RAID 5 + RAM general slowdown

Hi everyone
I have a 2006 Mac Pro which was fitted with a RAID card last year and configured with 3 disks + 1 rebuild spare. The disks are 1TB 7200rpm SATA drives.
Now even though Xbench gives me a good score for the drive (142 global, 227 sequentil, 104 random) Everytime I fill my 4GB of physical RAM up (not very long with the Adobe CS applications) the computer grinds to a halt, even my music cuts out and it doesn't even have time to beach ball. before writing to disk
Is this likely something to do with the RAID card or should I be looking somewhere else?
Thanks for any help or tips
Robin

4GB may be cutting it close and not really enough.
1-2GB for system, 3.5GB for CS4, 2-8GB for handling files and system cache.
Adobe really needs its own non-system primary scratch, there is more complex I/O with RAID5, and isolating boot + scratch + media is always a good idea.
The Apple RAID card... not such a great piece of technology.
You are probably seeing page outs at this point.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/03/adobe64_bit_mac_creative_suite_apps_wont_happen_till_v50.html
http://www.macgurus.com/guides/photoshopguide.php
http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshop-Intro.html
http://homepage.mac.com/boots911/.Public/PhotoshopAccelerationBasics2.4W.pdf
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/faq/
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404440.html CS4 Mac
http://www.barefeats.com/harper.html
More RAM, better storage strategy, pull the RAID card and selling it...
Also, Apple only certifies using their Pro RAID card with their drives which have custom firmware. Saying "1TB SATA" tells me/us nothing really. WD Black or RE3 or Enterprise while nice drives, are not supported (nor is Samsung), not sure if other retail drives (Seagate, Hitachi) work and if so how well if at all.

Similar Messages

2011 MBP with 8GB of RAM, generally slow under Lion, possibly thrashing

I have a 17" 2011 MBP with 8GB of RAM and the fastest CPU available at the time. It came with Snow Leopard, and it was really fast with basically everything I threw at it.
Since the upgrade to Lion, it has a general tendency to get really unresponsive. My workload hasn't fundamentally changed. Rather than just hope it's bugs in Lion that will get fixed, I'd like to see if anyone can advise me on things I might investigate, either to fix things myself, or to be more intelligent about identifying bugs I can report.
One thing I notice is that Time Machine backups will bring the system to its knees. Everything will be going along just fine, and then TM will kick on, and all my apps will stop responding. Once TM has finished, things will slowly come back to normal. There's a lot of disk activity, which I have assumed was swapping. Another thing that causes trouble is that mds (and a whole bunch of mdsworkers) will frequently kick on, and will slow down the system.
CPU load is always quite low, but free memory is always very low. (However, in some OS's Free Memory is misleading, because a lot of disk blocks are cached in RAM, so it's not really "used" either..)
What I can't really distinguish for sure is if the system is slow because of swapping/thrashing (which is what I assume) or if it's slowed down for some other reason related to disk activity.
Here are the apps I typically run:
- NetBeans (which is a pig, taking up over 1GB or real memory)
- Safari (which is also a pig, often taking up more than 1GB between the main Safari process and the Web Content process)
- Sometimes Parallels (2GB for the VM, and probably another 1GB for other stuff, because it's also a pig)
- kernel_task typically reports taking up over 1GB of real memory
- WindowServer also reports using 280MB
- various other small apps like Mail, NetNewsWire, Preview, Terminal, Adium, Smultron, Colloquy, none of which use much memory
I got the 8GB, because I knew I was going to use a lot of memory for stuff, and it was great under Snow Leopard. But with Lion, it just doesn't seem to be enough. Even with all of those huge processes, I can't believe that their working sets are really as big as their virtual and physical memory footprints seem to be. I mean it's not unusual for a process to have 2GB of virtual space but only a few 100MB of real memory, and some of that is shared object libraries, where the same physical memory is mapped into multiple processes. (Have shared object libraries stopped being physically shared under Lion?)
Are other people having similar trouble? Any suggested remedies? Any suggestions on how to investigate so I can see if there are any actual bugs?
I would like to understand why my system went from zippy to slow after I upgraded to Lion. Actually, quite a few things have broken. Time Machine has become a pig, bluetooth doesn't work reliably anymore, airport doesn't connect reliably anymore, and lots of little annoying bugs. But this is common for early point releases of new OS's, so I can't complain too much. But for Lion to have really regressed in memory management is definitely not good.

