Could running DISK WARRIOR, SEPARATELY, on stripped drives be causing dropped frames?

Hey Guys -

Geno Andrews here. As many of you know, D. David and I sold our first feature. Yeay for us. However, the company needs many of the elements and I'm having SERIOUS problems playing back anything in the timeline. I keep getting the, "RT Extreme has determined these dropped frames were caused by slow disks. Please try: blah blah blah.

The only thing that has happened between now and the last time I was cutting on this station is that my partner ran Disc Warrior on all the drives. UNFORTUNATELY, he mounted the drives one and a time when he ran the defrag stuff, but two pairs of these drives were striped and raided.

Could this be why this is happening? What can I do now?

If this isn't the issue, then I'll continue trouble shooting. But if it is, I stand here needing help.

Thanks in advance.

Geno

How were the 2 drives RAIDed? was it using the Disk utilities >RAID 0?

BTW- Diskwarrior does not defrag anything. It's sole purpose is to rebuild-repair disk directories.

Yes, I believe raid 0

g-

"Slow disks." Ouch. That means the stripe may be broken. If Diskwarrior was applied to single drives when both should have been mounted to appear as a single unit of striped storage-- uh... well, it's a perfectly innocent error but I'd start preparing to recapture needed elements.

You probably already know when you stripe volumes as a RAID 0 array, (AKA "grouping" you create a new larger virtual volume and you get a multiple of a single drive's bandwidth (assuming each drive in the group goes to a separately powered bus, card, or controller in the box, etc) which is absolutely great for multitrack streams and flavors of HD. If you break the striping, your media doesn't exist in readable form.

With different RAID schemes you get better data protection. RAID 0 which John was asking about is the most minimal striping scheme you can get, offering no protective redundancy. RAID 1 and newer flavors offer mirroring so you don't lose anything if one drive crashes.

I am uncertain if Diskwarrior even understands striped drive directories, and I'll be amazed if it understands them one drive at a time. Check with Alsoft on that. I'd like to hear what's up.

Hopefully you have your FCP project file *not stored* on this RAID, right? So you can recapture to restore the needed elements, if necessary.

Keep us informed and hearty congrats on the sale!

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Toggle your Timeline Filters bar with Option T !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Thanks for the input.

Though I'm still confused only because I merely followed someone else down the rabbit hole regarding the initial setup of our drives. To my best recollection here were the steps taken.

We bought OWC Mercury Elite Pro 800 gig drives. (Now waht's confusing is that I guess there are two 400gigs in each case. SOmehow they are hooked together to create a single 800gig) So we'll call each encasing a single 800gig drive.

I used two different kinds of software because we didn't get all the drives at the same time. HOWEVER, we successfully raided the drives (two 800gigs) to show up on the desktop mounted as a single 800gig believing that whatever was copied to the first drive was AUTOMATICALLY being backed up to the second drive. With me so far?

Now ON SET, we had our first mishap, where my partner mounted ONE of our 800gig drives onto his laptop so he could download photos from a still camera taken by the set photographer. That was the first ooops. From that moment on those two drives never mounted as a single drive again. In fact, we manually copied anything placed on drive 1 to drive 2 to make sure both were manually mirrored.

We finished the film and everything was hunky dori.

We recently sold the film and our distributor needs some of the files. SOOOOO - my partner, who hadn't done much with the drives since we finished editing thought it would be best to run Disc Warrior on the discs before I came by to pick them up. He plugged them in, one at a time, and ran disc warrior. What that accomplished I don't know. I guess he thought defragging the drives would help.

NEVERTHELESS -

By the time I hooked everything back together at my studio, HAPPILY, the 4 800gig casings mount as 2 drives. Same as before. So that's good. But my timeline has been giving me hell regarding the error I spoke of earlier.

So I ran disc Utility to find out what was going on and it immediately jumped into "Rebuilding RAID slice "disk4s2" The estimated time left to rebuild right now is 15 hours. I have no idea what this is doing and if it's trying to repair something my partner inadvertently did I want to let it continue. On the other hand, I may lose sleep tonight thinking the entire drive is being slowly erased.

There. Now you know everything.

Just so I understand better, what kind of raid did we perform in the beginning to stripe 2 800gig drives together so they mount as a single 800gig drive that whatever you copy to it makes an immediate back up to the other?

Thanks for your help - and if you know that this rebuild thing is WAY WRONG please let me know soon.

A million thanks in advance,

Geno

Congrats on your film, Geno! Great to hear that.

Hmm... Now, remember that old saying that went something like "... rushing in where angles fear to tread?"

>we successfully raided the drives (two 800gigs) to show up on the desktop mounted
>as a single 800gig

Yup. This should be a RAID 1, mirrored.

>Now ON SET, we had our first mishap, where my partner mounted ONE of our 800gig
>drives onto his laptop so he could download photos from a still camera taken by the
>set photographer.

Now... Yikes! What was he smoking? He broke up a RAID just like that? If the data on the RAIDs were readeable, you should have backed up the data to a completely different location and rebuilt the entire RAID then.

> On the other hand, I may lose sleep tonight thinking the entire drive is being slowly
> erased.

Sounds like what it is doing, is that it is rebuilding the RAID with the information on one of the disks thinking that the stripe failed or a disk crashed.



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But wow. You guys sound like you're having loads of fun on the project. Which is always a good thing...



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