PT 6.7 and SCSI ATTO drivers problems

[MarcoM]

We have an HD3 system running on a dual 1.25GHz G4 which has been very stable and reliable in OS 9. We have a DC UL3D ATTO SCSI card with 2 drives which have been performing impeccable in OS 9.

After we just moved up to OS 10.3.5 and PT 6.7, we have been having lots of problems with the SCSI side of things. To be honest, after we installed just OS X and PT 6.7, everything was just fine. We could easily record 48 tracks at 48KHz on a single SCSI drive and have good playback over a short loop on 48 tracks with lots of edits. That was with PT 6.7 on the default settings, playback buffer size at 2 (default), and track recording time set to maximum.

Following down to the letter Digi instructions on how to setup the SCSI thing, we installed all the recommended ATTO drivers and utilities, checked the firmware version on our card, etc. Guess what? We can now record only just 25-26 tracks at 48KHz, and only increasing the buffer size to 8 achieves all the 48 tracks to record for longer than a few seconds before we get a -9073 error. Incidentally, if we set too many tracks in record, the maximum length of recording stays the same - about 4sec. with the buffer set to 2 and exactly double that with the buffer set to 4 - regardless of how many tracks more than the maximum

We then tried to remove the ATTO drivers, but there's almost no documentation of what gets installed on the system and where, so we only managed to remove the ATTO Utility. Meanwhile, it looks like the record/playback track count has been falling after our initial tests, showing that something isn't quite right. Incidentally, we're still able to record about 40 tracks with the same settings on the Mac internal drive without a glitch, at buffer level 2.

All drives were formatted with the Apple Disk Utility, and we tried to reformat the SCSI drives in the same fashion a few times, with no improvement.

Is anyone else experiencing similar SCSI problems after moving up to OS X, and could you possibly share your configuration and the track count you're achieving?

We're aware that FireWire drives are good performers, but I just don't see why we should abandon SCSI drives which should be perfectly able to work and exceed FireWire drives performance with dense edits.

Many thanks for any help,

[snaggle]

Hello Marco,

I just recently updated my HD system. I went from OS 9 to OS X (10.3.5) and changed from the older Atto DC card to the UL3D on a Dual G4 1.25. Sadly, all I can tell you is that it all went, and is running flawlessly for me. I didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary either.

May not be what you want to hear, but, at least it will work. Let me know if there is anything specific you would like me to check.

K

[minister]

marco,

i have a similar system as well, though an HD2.. and, like snaggle, mine went flawlessly. sounds like you did everything right, one thing though, card order. is that correct? verified? did you try to unseat and re-seat the cards. and yeah, i'd be willing to check my settings for ya as well. the new atto config tool is a little cumbersome, and INCONVENIENT in that you have to drag ALL your drives off to install one new one, then rescan and mount them all.

[MarcoM]

Thanks guys,

it must have been a quirk with the ATTO software. We did manage to remove the ATTO drivers and we installed them again. Upgraded Mac OS from 10.3.4 to 10.3.5, it all seems much better now. I don't think it's got to do with the Mac OS version, rather something that the upgrade must have fixed along the way that we couldn't find ourselves.

As a matter of interest, could you tell me roughly how many tracks of record (playback is more forgiving) you can squeeze out of a single SCSI drive, and what's your DAE buffer set to? We can record 48 tracks for an extended period of time on an empty 10k RPM SCSI drive only if we set the DAE buffer to 4. Our dual 1.25 G4 has 1.5GB RAM and runs OS 10.3.5 with PT 6.7, for your information.

Is anyone NOT using the ATTO drivers under OS X? Just wondering if the standard Apple drivers are up to it - our earlier test seemed to indicate that they might perform better - although I'm not sure if there's a catch.

[Wolfgang Eller]

Well actually I was mentioning this problem half a year ago but nobody was really interested in.

I have more or less the same setup and the same problems: For replay SCSI as almost as fast as it was in OS9 times but for recording you have to go to buffer 4 to get 48 tracks to 1 disk (I can replay 96 tracks from 1 disk).

Recently I talked with a German Apple tech guy and his answer about the problems above were:
Official: It is right that there are some problems with SCSI and OSX. We are working on it.

Inofficial: We are not really interested in improving the SCSI performance cause we can collect licence fees with firewire not with SCSI.

BTW: working with buffer 4 in OSX is as fast as buffer 2 in OS9.

Cheers Wolfgang

[Evil Jack]

You need to log in as 'ROOT', to install the Atto drivers properly (they are installed at the lowest level of the OSX system).
You can find out how to do this in the Apple Knowledgebase.

[Wolfgang Eller]

Okay I tried it and maybe it´s the new driver (from October) or really that I installed it as root but now I can record 32 tracks in 44.1/24 buffer settings 2 on one 10000 disk (before the limit was 24) but it´s still far from what I could do in OS9: Recording 64 and playback 96.
Now just playback with 96 tracks is fine but if I´m recording 32 tracks on one disk (I´m doing a lot of classical and big band recording) there´s no headroom anymore.
I have to set the buffer size to 4 to get a better feeling.

Cheers Wolfgang