Help with SCSI performance!

I suggest that you upgrade and get PT 7. The performance of SCSI was greatly improved. I had to use OS 9 to do a live show at 24/96 with 72 tracks, I would not have done that with 6.9.x. I assume that some low level stuff was fixed in 7 as the performance is now excellent with my dual channel UL3D and our removable drive chassis. hope this helps Simon L.

Sorry to bother you with this but I would love to know what NVRAM settings you use Atto defaults and settings recommended by Digi (in a not very recent document) are so different that I wonder where the truth lies. thanks for any feedback on this

e-mail ATTO support for the latest if you are suspicious of the (dated) DIGI info.

We get good results (on a single, fresh formatted drive I expect to be able to get 96 tracks at 48K 24 bit with the DAE buffer set to 4 before I get a DEA error - we don't record as many tracks on session, but I use this to test system set-ups) as follows. OSX Driver v3.2.0, Flash Prom v1.6.6f0, use ExpressPCI Configure Tool v3.2.0 Set Selection Timeout to 250mS, PCI Burst Rate to 128, Sync Rate to 160DT and Fallback Sync Rate to 20 This is as specified in the compatability documents.

You most definitely do NOT want to use the ATTO card default settings, unless it was a Digidesign branded ATTO card. Stick with the settings on the Digidesign website. The Digidesign recommended ATTO settings are important because they slow the throughput of the ATTO card. The amount of Data Pro Tools is capable of "requesting" at any given moment (especially with larger sessions) and the amount of data one or more 10k SCSI drives can provide is much more than the CPU's PCI bus can handle. If you open up the ATTO card to it's full capacity, you will see problems with Pro Tools performance, most likely in the form of DAE 6042 errors. Other things which could be causing poor SCSI performance. - Drive initialization. Be sure to copy all of your data off first and be sure to initialize ("erase" in the Apple Disk Utility) all of your drives in the current Mac OS you are using. This can remedy two different problems.. 1) drives that haven't been inititialized in a long time can suffer in the performance area. Depending on how much you use your system, you should do this every few months, more or less depending on use. 2) Drives initialized in older version of the Mac OS can also create performance problems. Apple has been tweaking their OS, quite frequently, over the last couple of years and changes made to SCSI (and firewire) performance within the OS are not out of the question. - Proper ATTO drivers installation. Sometimes the ATTO drivers don't install and/or load properly. If they are installed and loaded properly, you should see the ATTO Logo on of your SCSI drives on the Mac desktop. If they don't have the ATTO logo on them, it's likely they are not seeing/using the ATTO drivers and the result could be bad SCSI performance. - Also, check all of the usuals, SCSI cabling, SCSI termination, SCSI ID's, etc. Jon Connolly Digidesign Product Specialist

Hi, I just installed the ATTO ultilities to get the SCSI-settings right. There's a ReadMe when I installed the driver. It's about Open Firmware Options, Event Logging, etc. Do we need an variable Open Firmware environment? And when I double-clicked the Flashbundle, it appeared on my desktop. I now moved it to systemfolder;library;extentions;ATTOExpressPCIPlus Utils. Is this the right place to put it? Thanks, Niels

The Flash bundle is designed to be loaded into the atto card using the Atto utility. You open the utility then click on the Atto card and there is a Flash loader with a browse button that allows you to locate the flash bundle so that you can load it to the Atto card, you then need to reboot the machine hope this helps Simon L.

Thanks for the feedback ! The latest news is that I am presently testing Pro tools 7.1 and 10.4.3, and guess what ? looks like something has changed because I wasn't able to reproduce the problem ! Unfortunatly I haven't been able to do in depth testing of this, as the problem can be very embarrassing with clients, so I stick to Firewire for the time beeing...

Good news, I confirm that 7.1 + OS10.4.3 seems to work well with my UL3D - same reasonably big session - same track in record ready & quickpunch mode - same locator PT 6.9.9 + OS 10.4.2 : after two or three play commands from same locator = error -9073 consistent and repeatable PT 7.1 cs3 + OS 10.4.3 : impossible to reproduce error !