Safari, for what ever reason, has become a huge memory
pig. The longer you are using it the more memory it
gobbles up.
In Activity Monitor, check the Page outs and Swapped used.
This will tell you how much memory swapping is going on.
As for Time Machine, you may want to set your Parallels
HD image not to get backed up by Time Machine. May
help since it is a huge collection of files. But there have been
issues reported with Time Machine and Lion. I don't
use it myself and opt for the cloning methodology and
seperate data backup strategy. Also, in Spotlight
preferences under the Privacy Tab, I have added
my Windows VM folders, for same reason. Unless you really
need to find something on the windows VM volumes when you
don't have the Windows VM active, it just eats up alot
of disk access time.
For solving airport issues check this article:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20117247-263/fixing-airport-problems-in-os- x/?tag=mncol;txt
For Bluetooth devices, try removing them, and have them rediscovered if you
can.
Hopefully, this gives you a start on cleaning things up.

I'm experiencing the spinning beach ball and general slowdowns since I installed the security update from apple yesterday. I'm using 10.6.7 on a macbook pro.

restarting and replacing the firefox program didn't help. I've also deleted the cache files.

Not enough free space on the startup disk can cause the issues you are referring to.
Control click the MacintoshHD icon on your desktop then click Get Info.
You'll see: Capacity & Available
Make sure there's at least 15% free disk space.
If it's not a disk space issue, verify the disk for errors.
Launch Disk Utility located in HD > Applications > Utilities
Select the startup disk on the left then select the First Aid tab.
Click: Verify Disk (not Verify Disk Permissions)
If Disk Utility reports problems, you will need to insert your install disc to make repairs.
And if you have not done so lately, backup all your important data just in case.

OSX slowdown due to XP install?

Has anyone noticed a general slowdown in OSX after installing XP? Boot up is definitely slower and it seems like apps bounce more on launch than usual. Or am I on crack?
Does anyone have results of a stock 2GHz MBP w/ 1GB RAM that they've benchmarked either with XBench, GeekBench or Cinebench I'd like to have compare benchmarks pre- and post-XP install.

OSX should perform just as well after installing Windows XP dual boot, however there are quite a few issues which you should be aware of. For example:
On the Mac Mini in particular, if you have installed additional RAM, an internal fan may run non-stop even under OS X. You will need to manually open up the Mini and make sure the fan jumper cable was reconnected after the upgrade.
Updates to OS X will cause the system to revert back to the boot.efi. You will have to rebless the xom.efi file to get dual boot back
The same issue occurs anytime you open up the StartupDisk Control Panel
Control-Alt-Del doesn't work in XP (you have to use a keymapper to give your self a Del key).
The only video drivers that work right now are for the Mini.
Many other drivers are not yet available, or are only partially working.
You must be VERY careful if you want to uninstall XP and restore your system to its factory OS X condition. You Mac may become completely un-bootable. (there are fixes for this, see FAQ link below).
Can not install an app from a CD on a Mac Mini solo.
Can't read/write to OSX partition from XP without installing something like MacDrive on XP (not even sure if this is working yet)
These are just a few things to be aware of. There are many other issues that are still being worked on. The goal is ultimately to develop an easy to use, stable, XP dual boot installer with complete support for drivers, etc. Thats the goal but it might be a while before they get there. Be very cautious and make sure you are pretty skilled with XP and OS X before you try installing XP. Or just make sure you back-up any important files on your Mac and CAREFULLY review the onmac.com wiki.
some links:
Main Dual boot Site:
http://onmac.net/
The Wiki - the best, most organized resource for info on dual boot:
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Main_Page
The FAQ on the Wiki:
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Users/FAQ
MacBook Specific (scroll to bottom to see table of working non working drivers):
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Users/FAQ
MacMini Specific (scroll to bottom to see table of working non working drivers):
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Mac_mini
All Sytems Drivers (click on column headings for your particular system, then scroll to bottom for driver status):
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Users/Drivers
How To install XP dual boot with screen shots (obviously this is an important one):
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/HOWTO
Where the project is going (the developer's goals):
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Developers/Project_Direction
Good luck.

