Unity drive free space not as listed

[Mario C]

Has anyone else come across the scenario where the drive will state is has xGb free, but PT can't allocate space for recording?

I'm talking along the range of 20-30 Gb (not M or K, but Gigabytes) free space (according to the folder and Finder), and I can't record 20 minutes of VO (1 track, prefs selected to allocate only 20 minutes). Now, my calculus maybe rusty, but one track of VO (16/44.1) for 20 minutes should not add up to 15 Gb.

This is very inconsistant and annoying. Sometimes I can run as low as 15 Gb free before it's full, other times I get stuck at 30Gb. I've gotten into the habbit of holding onto old projects, just so that I have something to blow off and give me some space.

Brief setup: 2x PT 5.1.3, OS9.2.1, 888, USD, AVXL box, expansion chassis, Unity 3.0
1x MC, 1xSymphony, 1xOther Mac client running graphics.

Audio workspace is allocated from 1 of 2 drive arrays; video guys use all other workspaces. For my needs, I've allocated about 70Gb of space for Audio workspace. And practically, I can only use 1/2 to 2/3 before it's "full".

As far as I can tell (by asking everyone in the building at the time), I am usually the only client using this workspace when this happens. (I suspect the video guys may try to use our workspace when their's gets full, but that doesn't always correlate with the recording space problem.)

Any ideas? One other note: the video guys also run across this problem on their side, but credit it to "lost" files the media manager doesn't account for. But why would this affect the audio workspace?

Thanks for any input,
Mario (is this shirt too small, or am I getting bigger?) in SLC

[DigiTechSupt]

Could be a few things. The first thing that comes to mind is the "creating" file that Avids use when digitizing.
Avids do some sort of "pre-allocating" of disk space when they digitize and by doing so create a file called the "Creating File". You can go into the OMFI Mediafiles folder of that workspace and then into each OMFI Mediafiles sub-folder for each system connected to the Avid and see if there is a creating file there.

When the Avid has tracks record enabled this file can get fairly large in anticipation of an up coming record pass. Once the Avid tracks are un-armed and the Digitize or Record tool is closed this file should reduce in size and possibly disappear. Sometimes they don't and can eat up gigs of space. You may have to go and manually delete them when this happens. Be sure that none of the creating files are in use by an Avid if you try to delete them.

This would suggest that possibly the Avid editors are using your workspace(s) more than you know, intentionally or not.

Another thing that could cause this would be a workspace that is not happy. I have seen instances where creating a new workspace takes care of similar problems. Be sure to copy the data out of the "bad" workspace and then delete it to free up the space. This shouldn't happen very often at all. Be careful to who you give write access to on the Avids ; ).

Hope this helps,

Jon Connolly
Digidesign Product Specialist

[DigiTechSupt]

I would suggest checking your administration tool and see how many files you have used for your whole network.

Even if you have gigabytes of storage left over, and then do something illegal like back up your system drive to it, this would use up your quota for allowed number of files the network size/server allowed.

Hope that or what Jon suggested helps,

Dan Muchmore
Digidesign European Support Engineer

[feakerboo]

We had to add more RAM to our server a few months ago but that was b/c we hit the file limit. All the sudden everytime the systems tried to autobackup we would get an error.

I have noticed a sort of similar problem when trying to COPY a bunch of files to the Unity server. We always have to just copy a few at a time. For some reason when copying, it takes up a lot of space, them when it is done it takes up exactly as much as it should.

i wonder if its related?

-brad

[Mario C]

Thanks for all the ideas.

We did check our file limits, but they were all within 1/4 to 1/3 of maximums. Should we still look into more RAM?

We also have that issue when copying files straight to a workspace: it seems to take 3x to 10x the space needed to copy, then when it's done it will release what wasn't used.

In the mean time, the video guys have agreed to free up some space (they're running at 98% capacity) and we'll rearrange some workspaces. Hopefully that will help.

[feliponk]

Mario: I'm having the same problem, try reducing the Open Endend Record Allocation setting in the preferences menu, put it as low as 10 minutes and see how it works.

[feakerboo]

The partition that I record to has 8 drives allocated to it and that is all. I don't share the dives with anybody else. This seems to work most of the time but it is still not as solid as recording to a SCSI Drive. One note, that is a little off topic: I was always under the inpression (as it was given to me by tech support) that you could distructive record to a Unity partition. I now have it confimed that this is NOT supported under UNITY. Kinda makes sence that this is the case considering how UNITY "sprays" the data across the drives. Because of this however I seldomly record to UNITY anymore.

Lets try to keep this thread alive since UNITY and Protools configurations still seems to be somewhat of a black art.

-brad

[Mario C]

I've gone as low as 5 minutes with it not working.

In fact, there have been times I couldn't create a fade or even save my session, because drive space was gone.

I've also noticed the non-destructive record feature. Generally it's not a problem for us, but there are times when it's needed.

[feakerboo]

I know that this is a dumb question but are you using ANY other media (SCSI, Firewire, Internal) I know that you are supposed to use ONLY UNITY or not use it at all. When I have big sessions (100+ track) I'm always VERY diligent about this. I usually can cheat on smaller sessions and usually end up playing back off Unity and Recording to SCSI as Destructive record is something that we use all the timeand its always been more stable than recording to Unity. I belive that Atto sees the Fiber Channel card as another SCSI device anyway. I would be happy to continue helping you check this out. I have been able to record 100+ tracks at a time in the past, and that was when we were using 1Gb switches (now we have 2Gb.) Good Luck.

-Brad

[matt connolly]

We are experiencing something funny with our UNITY server where even the server monitoring tool is confused about the free space on a drive.

I have also noticed that I cannot copy a large number files at once - I have to break it up into smaller pieces. Since the projects I am working on are not massive by track count, but often and with tight deadlines, we basically use the unity for video playback and file transfer. I consolidate all the audio from an omf onto a local IDE drive and play the video live off the unity. This has proven to be the best way to run it here.

PT 5.1.3 OS 9.2.2 Mix+ 888 AVXL Unity

+ 8 x Avid Adrenaline Windows systems.


mc