Single or dualchannel SCSIcard?

[Wooster]

We have a dualchannel Atto PCI Express SCSI card and my question is the following: Does a dualchannel card take up more PCI bandwith even thou we don´t use one of the channels at the moment. We get error -6042 when we get over 30 tracks and I´ve tried everything (referre to old post named "Error -6042"). We are going to try a Digidesig 7-slot chassi now instead of our SBS Bit 3 13-slot, but I just came to think of the SCSIcard and if someone have any info on this matter I would be grateful to hear it.

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Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[Gulliver]

No, it only takes up the amount of data flow that's going through the card and bus.

Note, a G4 PCI bus is able to stream data at 133MB/s. Audio streams very slow, way less than the 40MB/s top speed of your one ATTO DC SCSI bus.

Your SCSI card should be in the computer, and not the expansion chasis. Drop the sync rate to 20/10 and burst rate to 32. Check the access time rating of your hard drive. Old SCSI drives may be too slow for that many tracks (files). It should be faster than, lets say 9ms.

[Wooster]

Thanks for the reply but my disks are 10.000 rpm 18 GB Seagate Cheeta with 4 MB Cache and average seektime around 5.1 ms so I don´t think they are the problem here. The problem is that I can´t get more than 48 track playback (@24 bit / @44.1 kHz) on the following system:

G3 350 Blue/White (latest firmware)
MacOS 8.6 (Swedish)
ATTO Dualchannel Exress PCI (firmware 1.44)
Protools 4.3.2 with DAE 3.4.f9
SBS Bit3 13-slot chassi
1 x Mix core and 4 Mix farms
1 x Twin Turbo 8 MB graphicscard



------------------
Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[Danny Caccavo]

You should post your card order in the Mac and the Bit 3.

You know about the "bridge chip" thing?

dc

[Gulliver]

48 tracks on one hard drive isn't bad. If you have a lot of edits you will get less performance. Also, Digi recommends partitioning at least to 2x9GB. How about the buffer size setting? How about application memory allocation?

Just making sure you got your bases covered.

[Wooster]

Here´s the following equipment and trubleshooting I´ve done so far. And I might add that I´ve installed 9-10 big PT systems during the years (worked both in pro music shop and as Apple service engineer) and I have never had near so many errors as with this system. What differs this system from the rest is stated later in the text.

The problem is that I can´t get more than 48 track playback (@24 bit / @44.1 kHz) on the following system:

G3 350 Blue/White (latest firmware)
MacOS 8.6 (Swedish)
ATTO Dualchannel Exress PCI (firmware 1.44)
Protools 4.3.2 with DAE 3.4.f9
SBS Bit3 13-slot chassi
1 x Mix core and 4 Mix farms
1 x Twin Turbo 8 MB graphicscard

I´ve tried to take out 1 of the graphicscards but no joy. Tried all the folloing below.

Troubleshooting:
Doublechecked all Control Panel settings:
Colors at 256 (and greyscale) - helped to get 4-8 channels more
Disk Cache at 128k (also tried 512, 256k)

DAE Playback buffer set at 2, (4 and 8 also)
Removed ALL ATI Extensions (ATI Driver Update is reportedly notorious for PCI bandwidth hogging. Helped somewhat)
Trashed ALL prefs for PT
Tried different cardorder in the G3

The following tried on the ExpressPro-Tools software:

-Sync Rate set to 20/10. - Done (works better at 40/20)
-Termination set to Automatic. - Done
-PCI burst rate to 32. - Done (Works better at 512)
-Enable synchronous transfer. - Done
-Enable wide transfers. - Done
-Enable allow disconnect. - Done
-Enable LUN's Enabled. - Done
-Inhibit driver loading can be left disabled. - Done
-PCI Burst length should be set to match Pro Tools cards: 32 bytes. DSI 5.01 changes the burst length to 32 bytes on boot. This occurs only with the ATTO EPCI-DC card. Adaptec cards often spike with a large initial burst rate causing a -6042 error. - I didn´t notice any different between Adaptec 3940 and ATTO dual channel UW with the same setup. I first had a 3940 and I have bought a ATTO to try it out - No change!!!!

The following cardorder is used (tried minor variations with no luck):


The system is as follows:

G3 B/W card order

Slot 1 - Original graphics card
Slot 2 - PCI chassi host card
Slot 3 - ATTO card
Slot 4 - Extra graphics card (Twin Turbo 8MB)

PCI chassi card order (Bit 3 13-slot)

Slot 0 - Host chassi card
Slot 1 - Empty (as it states in Digi expansion chassi guide)
Slot 2 - Mix Core
Slot 3 - Mix farm 1
Slot 4 - Mix farm 2
Slot 5 - Mix farm 3
Slot 6 - Mix farm 4

I have replaced the following parts during a 5 month period (some improvments thou):

PM 9600/250 -> B/W G3/450
ATI Orion 128 (16 MB) -> Twin Turbo (8 MB)
2 x 9GB Seagate Barracuda -> 2 x 18GB Seagate Cheeta
Adaptec 3940 -> ATTO Dualchannel

I´m going to try a Magma or Digi 7-slot chassi next week. Also going to try with Protools 5.01 just for the sake of it.