Trouble capturing to xserve raid

Hey,
I'm having serious issues capturing from my Dual 2 Ghz G5 with 3.25gb RAM (running os 10.3.9) to my apple xserve raid.
My raid is striped as raid0 and is connected by fibre channel to another G5 running os 10.4 server software. Capturing from this G5 works perfectly, but when I try and capture from my other G5, which is connected to the G5 with server software via a gigabit ethernet cable, I encounter numerous dropped frames.
I have tried everything I can think of to get this working, but to no avail.
Any suggestions would be most appreciated. Am I wrong in thinking that I can capture DV to an xserve raid across a gigabit ethernet? If so, what would I need to do to solve the problem?
Sorry if I've been abit vague or if I've not supplied as much info as needed. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to add!!
Thanks in advance for any help given.
Cheers
Adam

Thanks for your post - I know its been a while responding, but it seems to be one thing after an other at the moment!
Right, for a time, your suggestion worked! We started capturing to our local drives, then transferring the media across. Render files and project files were also saved on the raid. Generally our workflow was very good - but not perfect!
Then I realised that one of the macs that is connected to the network isn't gigabit, which, from my understanding, means that all the other macs would be limited to 110mbs instead of 100 - Do you know if I am correct with this assumption?
Anyway, it hasn't caused us major issues and because of how busy we've been we haven't really had a chance to test the theory and/or reslove it.
Anyway, my boss then kindly went out and bought me a G5 Quad, which was also added to the network and then we upgraded to FCP5 on every computer - now we are having no end of trouble working across the network. When we capture locally, move it across and then play it back the footage is constantly freezing, especially on the Quad!
People keep telling me that you can't use dv across a gigabit network, but surely this can't be the case.
There must be something I'm doing wrong? if it the 10mbs issue I mentioned, or do I simply need to go spend alot of money upgrading every mac to fibre channel? Even if I did this, would it definately solve all our problems?
Pleae, please, please help!!!
Adam

Do I have a ram problem?

