External Firewire Nightmare

[FeltSoulMedia]

So, here I am in the bush, Alaska in a town of 25 people, finishing up month 1 of a 2 month enviro doc and my weibetech raid 1 craps out on me. I am able to salvage all of the footage thanks to a download of disk warrior, but now my clips will not preview in the p2 import window. i have not been importing the clips into final cut, but instead have been leaving them in their original form and checking them out via the p2 import window of fcp. so now i cant trust the crapped out, but salvaged weibetech drive. I have 2 new drives flown in on a charter - 2 rocstor 1tb drives raid0 from the apple store in anchorage. after backing up all our recent footage to the first rocstor drive and thinking we were saved - turns out none of the footage will preview in fcp p2 import window, but the exact same footage is previewable via our trusty old FW OWC pocketdrive. WTF? Does anybody have any idea what is going on here? Please advise. oh and the second rocstor drive does not even mount. Am I going insane in the bush or what?

[THoff]

Don't use RAID0 -- you've got twice the number of potential points of failure, and if either drive goes bad, you lose everything.

The reason why you may not have lost everything with your RAID1 array is because of the redundancy, and even that is clearly no insurance against disasters. If a program or user error causes information to be lost under program control, it is gone from both drives.

[FeltSoulMedia]

I always thought that raid1 was the best for built in redundancy - no?

then I thought that RAID 0 was second best for the read/write/access speed needed for the demands of hd video.

Should I just keep it old school with "normal" FW drives?

Thanks for the quick reply

[THoff]

Use RAID1 for redundancy, RAID0 for speed. The drawback with RAID0 is that the information is distributed across two drives, so if one of them fails, you have nothing. That's less reliable than a single non-RAID drive.

Since you are already experiencing problems, I'd hate to see you put all of your eggs in one basket with that new RAID0 drive and lose that, too.

[cheezweezl]

the fcp preview issue may not be due to your drive issues. sometimes i lose the ability to preview as well but import works fine. for instance, i can always preview directly from the card but sometimes after the transfer the preview window just stays white...

[FeltSoulMedia]

My preview is staying black for my now straight fw drive. I changed it from raid0 to "normal" in the hopes of recovering the preview functionality - but no dice. So as it stands no preview from my Wiebetech RAID1, Rocstor temporary RAID0, and Rocstor normal fw drive. It does work with the exact same files from my OWC 5400 rpm FW800 pocketdrive.

WHY? Once we dump our cards this is our only way of checking out the footage...

Is this a FCP issue or hard drive issue? Seems like it has to be FCP. But we tested it on another mac book and same deal.

[THoff]

You can't take a RAID0 array and change it to JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) -- half the data will be missing. You must copy the files off the intact RAID0 array to another location.

[FeltSoulMedia]

You can't take a RAID0 array and change it to JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) -- half the data will be missing. You must copy the files off the intact RAID0 array to another location.

That was my approach. I now have 2 independent FW drives and still no FCP p2 preview ability, despite the preview functioning with my OWC FW pocketdrive. Any ideas on the reason for a lack FCP preview?

[nsoltz]

Which version of FCP? OS? Ram? Can't see you system from here.

Ned Soltz

[FeltSoulMedia]

The drives I am using are the wiebetech RaidTech800 as a raid1
dual 500GB SAta drives @ 7200RPM
I have been connecting via FW800 but have tried via 9pinto6pin and USB = no luck

The other drive is a Rocstor 1 TB FW external FW800 @ 7200rpm connected via FW800/400 or USB = no luck

The drive that actually works is a OWC 5400 rpm pocketdrive connected by FW800.

I am running a dual core Mac Book Pro with the latest OS and 5.1.4 FCP, but have also tried with the same luck on a mac book.

Any ideas are super appreciated.