Is it more demanding for the PCI-bus to play back recorded tracks than to record them? I do not get any -6042 errors when recording 64 tracks at the same time but I can only playback 48 at the same time. Can someone at Digi please answer me!

In the studio I work during the days we have an similar setup with the exception that we use a beige (classic) G3/266 and a Bit 3 7-slot chassi and Adaptec 2940. We get the -6042 error about once every three month.

------------------
Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[This message has been edited by Wooster (edited February 02, 2001).]

[Wooster]

Is there some Digi guy there who have a clue about the above problems?

------------------
Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[Gulliver]

Do you have your OS/boot/application drive as an IDE drive, with the 2 SCSI drives as audio drives? Have you split tracks, assigning 32 to each drive? Did you try hanging each drive off of it's own bus, rather than 2 on one bus and legacy devices on the other? Do you have legacy devices sharing a bus with your SCSI drives?

[Wooster]

Yes - booting from IDE, applications on IDE.
The two Cheeta UW SCSI drives as audiodrives - tried both on the same bus and one each on the two busses of the ATTO card.
Yes - I have 32 tracks to each drive setup as defualt by my autoload session. (Every fourth track)

No - there is not anything else connected to the SCSI-busses

------------------
Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[This message has been edited by Wooster (edited February 03, 2001).]

[Danny Caccavo]

I know it's not a G4, but try pulling the second display card out and see what happens. Take out the IX micro drivers as well. And/or set the monitors to 8 bit instead of 16 or 24 bit.

Also, contrary to what someone else posted, if you partition an 18 gig drive into two 9 gig partitions and are running a session that uses both partitions, the drive actually has to work harder than if it were a single partion.

[Wooster]

Thanks for your answer but if you read my summary I have already pointed out your qestions:

I know it's not a G4, but try pulling the second display card out and see what happens. - done it!
Take out the IX micro drivers as well. And/or set the monitors to 8 bit instead of 16 or 24 bit. - no driver (only generic display support) and 256 colors (8-bit)

Also, contrary to what someone else posted, if you partition an 18 gig drive into two 9 gig partitions and are running a session that uses both partitions, the drive actually has to work harder than if it were a single partion. - Only one partion per drive (two harddrives)

Danny you wrote something about "Bridge chip-thing" in an earlier post - I can´t recall ever reading something about that. Can you perhaps explain what it is. - many thanks!!!

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Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[This message has been edited by Wooster (edited February 03, 2001).]

[Gulliver]

You could try partitioning the drives, and, of coarse, keep within the same partition per song. Although, those drives are crazy fast, I don't think this will help.

In the new Macs, a bridge chip was removed from the PCI bus to make them faster. I don't think this will effect you because audio doesn't need very fast speed. Plus, other systems are getting 64 tracks.

How much memory do you have?

Sorry, I'm out of ideas.

[Wooster]

I have 256 MB and very stripped system with minimum of extensions.

------------------
Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[Wooster]

Just to get Digi´s attention!!!

------------------
Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE

[DigiTechSupt]

-At this point, I would suggest stripping the system down to the bare minimum and start building up from there. Install the following in the host CPU:
1-stock monitor card
2-Mix Core
3-Empty
4-ATTO

-Trash the DigiSetup file, restart the computer and Zap PRAM.

--Open the Extensions Manager Control Panel. From the selected set pop-up menu, select “OS 8.x base” click on “Duplicate Set" at the bottom of the window. Name the set whatever you like. Enable the following extensions and restart the computer:
-DigiSystem INIT
-Digidesign DSP Manager
-Open Music System (only if you are using MIDI)
-USB Floppy Enabler

-Launch Pro Tools, create a new 64 track session, import audio and see if you still get -6042's. While you are playing, keep the Automation Enable Window open to monitor PCI activity.

-If all is well, add the chassis back into the system and only install the Mix Core in the Chassis. So the CPU should be configured as follows:
1-stock monitor card
2-Chassis host
3-Empty
4-ATTO

-Perform the same steps as above and monitor the PCI activity in Pro Tools.

-If problems occur as soon as the Chassis is introduced, what is its model number?

Brent

[Wooster]

I will try it at the same time I try the nwe Chassi from Magma. I will post the results when done

------------------
Best regards
Holger Netterby
ACSE