I've been having a terrible time with iMovie crashing and restarting my Mid 2012 MBP (no retina) this last couple of days. I've tried everything I can think of to resolve the issue including : resetting PRAM, deleting iMovie plist, safe mode (iMovie crashes immediately upon open in safe mode), removing/reinstalling iMovie, reinstalling Mavericks. So far nothing's worked except the PRAM reset, which allowed me to export a file once (and the finished movie was all garbled and unwatchable), then it immediately went back to its bad behavior.
So I ran hardware test by holding 'D' on startup, and the system froze during the memory test. I remembered that back in April, I installed additional ram (went from 4g to 16g) because of all the video editing I've been doing. So I went on the net and downloaded memtest, opened terminal and ran it and, lo, kernel panic while testing. Here's the log:
Anonymous UUID:       85DDD5E0-140E-61C4-B4F4-4824D2EF2556
Wed Jun 11 19:56:51 2014
panic(cpu 3 caller 0xffffff8021edbf5e): Kernel trap at 0xffffff8021ea31f3, type 14=page fault, registers:
CR0: 0x0000000080010033, CR2: 0x0000000000000020, CR3: 0x000000005d85d01d, CR4: 0x00000000001606e0
RAX: 0x0000000000000020, RBX: 0x00000000000bbc57, RCX: 0x0000000000000020, RDX: 0xffffff804098a001
RSP: 0xffffff820b9f3c20, RBP: 0xffffff820b9f3c40, RSI: 0x00000000252b0fc9, RDI: 0xffffff8025ec7e28
R8: 0x0000000000000001, R9: 0x00000000cccccccd, R10: 0xffffff80224d15f0, R11: 0x0000000000000184
R12: 0xffffff8023e6a000, R13: 0xffffff8027084000, R14: 0xffffff8025ec7e28, R15: 0xffffff8027084000
RFL: 0x0000000000010207, RIP: 0xffffff8021ea31f3, CS: 0x0000000000000008, SS: 0x0000000000000010
Fault CR2: 0x0000000000000020, Error code: 0x0000000000000000, Fault CPU: 0x3
Backtrace (CPU 3), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff820b9f38b0 : 0xffffff8021e22fa9
0xffffff820b9f3930 : 0xffffff8021edbf5e
0xffffff820b9f3b00 : 0xffffff8021ef3456
0xffffff820b9f3b20 : 0xffffff8021ea31f3
0xffffff820b9f3c40 : 0xffffff8021ea51d8
0xffffff820b9f3c60 : 0xffffff8021ea5317
0xffffff820b9f3cb0 : 0xffffff8021e8ff13
0xffffff820b9f3d60 : 0xffffff8021e95a03
0xffffff820b9f3d90 : 0xffffff8021e8f16d
0xffffff820b9f3dc0 : 0xffffff8021e8e3bc
0xffffff820b9f3e00 : 0xffffff8021e7e35c
0xffffff820b9f3f10 : 0xffffff8021e8239f
0xffffff820b9f3f40 : 0xffffff8021e1d177
0xffffff820b9f3f70 : 0xffffff8021ec989d
0xffffff820b9f3fb0 : 0xffffff8021ef3c76
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: ReportCrash
Mac OS version:
13D65
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 13.2.0: Thu Apr 17 23:03:13 PDT 2014; root:xnu-2422.100.13~1/RELEASE_X86_64
Kernel UUID: ADD73AE6-88B0-32FB-A8BB-4F7C8BE4092E
Kernel slide:     0x0000000021c00000
Kernel text base: 0xffffff8021e00000
System model name: MacBookPro9,2 (Mac-6F01561E16C75D06)
System uptime in nanoseconds: 1055663344966
last loaded kext at 635237927899: com.apple.driver.AppleIntelMCEReporter          104 (addr 0xffffff7fa337a000, size 49152)
last unloaded kext at 720291902029: com.apple.driver.AppleIntelMCEReporter          104 (addr 0xffffff7fa337a000, size 32768)
loaded kexts:
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com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X          7.0.0
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Model: MacBookPro9,2, BootROM MBP91.00D3.B08, 2 processors, Intel Core i5, 2.5 GHz, 16 GB, SMC 2.2f44
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000, Intel HD Graphics 4000, Built-In
Memory Module: BANK 0/DIMM0, 8 GB, DDR3, 1600 MHz, 0x01BA, 0x202020202020202020202020202020202020
Memory Module: BANK 1/DIMM0, 8 GB, DDR3, 1600 MHz, 0x01BA, 0x202020202020202020202020202020202020
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0xF5), Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.106.98.100.22)
Bluetooth: Version 4.2.4f1 13674, 3 services, 15 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: Wi-Fi, AirPort, en1
Serial ATA Device: APPLE HDD HTS547550A9E384, 500.11 GB
Serial ATA Device: MATSHITADVD-R   UJ-8A8
USB Device: Hub
USB Device: Hub
USB Device: Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad
USB Device: IR Receiver
USB Device: BRCM20702 Hub
USB Device: Bluetooth USB Host Controller
USB Device: Hub
USB Device: FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)
Thunderbolt Bus: MacBook Pro, Apple Inc., 25.1
I'll try reinstalling my old ram tonight to see if that resolves my issue.
Is it normal for ram sticks to fail over time, or should I have noticed issues immediately?
Thanks!
Bryan

Bryan,
RAM generally doesn’t degrade over time, but depending upon where in the RAM the fault exists, you might not have noticed an issue immediately — for example, if it exists in a spot where it is used only when the 14th gigabyte is being allocated, you wouldn’t have noticed it until the first time that that much RAM was being allocated and used. You could try swapping just one of the 8 GB RAM modules at a time, running with 10 GB of RAM, to see if the fault is only in a single 8 GB module, or if both of the 8 GB modules have a fault.

