Pro I/O

[John_Toolbox]

The last version of pt that will work with a disk i/o is 5.0.1. the disk i/o card has a built in scsi connection, it will not let you record to any other drive. disk i/o's will record up to 16 tracks per core card, and you can have up to 3 disk i/o's in a system. You need a special scsi cable that is very hard to find for a disk i/o, it is a VHDCI-50 at the card end and centronics at the other.

There are only about 3 SCSI cards(all made by atto) that are supported with mix cards and d24 systems. The reason is that you need to be able to slow them down enough or they will eat up pci bandwidth that the pro tools cards need.

[steve78]

Perfect, I wasn't planning on getting the disk i/o cards anyway, however, I may have one of those cables that came with the avid stuff that was given to me.

Let me guess, the atto cards are the ul2d and ul3d. I happen to have one of each in the avid PCI expansion chassis that I have, which looks just like the magma chassis.

If I was to use the magma chassis, do I need a special scsi card in the mac, or would a generic one work aslong as it has a 68 pin scsi connector?

[John_Toolbox]

You still want the UL2d or UL3d - the reason is that other scsi cards are bus mastering and will chew up pci bandwidth. Read up on it in the answerbase and/or technical document archive section of digi's website. It may work, but you'll probably end up with an unstable system.

The SCSI card should be in one of the computer's pci slots, not the chassis. A UL3d will be the ultimate SCSI card for a mix system, with one of those you will easily be able to handle the 64 track maximum of PT 5.1.3.

[steve78]

Help......

So, I have the cards and such now and I am having issues with it all. To refresh, I have a silver G4 tower. It has a 733 cpu and 768mb of ram. I have a 40 gb master hard drive running OS X 10.4. I have a 60 gb and 20 gb slave hard drives for data. I also have 200 gbs of scsi drives that I intend to use as well for recording the tracks to, these are currently not hooked, but when the will be, they will be connected to a UL3D scsi host card.

I have 2 digidesign d24 host cards, one of which is currently in the computer, both of which are QC edition. I also have 2 digidesign DSP farm cards, one of which is also in the computer, both of which are also QC edition. These are both jumped with a 5 position jumper cable that came with the cards. Also I have 2 882/20 I/Os, one of which is currently plugged into the d24 card.

I have installed PT 6.0 and it seems to install fine, however, I can't get the silly thing to start up, and I don't know why. There is also a version of PT 6.4.1 on the same drive.

When I went to start PT6.0 I get an error of 1133, which says that its an error with the DAE. When you try PT6.4.1, it comes up with a different error, saying that the DAE is used by a different program. The same thing happens when you try running digitest.

Is this an issue with trying to run PT on a newer OS then 10.2?

I also have OS 9.2.2 that I tried installing on a different partition on a differnt drive. This fires up fine till I load on the PT 5.1.3 that I also have. Then all that happens when you boot into OD9 is that it freezes. It goes to the main page without the dock or anything, the cursor turns into a watch and then nothing else happens. I figured that there is a conflict there and that is the end of it. So I then went onto trying the OS X version as per above. I have shut off all the stuff it says to shut off in the manual for all the different PT versions I have, and it doesn't seem to resolve anything.

Can any help me?

[stonehenge]

1133 is basically the same thing - hardware in use.
make sure coreaudio -osx- or sound drivers -os9 - aren't hogging the hardware.
try 1 d24, 1 farm, and 1 882 at a time till digitest passes to see if you have bad hardware.

[John_Toolbox]

I have a 40 gb master hard drive running OS X 10.4.

That's your problem. Mix and d24 systems simply won't work with 10.4

Double check the answerbase archives, but I'm pretty sure that PT 6.0 needs to be running on 10.2.x to work.

PT 6.4 will not work with the d24, you need a mix card in the system. I think the last supported Pro Tools version for d24 cores was 6.1.

You can run 10.3.9 if you add a mix card in the system(you can use a mix farm if you have a d24), that's the newest mac OS the will work with these systems. I didn't start using OSX until 10.3, so I can't speak with experience... But from what I've heard most people say to steer clear of any of the OSX versions earlier than 10.3 if you can.

[steve78]

Thanks guys for all this, I still have to have time to try it all out, but I will get there and see if I can't get it working yet.

