This is an old subject ;) but , well maybe some peole will respond to it.
I'm in a tiny tiny tiny post production company and we are running for now a hybrid solution : Metasan setup, with avid virtualisation on a 2gb fiber network assisted with a Gig ethernet.
But, well not really the best system, kind of buggy&laggy sometimes, and there is not way to share project as unity is doing it
So i started to invistigate : What is inside a unity !
-Mediarray XT : Simple motherboard, P4, 1 or 2 Go ddr2 ram.
An Atto celerity 41ES /XS 4gb fiberchannel hba
A 3Ware 9650se 16port raid adapter in JBOD
Some enterprise class drive : in my example Hitachi ultrastar 500gb with special avid firmware on it.
Software :
-Simple XP pro( Xp wtf?!?)
-3ware 3dm2 manager
-Avid IBOD , Who has a double function : first it check the drive and the raid harware to be sure it's the good chassis and second it activate the drive to simulate some fibrechannel class one and promote it along the fiber network as target.
The thing i'm trying to do is build my own mediarray XT chassis from a supermicro one. For now i got exactly the same hardware that the mediarray one except my disk are not avid rebranded one. I have 24 Seagate 500gb with the same firmware/size 16 for the mediarray and 8 for sparing the unity old days ;).
And Avid IBOD is telling me it : error -1 not avid drive
So how i can make Avid Ibod accept my disk ? Do they have to be exatly the same size of original avid one ? do i have to manage to flash my drive with a custom firmware to rebrand the disk vendor ID = AVID ?
I already tried to put some virtual drive target on the fiber network with a great linus distro OPEN-e DSS who let you make a virtual disk and promote as fiber drive target but the filemanager doesn't seems to even take care or look at it ...
Is it possible that the 4.2.x version of unity is now checking the drive and refuse to promote it if it's not avid certified one ?
Thanks for your awnsers
Alex
--- In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, Jay Mahavier <jay_mahavier@...> wrote:
>
> Thank you very much. That make very clear sense. I appreciate the
> time you took to write your post. I feel that it is going to be
> extremely helpful.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Jay
>
> On Aug 6, 2008, at 12:34 PM, Wilson Chao wrote:
>
> > Yeah, it was me - I've used generic (non Avid) drives on Unity -
> > actually, they were used/re-furbed Seagate drives from eBay, at about
> > 10% the cost of Avid drives. This was way back in the day, before
> > Avid got anywhere near reasonable with their storage pricing. I'm not
> > claiming it makes the same economic sense today.
> >
> > There's actually nothing secret nor magic here. And although it's to
> > Avid's advantage to sell their own branded drives, they've not
> > conspired, nor embedded any secret code in their software to require
> > such (though it would be easy to do).
> >
> > You simply must use a set of drives, all of whose firmware *claims*
> > they are EXACTLY identical in size. Not a big trick, at least when
> > you're originally purchasing new drives. If you buy a dozen
> > "identical" drives through an online retail distributor, you're likely
> > to get 12 drives from the same manufacturing batch, with the exact
> > same firmware rev., with the actually identical *claimed* size. OK,
> > fine. Unity has no problem striping these "identical" drives in a
> > group.
> >
> > But a year later, when you go to buy another dozen drives, and you
> > order the exact same model, you'll likely receive 12 more drives with
> > a different firmware rev. from the first dozen, with a different
> > *claimed* size. Unity can stripe this second dozen together with
> > themselves, but it won't combine them with the first dozen into a
> > group of 24. This isn't convenient, but it's workable.
> >
> > Where you'll crash & burn is if you have all your "identical" drives
> > striped together, and you lose a single drive, so your Unity slows to
> > a glacial pace & asks you to mount a spare so it can rebuild. And you
> > FedEx your single bad drive back & the manufacturer sends you back a
> > replacement drive. Uh-oh... That warrantee replacement is the "same
> > model" but with the current firmware rev., with a different *claimed*
> > size. Unity refuses to group it with your older drives, you can't
> > rebuild, & you're "tits up in a ditch".
> >
> > Avid works around this by writing their own firmware onto their
> > drives, *claiming* that they're all the same size. Note that
> > Avid-firmware drives aren't physically any more or less identical than
> > the manufacturer-firmware drives, they just *claim* to be. So you can
> > always count on Avid drives being compatible for Unity, unlike 3rd
> > party drives.
> >
> > Practically, this means that for Unity use, 3rd party drives HAVE NO
> > WARRANTY because their warranty replacements are un-stripable. If
> > you're willing to buy a bunch of spares up front to keep on the shelf,
> > go ahead. (You can always use those pesky replacement drives for some
> > low-bandwidth applications.)
> >
> > And yeah, I gotta agree w. Jeff S. If you have inhouse skills
> > sufficient to install, maintain, & troubleshoot a Unity, go ahead. If
> > not, don't.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 8/6/08, Jeff Sengpiehl <docavid@...> wrote:
> > You need to ensure that all the drives match in size exactly, which
> > means that ALL of those drives have the same firmware, which means
> > the same firmware size. You also will need to have enough spares to
> > cover your ass in case of difficulties.
> > Can you? yes Should you? Depends on your skill level with Unity
> > Do I recommend it? If you have a full time Unity ACSR (Or more then
> > one), on staff, and just down the hall from the system, sure, why
> > not.
> >
> > On 8/6/08, avid_curren <tcurren@...> wrote:
> > Not true. Another prominent member of this list had success replacing
> > drives in Unity in the past. As I recall, the only trick is to make
> > sure all the drives match in size exactly. Maybe he will chime in
> > here.
> >
> >
> >> --- In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, "dishon.bilgory"
> >> <dishon.bilgory@> wrote:
> > drives and the FM is programmed to not accept drives that do not have
> > the modified firmware. To succeed in this you would probably need to
> > do some hacking of the drive firmware.
> >
> > ------------------------------------
> >
> > Search the complete Avid-L archives at:
> >
> > http://archives.itg.uiuc.edu/avid/
> >
> > The Avid L2, Where the Answers are.Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
>
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