Raid configuration -- the elusive best practice/best value framework

After much research on RAID, both on and off the Apple site, I am still looking for answers. I searched RAID threads for thoughts on some of the top users in the Forum so I apologize, I am sure some of this seems old hat to you old Pros.
I just bought a Mac Pro. Haven't even fired it up yet because I want to get the storage issue (RAID 0 or 1, or 0+1) settled before I transfer my jpg and video files. I have pretty much decided against the expense of the Hardware RAID card when its performance seems somewhat less than rock solid (perhaps a myth). Anyway, with a 4-core PRO I assume (correct if I am wrong) that the CPU hit to do software RAID is reasonable.
Other Questions:
1) The single 640 Gb hard drive as retailed. Can I separate "Users and their jpg/video files" to a drive separate from the boot, OSX, and Applications? Is it advisable?
2) If #1 is recommended, should I then mirror the boot drive or simply Time Machine the backup of the single drive?
3) Somewhere someone suggested better performance by putting together drive 1 and 3, and drive 2 and 4? I don't recall if that approach was RAID 1 for drive 1&3 (mirroring the boot), and striped (RAID 0) for drive 2 and 4. Your thoughts on this -- assuming its even relevant based on your recommendation for the boot drive on question #1 and #2?
4) So at this point we're down to how we should use either the remaining two or three drive bays depending the choice taken with the boot drive. What is your recommendation for optimal value -- e.g. maximizing storage, data protection, and costs. Note: I am willing to purchase external drive(s) for Time Machine backup.
5) Name your top two or three internal and external drive picks for this arrangement.
Thanks much for your help on this. Anything else you'd like to suggest or question for clarification.
cougar90

Well, if you're going to be using the system for dual purposes, right off the bat maybe software raid is not for you (especially a 0+1). That's a lot of overhead to be dealing with: video editing plus users accessing files on the same comp.
If you have users needing to access files, I would keep the "video editing" system and "server" system separate.
Hatter's idea of a PC/Mac compatible NAS sounds good; very easy and affordable to implement. I only wonder about the speed, if you will be transferring large video files, and have multiple users connected at once (although if hatter recommended it, I'm sure it's fine). If you do go the NAS route though, make sure you have a gigabit network running. If you have any old computer system laying around (pc or mac), you can also configure that very easily as a server. Add hard drives or external enclosures for space. If it's a spare mac, and you have tiger 10.4, the app sharepoints works very well.
The PVR can be done on the Mac pro; keep it with the "video editing" system.
In regards to Raid card stability, I believe you were looking at the "Apple Raid Card" for the mac pro. Yes, there have been many problems with it regarding the battery. However this is pertaining to only the Apple raid card, NOT hardware raid in general.
There are other companies that put out very solid raid cards. Check the before link to www.amug.org, they are a great resource of raid info. On my setup, I use an ATTO Card connected to a D800RAID from Sonnet (mine is the previous model).
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiondx800raid.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/ATTO/ESASR380000/
Also, before even attempting raid, get a good grasp on it.
http://www.acnc.com/040100.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
Note RAID 5 needs Hardware Raid. Also if hardware raid is too expensive, you can also go with esata enclosures. This sonnet enclosure with esata card for example:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiond500p.html
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/temposatae4p.html
More affordable, with great performance. Use for Raid 0 scratch, temp files.

HELP: Premiere Pro CC not using all CPU and RAM during rendering and export

Hello,
I am using Premiere Pro CC on a Windows 7. My timeline is quite simple with two videos, one with the movie (mpeg) and the other with the subtitles (avi).
When I render the sequence in PP or export, the rendering time is way too slow and it only uses around 15-20% of the CPU and 3 GB of RAM.
My hardware config is :
- CPU : i7-4770k 3.50Ghz
- RAM : 8 GB
- Disk : 2 x 3 TB SATA (no raid)
RAM is not the bottleneck, neither the disk access.
I have tried rendering and exporting the same project on an iMac (with an i5 2.7 Ghz and 4 GB RAM and only 1 disk) and the result is 4x faster !!!
The CPU usage is close to 100% as well as RAM usage.
So how come PP uses all resources availble on an iMac and not on a Windows 7 ?
Is there any known bug or software bottleneck on Windows 7 ?
My machine is brand new and nothing much installed besides Adobe products.
Any help is very much appreciated.
Thanks,

