External storage recommendations..

Well, I'm just a lowly AVID Editor and can't answer the questions about booting. The ATTO card does not have a fan, but seems to need one. Atto tech support told me that heat was not and issue in PC's and that MacPros in particular had been giving them trouble.

I wish I had bought the Areca card for the RAID 6, but my line of thought had been that AVID qualifies ATTO for SCSI so I though the R380 might play nice too. Atto's literature indicated an upgrade to RAID 6 is in the works as well as the possibility of adding RAM to the card.

Anyway after scouring the internet It seems like we're on the bleeding edge here and I just wanted to post a little info for other video folks looking to save some bling. I've given AVID enough money! I second the Enhance box. The multi lane connections rock and are much sturdier than eSATA.

Cheers!

Hi,

Thanks very much for the info about the fan control. We tried to contact about R380 heat issue with ATTO but they never get back. I guess you just have to call them.

When R380 gets too hot, it makes a couple of drives (usually more than one) fail, so even RAID5 won't help. I was giving up and considering to switch to Areca with a fan on the card, but I will try this.

By the way, I use Enhanced chassis, too, it works great so far.

I experimented further on R380 with the fan control on, but I concluded that R380 won't work reliably with Mac Pro. Even the smcFanControl is set to say 1500rpm on the fans, indicating the temp to be around 40 dgree C, drives start to fail. When it fails, always a couple of drives fail at the same tiem, so RAID5 won't be good for anything.

Now I do the same test with all of the same components with Areca ARC1220ML, no problem happens.

Any of you using R380, have you really used up all of the capacity and do like major duplication of files on the same RAID volume?

This is an interesting and helpful thread. I had some extra $ laying around at work and bought a Mac Pro 8-core with 16GB RAM and the apple raid card, which is in PCI slot 4. This makes it run a little hot anyway (qualitatively - I have not measured it).

Adding the atto R380 (in slot 3) puts the Mac Pro over the top. When they turn the a/c down at night, my Mac freezes up -- not a kernel panic, but a freeze, the system becomes unresponsive to keyboard and remote login. Nothing appears in the system log files -- I've had thermal problems with a G5 before that did appear in the log. I presume the Atto card is flaking out on its own, and does not write its status into the log.

It's pretty reproducible -- when I pull the Mac away from the wall where it can get better air circulation, it stays up all night. Obviously this is running at the ragged edge of what the system can support.

I'm using the card with the sonnet 4-drive enclosure. I'd get the Areca card instead of the Atto card in this system!

turmon, good luck with your R380 card. I gave up on it though.
Use that SMCFanControl for sure. It makes even cooler and can set it up at where the fan noise is not as annoying.

R380 seemed to work fine in the beginning, but if you put some heavy load test then it will fail. I tested THREE cards with different cables and drives, they all failed.
It works okay with less drives, like four drives, but as soon as you structure like 8 drive RAID then it seems to exceed its ability to work safely.