Facilis Terablock and PT 12

[coaxmw]

Is anyone on a mac running a Facilis Terablock server with ProTools 12 (or 11)?
Ours was recently re-formatted to change the layout. The drives were all set up as multi-user and it was working fine on PT10. When I upgraded to 12, PT wont write any PT specific files to the drive, except for the session file which it locks.
If I copy a project to the drive and open it, PT wont let you save or write any files. Sometimes it will tell you that the file is already being used by your user name.
If anyone has been running these 2 together successfully could you give me any tips on how your drive is formatted and its permissions set? We (mostly our tech) have tried a few different formatting options and either Facilis, ProTools or Mac seems to have an issue with each style.
Thanks in advance

[Eric Seaberg]

We've been running Facillis for quite awhile... about a year... primarily for our 6-Avid and 2-Adobe video suites. We decided to add our ProTools suites to it and have discovered several problems, depending on if you're running Multi-User or Single-User.

We did try running Multi-User setups with ProTools and have had MUCH better luck running PT 10 (and 11/12) in Single-User mode. All other users can still READ the other ProTools drives as necessary, however, we have discovered severe speed issues, especially using PT 11/12 hi-speed bounce to ANY mode.

I'm in charge of doing a hi-speed bounce of 5-stereo stems, but can't READ and WRITE to Facilis at the same time... crawls at 4x original speed. If I READ from Facilis and Write to a local 7200RPM drive, my speed jumps to 24x original speed. We've submitted LOTS of test numbers to Facilis and are awating their response.

For the most part, we LOVE the Facilis concept... but coming from an Avid Unity system and Avid support... Facilis has a LONG way to go to catch up.

[coaxmw]

Thanks for your response Eric. Our Tech guy formatted a Single user drive for me today but I was unable to write to it from the finder or ProTools. When the company re did the partitioning they also upgraded to the most recent software and I'm not sure if thats part of the issue when trying to format this drive for me or....
There are 3 edits suites (premier/FCP7) and several edit stations as well as some Davinci work that seem to be having minimal trouble with the setup, just the Protools setup wen running 12.
Any chance you could tell me the format of the Facilis drive your working from?
Thats really unfortunate about the speed and read/write issues. I'm mostly doing spots and projects under 5 min in length so I just re-record my mix and splits into my session. We also have an inbox/outbox setup on a shared server so I don't need any editors to access the PT drive ever.
Thanks.

[Eric Seaberg]

For Single-User drives, you need to initialize it from YOUR MAC as if it were a local. He can set it up for you, but you need to initialize it. Try that and see how it works...

With our ProTools systems, all Facillis drives are Single-User, but ALL other PT systems have them mounted and can read from them. That way the guy in Studio C can be working on a piece that I may need in Studio A later in the day. When he's done my PT session loads it from his drive as READ ONLY and I'm off to mix... no need to copy files to my session! Real time saver.

The speed issues only pop up doing multiple stems back to Facillis. A stereo offline bounce is still very fast. We're also checking to see if it's our fiber cards in the MacPros (last towers). Our Avid suites are all using MacPro 'trash cans' with faster fiber cards, but are having some issues as well, depending on what they're doing.


Let me know about the initializing of your drive. You can email me, too. eric at seaberg dot com.

[coaxmw]

Thanks so much Eric, I'm going to try formatting from my machine after my session tomorrow.