I just rendered out a a 2 minute sequence with about 100 clips in it and Colorista effects on everything to the Vimeo 1080 H264 preset. It took about 5 minutes to render straight from Premiere, it used all the recourses it could, my CPU was running at near %100, same with my ram and GPU, I was happy.
Then I did another render with Red Giant Denoiser and it now wants to take 30 mins and it is only using about %20 of the recourses available. My problem isn't that its taking longer with Denoiser but that its not using all of my computers CPU and GPU.
Im rendering at maximum render quality and bit dept to H264 (Im happy to wait the extra time), if I try to use VRB 2 it encodes 1 pass at a time and wants to take up to 40 minutes.
I would appreciate some advice on this.
Premiere Pro CC 2013
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB (CUDA GPU enabled in Premiere)
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
OS X 10.9.4 (13E28)

Monitoring RAID with Solaris 10 x86 and Dell PowerEdge 2650 PERC 3/Di

Hello,
I have a PowerEdge 2650 with the PERC 3/Di RAID controller.
The OS installed is Solaris 10 8/07 U4.
Currently RAID is configured through the BIOS and it works fine, but I have no way to monitor the status of the drives.
Is there a command to show me the status of the drives? Drivers I need to install?
TIA,
Chris

I'm just now starting to delve into the X86 servers, and I am not a fan of hardware RAID in general, but on the SPARC side, you would use 'raidctl' to interact with hardware RAID environments.

RAID 5 Set Suddenly NOT VIABLE!

I'm running an early 2008 Mac Pro with an Apple Raid Card with 4 internal, 1TB drives formatted into a single Raid 5 set. The raid card has had numerous issues in recent years, mainly drives that would unexpectedly drop out of the Raid and list as "roaming". In those past cases, Apple had me shut down the computer, remove the drive sled of the problem drive, wait a few minutes and replace the drive then restart. On one occasion, the Raid set was back to normal, on other occasions the drive was seen and I would have to assign it as a spare and rebuild the set. Everything would work fine until the next time.
In the last few days, I discovered the Mac Pro shut down, after I had left it idle for a while with the screen asleep. When I tried to restart, I was greeted with a blank grey screen, no Apple, no anything. I tried booting from CDs and external Boot Drives with no luck. This morning I was finally able to boot onto an external drive and discovered my Raid 5 set is now "NOT VIABLE!"
ALL drives are listed "Verified" and "Good." Bays 1 and 2 are "assigned" while Bays 3 and 4 are listed as "Roaming." The Volume is showing "Degraded" and the Raid Set is listed as "Not Viable." I have tried shutting down and removing all the drives then reinserting them (in their original slots) and restarting, but nothing changes.
Is there any way I can get these two drives to assign back to the Raid Set WITHOUT losing all my data? Is there any way to recover all may data? Am I hosed here and everything is a loss?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Brett B.
Here is a screen capture of what Raid Utility reported:

In my experience, Apple RAID in general (with RAID card or without) does not tolerate a very high error-retry rate from the Drives.
I had a mirrored RAID that repeatedly became Degraded, and decided to take strong action. I made sure I had two Backups, then pulled out the Drives and erased them with Write Zeroes, one pass. One of the drives had more than 10 blocks that needed to be "spared", so Initialization Failed. I ran the procedure multiple times and found that 30 blocks had needed to be spared. If any of these had been marginal in daily use, it could have caused the drive to get (what appears to be) stuck doing dozens to hundreds of retrys, but still not throw an I/O Error that would bring the system to a Halt.
Google did a very large study and concluded that there is a very high probability that drives with multiple errors will end up being replaced within about six months. They attributed this to a cascade of additional errors that often followed the first group detected, leading to the drive being declared unusable.
In my opinion, just reseating the drive (combined with rebuilding, which does re-write the data blocks) may not be strong enough medicine to fix a recurring problem. A drive may repeatedly be doing multiple retrys on some data blocks, or may have Bad Blocks.
I suggest you Zero the troublesome drives (which takes many hours each). If Disk Utility finds more than 10 blocks that need to be spared, or if the drive runs out of available spares, it will report "Initialization Failed!" Consider such a drive not good enough for use in a RAID and replace it with a new one. Or just rebuild your RAID with different (e.g., larger) new drives.

