone. You could also have used RAID 1 in the OSX utility and wind up with a "mirror" or two copies of everything. From your writting I suspect that you think that you have a backup like that.

The numbers suggest that is not the case however. If you have storage reports in the 1.5 tera range you have all 4 drives raided together for maxium speed, no protection.

Now throw in the split up. Now I am confused too. I would expect that you would NOT be able to read any of the files with just one unit loaded. The bits are scattered across two drives. Yet you say that with just one unit online you have valid files.

I can understand that you have more than 800 GIG of data. You have all that you recorded before the drives split, plus two copies of what came after.

You should do a bit of reading on RAID structures, or as Andrew suggested consult someone who understands these structures. As you have weeks of work on them expermentation is really really scary.

More clarification. Just cause I'm sure I'm confusing.

Each 800 gig drive is comprised of 2 400s.

We wanted to have a mirrored 800 gis on set so as we dumped footage, we were sure the second 800 (the mirrored drive) was backing up as we dumped the footage. So in my estimate, we had 2 800 gig drives mirrored together.

Strange thing. Of course it was only a single icon on the desktop. But under the GET INFO it says its capacity was 1.35 terrabytes. This is strange, I would have thought it should have said 800 gigs.

Any way, the two drives got seperated when my partner mounted ONE DRIVE and added stuff to it. Somehow, the next time we got to set, there was no longer one icon, but two. OWC 0+1 drive 1. And OWC 0+1 drive 2.

Both had identical files. So we just kept dumping new footage to drive one. Then copying manually by dragging and dropping the file to the next drive. To be sure we were backed up.

We wrapped the feature on Monday. I mount both drives (the 2 different 800 gig drives) at my cutting station to find that they both INDIVIDUALLY, independent of the other, think they have a capacity of 1.35 terrabytes, with 500 gigs still available, and they both contain 888.55 gigs of the same footage.

How? Does this help?

I wouldn't be wrapped up in methodology here. First order is to get the files off the drives. Forget conjecture, don't tinker. I wouldn't even turn off your machine or reboot until you transfer the files to a HD that is not RAIDed. Then make a copy of that, then tinker and speculate to your heart's content.

This is why insurance companies run when they hear of films being done with "tapeless" cameras.

Well the picture is clearing up. The drive names OWC 0+1 tell me that the RAID was set up correctly. That is you had two RAID 0's soft raided as a RAID 1.

I have never done that, so I can't speak to exactly what happens. The wrong capacity in the info box is confusing for sure. Having the two show up as seperate icons does make sense, as the OS must have seen the difference caused by adding the first set of files to the single drive. I guess the OS is as confused as we are.

The good news is that it sounds like you have all your files intact. Copying to a clean array is a grand idea.

-V