On a different note, is there by chance somewhere to find out the pin outs of the cables for these systems?

I am curious to find out that when the Y cable is used, does the second interface used a different set of pins or not. I have a a couple of the avid cables that came with a bunch of stuff I have collected over the years, and they go from the standard 60 pin digilink connector to a scsi 3 (68 pin) connector. The standard TDM cable is the same 60 pin digilink connector to a scsi 2 (50 pin) connector. I am curious if one can use a scsi 3 to scsi 2 adaptor and use the avid cable on the digi 888 i/o boxes. Or is one can use the avid cable and break the 68 pin into 2 50 pin connectors as a way to get 2 i/o into a card....

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by steve78

Thanks guys for all this, I still have to have time to try it all out, but I will get there and see if I can't get it working yet.

On a different note, is there by chance somewhere to find out the pin outs of the cables for these systems?

I am curious to find out that when the Y cable is used, does the second interface used a different set of pins or not. I have a a couple of the avid cables that came with a bunch of stuff I have collected over the years, and they go from the standard 60 pin digilink connector to a scsi 3 (68 pin) connector. The standard TDM cable is the same 60 pin digilink connector to a scsi 2 (50 pin) connector. I am curious if one can use a scsi 3 to scsi 2 adaptor and use the avid cable on the digi 888 i/o boxes. Or is one can use the avid cable and break the 68 pin into 2 50 pin connectors as a way to get 2 i/o into a card....

This is something I've been curious about, but never had the time to figure out. Being that you can now find y-cables for around $50-$75, it's not something I see as being worthwhile anymore. But if you do figure anything out be sure to post your findings on here, I'm sure there are others who are curious about this too.

Take a look on ebay too, there are several cisco cables that use the same db60 connectors, I always thought that one could make their own custom cables from one of these and some SCSI-2 connectors. It would be really nice to be able to have shorter cables than 12 feet, this seems to be the only size interface cable I can ever find.

[steve78]

So I have finally got it all up and running, well atleast the protools side of it with 1 888 i/o, and it seems to work great. I was playing with it on the weekend and it looks like its gonna be fun. Thanks guys for all your help.

I was doing some reading on the weekend in the protools manual about the d24 system which is what I have, and the manual says that the track count is a max of 32 tracks. I am assuming that that is for 1 d24 cards and the balance of dsp cards to get that number of tracks, which I believe is 2 dsp cards. Can I add a second d24 card and 2 more dsp cards to get the track count up to 64 tracks?

Also, I have a ul3d atto card in the computer right now, even with nothing hooked up to, should it show up when I run digitest? I have a feeling it may defective, I haven't seen the card show up in the "about this computer" section or in digitest, even if I plug in the scsi drives to the card, nothing shows up, however, I have no idea what format state the drives are in, I can see them to format them.....

The other issue I have is that in order to use atto express stripe I need a serial number, atto says is suppose to be on the cd package, but of course is was on the protools disk, and of course they can't tell me where to find the serial number, can anyone tell me where this serial number is suppose to be? Is there a read me file that has it in it, or is there something better to use to format scsi drives......

[John_Toolbox]

Can I add a second d24 card and 2 more dsp cards to get the track count up to 64 tracks?

Yes, another d24 or a mix farm will give you the ability to run 64 tracks. You don't need more DSP farms unless you want more processing power, they won't affect the max track count.

Also, I have a ul3d atto card in the computer right now, even with nothing hooked up to, should it show up when I run digitest? I have a feeling it may defective, I haven't seen the card show up in the "about this computer" section or in digitest, even if I plug in the scsi drives to the card, nothing shows up, however, I have no idea what format state the drives are in, I can see them to format them.....

digitest only tests digidesign cards. You should be able to see your UL3d from the system profiler, assuming you have the atto software installed. If you haven't already, go to atto's site and get atto expresspro tools 2.8.3, that's what you need to connect/format SCSI drives with your UL3d.

The other issue I have is that in order to use atto express stripe I need a serial number, atto says is suppose to be on the cd package, but of course is was on the protools disk, and of course they can't tell me where to find the serial number, can anyone tell me where this serial number is suppose to be? Is there a read me file that has it in it, or is there something better to use to format scsi drives......

You sure about this? I don't remember ever having to give a serial number for the atto software... Been a while since I've installed it, but that doesn't sound right.