Adding another HD and making it raid

I currently have one Hitachi 250 ata HD and I want to add another one.
If I add the HD and put it in raid format from disk utilities will I lose all my data??

Hi hubris81;
To the best of my knowledge no.
Why don't we back up a bit here and tell us why you think you need RAID. Generally it has been my experience that people have totally unrealistic expectations of RAID. Once we start looking at what you want then maybe we can either explain to you if is a valid reason to use RAID and process to do it.
Allan

RAID Array being blown away when CamCorder inserted or removed

This is a strange problem at best.
I have six external drives on my G5 in an unequal mix of FW-400 and USB. The issue is with two of the former when combined in a RAID-0 or RAID-1 array.
Both of the disks in this array (Western Digital 320GB FW-400) are of the same make and model. There are never any issues unless and until such time as I insert or remove a Sony CamCorder: the array is blown away. Gone. It does not matter if the Camera is on or off when inserted or removed. Albeit part of the chain, the Camera is attached to another device altogether via FW.
This will happen without exception each and every time.
Anyone have any ideas what's going on here?
Thanks,
Lyman

Hi Lyman;
This doesn't sound like the best designed implementation of RAID. Generally it is recommended that everything try to be kept as same as possible for the various part of the RAID array. Since the overall performance of a RAID array is determined by the slowest link which in your case would be the USB, I seriously doubt that it will have stellar performance.
What is probably happening is that the camcorder is changing the Firewire bus enough to disrupt the RAID array. I doubt that there is any way to fix this short of putting the RAID array on it's own buss using a card in one of the expansion slots. That would leave the computer's Firewire for the camcorder.
What ever you do stop using USB for RAID. USB is never going to be able to give you good enough performance to be worthwhile.
Allan

RMI Slowdown

In another post I made I mentioned that I've been experiencing some general slowdown with RMI lately. I've been trying to figure this out for awhile with minimal success so I figured I'd post something here and see if anyone (*cough*EJP) might have a suggestion on what could be improved.
First off let me explain the problem. We have many processes communicating across several machines and one process is the center of events that all other processes "listen" to for events. Everything seems to run smoothly until around 35 listeners are added when we start seeing it take 30 seconds to even a full minute to iterate through the list of listeners and pass off the next event.
These are the Remote interfaces that are used. They are a very simple callback paradigm. Essentially, EventListeners are added to the EventGenerator and they receive the events to process.
public interface IEventListener extends java.rmi.Remote {
    public void processEvent(Event event) throws java.rmi.RemoteException;
public interface IEventGenerator extends java.rmi.Remote {
    public void addEventListener(IEventListener listener) throws java.rmi.RemoteException;
    public void removeEventListener(IEventListener listener) throws java.rmi.RemoteException;
}Now for the meat, this is our EventHandler class that is the primary implementation of the IEventGenerator interface. Essentially it creates a List of listeners and a Queue of events. When events come in, it takes them off of the queue and then iterates over the list of listeners passing each one the event. You'll notice the use of a SynchronizedQueue class in here. That is a custom class that we wrote that uses a wait()/notify() mechanism so the thread that is started doesnt spin while the queue is empty.
The slowdown is occuring inside the for() loop within the fireNextEvent(Event) method. It is very straightforward simply calling processEvent() on each listener in turn and it runs very very quickly. However, when the number of listeners reaches 35 we start seeing it take several seconds to notify each listener.
Does anyone have any clues as to what might be causing this and what we can do to fix the situation or even recommend some improvements? About the only thing I've thought of is to institute some form of batching where instead of sending off the events one at a time, it sends out all the events currently in the queue. It may help the overall time, but if it still takes a few seconds to send the data to each individual listener that is not really a solution.
public class EventHandler implements IEventGenerator {
    private Logger m_logger;
    private List<IEventListener> m_listenerList;
    private SynchronizedQueue<Event> m_eventQueue;
    public EventHandler() {
        m_logger = ...; // Logger initialization, not important
        m_listenerList = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList<IEventListener>());
        m_eventQueue = new SynchronizedQueue<Event>();
        // Start a new Thread that is responsible for taking the next event out of the
        //    Queue and distributing it to the listeners.
        Thread eventThread = new Thread(new EventHandlerThread(),"Event Handler");
        eventThread.setPriority(Thread.MAX_PRIORITY - 1);
        eventThread.start();
    public void addEventListener(IEventListener listener) {
        if(listener != null) {
            synchronized(m_listenerList) {
                m_listeners.add(listener);
    public void removeEventListener(IEventListener listener) {
        if(listener != null) {
            synchronized(m_listenerList) {
                m_listeners.remove(listener);
    // Adds an event to the queue for processing. notify() is called to wake up
    //   the other thread that might be waiting if the queue was previously empty.
    public void fireEvent(Event event) {
        m_logger.finest("Adding " + event.toString() + " Event to the queue.");
        m_eventQueue.add(event);
    // Grabs the next event to fire, if none are available, wait() is called.
    private void fireNextEvent() {
        fireNextEvent(m_eventQueue.removeNext());
    private void fireNextEvent(Event event) {
        StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer("Firing " + event.toString() + " event." + newline);
        List<IEventListener> copyOfListeners;
        synchronized(m_listenerList) {
            copyOfListeners = new ArrayList<IEventListener>(m_listenerList);
        for(IEventListener l : copyOfListeners) {
            buf.append(new java.util.Date().toString() + "\t" + l.getClass().getName() + newline);
            try {
                l.processEvent(event);
            } catch(java.rmi.RemoteException ce) {
                m_logger.info("Failed to connect to Event Listener, Removing it.");
                removeEventListener(l);
            } catch(Exception e) {
                m_logger.warning("Exception while Firing Event.", e);
        buf.append("Queue Size: " + m_eventQueue.size() + newline);
        m_logger.finest(buf.toString());
    private class EventHandlerThread implements Runnable {
        public void run() {
            while(true) {
                fireNextEvent();
}

