1394 drive freezing test results from SF

SonyEPM wrote on 5/29/2003, 10:38 AM

An update on the "1394 enclosure/drive freezing issue" some of you have reported:

One of the forum users ("CF") who has been experiencing the 1394 freezing problem was kind enough to send me his 1394 enclosure/drive and a sample project.

Here's the details:

I have Win2ksp3, with an ADS 1394 drive kit, containing a Maxtor 40Gb drive. This is fed into an ADS Pyro 1394 card. Zero freezes, no matter what the project.

CF's enclosure/drive (IBM Deskstar 80Gb inside an ADS 1394 drive kit), plugged into my known-good system...freezes constantly, just as all of you have described. CF's drive is plugged into the same 1394 card as my other drive, both drives are on.

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My tests & conclusions:

1) Is the problem project dependent? Nope. I copied CF's freezing project to my (good) 1394 enclosure/drive, no freezes. No freezes with this project on IDE or SCSI either.

2) 1394 Cable problem? No- I tried multiple 1394 cables, no change in results.

3) Power supply problem? No- I swapped power supplies, no change in results.

4) Too many 1394 devices connected? No- the bad enclosure/drive freezes no matter how many devices are plugged in.

5) Firmware problem? No. I spent an hour on the phone with an ADS tech yesterday and we flashed the firmware of the bad enclosure* and walked through a number of other scenarios- no change in results. Both the good and bad enclosures now have identical firmware settings, no changes in behavior though.

*ADS did mention that if you are getting a windows message:

"Windows- Delayed Write Failed: Windows was unable to save all the data for the file..... The data has been lost. This error my be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection..... "

that firmware updating can sometimes help- you need to contact them directly for instructions.

6) Master/slave settings on the drives? Both are set to master.

7) I switched the drives inside the 1394 enclosures. My Maxtor is now in CF's 1394 enclosure. CF's IBM drive is in my 1394 enclosure. Bam! FREEZE using the Maxtor in CF's 1394 enclosure, first minute of operation, multiple repros!

8) CF's drive works perfectly in my enclosure.

9) For reference purposes,

My enclosure says, on the circuit board: "8094 ver:c 0244 BM-01 E226252

CF's enclosure says, on the circuit board: 1394/IDE Bridge PC8 Rev 6.1-V (WA02040M)

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So, (and please check my logic all), after going through all of this, I believe the problem I am encountering is due to a problem with CF's ADS 1394 enclosure. Again, the drive itself appears fine when used anywhere else, the project coming from anywhere else is also fine, and the circuitry inside the enclosures is definitely different.

ADS has been really helpful with all of this and they should be able to work with you on further troubleshooting, or if needed, replacement enclosures (they have excellent support). All this info will be sent to ADS tech support right away.

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More: Quite a few people here have 1394 drives and use them without problems on different OSs- some are ADS, some other brands. Our CTO (SF Founder, ex-Microsoft driver engineer) uses 3-4 1394 drives simultaneously and I KNOW he'd be hollering if this was a ubiquitous, Vegas-centric issue. Douglas Spotted Eagle, who runs around the world demoing our apps with 1394 enclosure/drive does not have this problem, and many others are using ADS 1394 drive/enclosures without issue.

I hope this helps, at least a little. We'll be keeping our eyes on this and if we run across a simple solution, we'll post it immediately, and as I mentioned, I'll keep ADS up to date on all of this. Don't give up on ADS- they make some very good products, support them very well, and they'll want this resolved as much as anyone.

Back to post

Comments

Albert Shroyer wrote on 6/12/2003, 6:49 PM

Rob,

I bought my case (Firewire only; no USB) from Circuit City in December '02 and it was labeled as being the newer Oxford 911 bridge. The latest firmware update per the ADS technician is for December '02 but despite the date was not available until some time earlier this year.

Regards,
Albert

bokan wrote on 6/21/2003, 12:13 AM

Hello all,

I have a oxford 911 based firewire enclosure.

http://www.triumphtech.com/Driver/Oxford160GB.zip

Just dl this file, unpack, install.

Then update with the last firmware provided.

Then it works :) !!!

Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh

I will work with Vegas now !!!! :)
++

rmack350 wrote on 6/21/2003, 1:27 AM

This is a firmware update and as near as I can tell there's no going back.

You'd have to be a pretty brave soul to flash a bridge card with software provided for some other product than your own.

Just a word of warning. It worked for one person who, I assume, was using a product for which this firmware update was intended. For others, do a lot of homework and be prepared to just kill your bridge card. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

Congrats, Bokan.

Rob Mack

Zulqar-Cheema wrote on 6/21/2003, 6:18 AM

I like others thought that firewire as the holy grail for project management. But like others I have found that certain drives wll not function correctly in certain firewire cases, and certain PC's.
So you have this mad complexity that this make will work in that case with that PC, but that case with the same drive will not function on the other PC. I have found that the Oxford chipset with IBM drives seem to work in most cases and some older Maxtor drives as well, but they do cause problems in printing to tape on a random basis.

