Atto formatted drives

[EHeiberg]

Just upgraded a 9600 to a Dual450, (painful)-Digi said reformat all drives w/Atto. Put an older drive (e.g. FWB) on the system and computer crashes.... hard! anybody else hating life with Atto ?

[BDWillis]

I only use Express Pro Tools app to control the SCSI card, not to format. However, mine's a "closed system" (not swapping drives with other systems), so if you need to swap, you may indeed need to go all-ATTO. When I moved from a beige G3/Adaptec (FWB 2.5.3) to G4/ATTO (FWB Hard Disk Tools PE v4.0) there were no problems… here's how:

First, leave the ATTO extension OUT of the Ext Folder; next, launch ATTO app, set SCSI card synch rate to 20 (10) & burst rate to 32 bytes. Quit EPT, save changes, restart; then launch FWB HDT, insert/mount drives & update disk drivers to v4.0.1 (this doesn't lose any data…).

I've heard that all disks on a given system need to use the same driver to avoid SCSI problems, and based on 2 years of very smooth operations with Adaptec/FWB, I decided to try FWB 4.0 with the ATTO card. So far it's been flawless. Others may have had a different experience. Also, make sure your DAE buffer is set to 2, disk cache to 512k, platinum sounds off, etc per the manual. There are issues with the DP Macs that you should look into if you haven't already… a search on the DUC will give you a lot of info. Good luck.

Warmest Regards,
Brian

[Gulliver]

Whatever software you're using in your system should be the same as what the drives are formatted with. ATTO software will not read FWB formatted drives.

Install FWB in your system to read those FWB formatted drives; if you have files you need to get from them. You may re-format them with ATTO if you would like.

[Danny Caccavo]

Here's what I've found....

I've had problems with mounting ATTO formatted drives on Adaptec cards. They won't auto mount, and if you try to mount with FWB, the drive will show up as locked. However, if you use EPT (yes, on a system with an adaptec card) to mount it, it will mount.

What I do with ATTO card systems is to put the Ept extension in, and set both busses of the card for "inhibit driver loading" (you actually set this on the drive dialog, but be sure you do it for each port). Reboot, and the ATTO drivers will load for all your hard drives. I've found it's very reliable like this. And it won't matter what your drives are formatted with.

DC