So what would be a good use of the java.server.rmi.hostname property? When using a machine with multiple network interfaces and you want to use a particular one?
I'm also having a hard time wrapping my head around the sun.rmi.transport.connectionTimeout property. Yer book reads "Timeout for idle RMI client-side connections; if this expires before they are reused, they are closed." The default value is 15,000 milliseconds. Does this refer to the "decay" rate of a socket? So if my client has a remote reference to some server object and it sits on the object without invoking any remote calls for 15 seconds then the socket is discarded and a new one will need to be created when a call is eventually made?
Ok, say that is true. Then if I have a TimerTask that is only making remote calls every 20 seconds, then would it be a good idea to set this value to something slightly greater than 20,000, say, 25,000?

Hardware RAID on Arch?

Hello~ I'm buying myself a new PC soon and I was really looking forward to putting Arch on it but the problem is is that I cheaped out on the mobo so I have to get a $20 PCI raid card in order to put my new 160gbs in RAID0, the only problem is that of course the only drivers supplied are for Windows, and I'm not sure how to go about doing this on Arch / any other linux distro because I'm simply not the best at the linux environment. So yeah, any comments are appeciated. Oh, and if it matters, here's the link to the card I'll be getting: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a … 6816132008

dr0p wrote:Okay, well if it's supported, how would I set it up just like in the software raid article I read?
I think you're getting confused now...
Software RAID and Hardware RAID are separate things. If you have Hardware RAID, you don't need to use Software RAID. The RAID array will just appear like a normal hard drive to Linux and the Hardware controller will take care of the RAID part.
Software RAID can be used instead of hardware RAID to save costs (no hardware controller required). Software RAID is generally slower than hardware RAID, but not noticable in desktop applications.

Need RAID Help

I'm new to the whole idea of RAIDing my iMac with an external HD, so I have a question I'm hoping to get answered before I go ahead with it.
Is there a way to set up my external drive to mirror my iMac HD without erasing the iMac's HD?
Thanks
EDIT: would I be able to partition the external drive and RAID a partition with my iBook that would act as an automatic backup each time I plugged the iBook into the external drive?

Hi iMac therefore iAm;
No. All data is lost when you from a RAID array.
What do you hope to gain with RAID?
Generally it has been my experience that most users have totally unrealistic expectations of RAID.
Allan

RAID 5 + RAM general slowdown

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