My Genisys chip set did not like Maxtors, frooze as soon as you tried to play a AVI file yet worked perfectly happly with all other files, I believe there is a latency issue with VIA chipsets in this case, but it does not help. The IBM drives work fine with Genisys.

Its all configured to make life hell for no reason, or is it those dammed sunspots again?

farss wrote on 6/21/2003, 9:38 AM

I've never been a great fan of firewire drive enclosures and least of all the ones where you get to add your own disk. I'm cartain they have their place in the scheme of things but i've never found it. I much prefer the disk modules from Lian Li and others, at least the disks get good airflow and ther's no additinal electronics and firmware involved.

Plus the drive is securely locked away where its unlikely to be knocked. The better drive rack modules also have filters on the fans to stop grot blocking the airflow to the drives. When the new SATA enclosures appear they should also be hot swappable and pretty fast. On top of that by all reports the latest 10,000 rpm drives run real hot and need a lot of cooling.

I think I'll leave fwire drives to those in Mac land where they oftenly don't have any other choice.

bokan wrote on 6/21/2003, 10:30 AM

this firmware is for oxford 911 chip. You can use it on any taiwanese enclosure using this ship (just look on the chips one should have 911 writen on it).

This boxes are built like this :
- the factory buy thousand chip at oxford semiconductor
- Oxford provide the mounting sheme and software support
- The software is not distributed directly by oxford because they don't want to deal with final users.
- since the taiwanese company don't care about support the do not distribute it.

Most of the upgrade check the hardware prior to flashing it. You can trust it.

B.R.

rmack350 wrote on 6/21/2003, 1:29 PM

Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. I'd hate to be the guy who told a hundred people they could flash their bridge cards with software from a third party if it didn't really work.

Rob

rmack350 wrote on 6/21/2003, 1:41 PM

I agree in part.

For a stationary system it makes much more sense to use a pair of SATA removable carts. If you also want to move that media into a firewire enclosure for mobility, I'd want a 1394b-SATA bridge board. Haven't seen them yet.

That's going to be a goal on my next system. I'm not in a hurry, luckily.

Unfortunately, I DO need to move media between systems so 1394 has been a blessing as well as a curse.

BTW, I was looking at a couple of documents at the Oxford site. They seemed pretty suggestive as to why one might see playback stalls. Nothing specific but the notes were leading.

Rob

doncarp wrote on 6/21/2003, 3:12 PM

Please allow me to throw out some related information and questions.

Before I saw this thread regarding the 1394 external drives I had the bright idea of getting an external USB 2.0 drive to be able to transport data and projects easily. I installed a Western Digital 200 Gig /w 8 meg cache in an enclosure from cooldrives.com. I was capturing a series of lengthy projects to this drive. All was going well until the drive began filling up (approximately 70% of capacity), then I began getting the error message: "Windows- Delayed Write Failed: Windows was unable to save all the data for the file....." After several of these errors I abandoned the external drive enclosure and relocated the drive internally. No more problems with the drive.

I then got another 200 Gig Western Digital drive and installed it in the external enclosure. Once again the drive worked great until it began filling to approximately 70 % of capacity. After one of the "failed write" messages I saw a temporary file on the drive. On subsequent attempts I saw other temporary files. (I am moving into my theory realm now.) It seems that a temporary file was created as part of the writing process, then once the file is completely written the temporary file is supposed to be deleted. If this is the case, the process requires twice as much room as the actual size of the file. If there isn't enough disk space, then there is an error.

I have read most, if not all, of the posts on this subject. I didn't see anyone describing when their drives were locking in relation to percentage of free drive space and file sizes of the projects on which they were working.

farss wrote on 6/21/2003, 5:08 PM

As a matter of interest were the drives formatted FAT or NTSC?

Does the OS have Enabled Write Cache turned on?

doncarp wrote on 6/22/2003, 12:16 AM

>As a matter of interest were the drives formatted FAT or NTSC?

NTSC

>Does the OS have Enabled Write Cache turned on?

I used the recommended setting to prevent write error problems, which is OFF

bokan wrote on 6/23/2003, 9:59 AM

NTSC ??? :)))))) isn't it NTFS instead ? We see the video guys ! :)

There is a limit in capacity at 160 gb for certain ata standards.
You need to have a newer ata standard enabled to adress the data above this limit (i think you need ata6 instead of ata5 but i'm not sure). Since this limit is near to the 70% you're speaking.. I guess it's this.

Upgrading to the latest firmware will do the work.

But take care to upgrade with the good firmare ! Do not flash your hard drive enclosur with a washing machine or electric screwdriver firmware ! This could damage your enclosure and cause irreversible effects.

Now no one can tell I didn't warn him. :)

see ya folks.

rmack350 wrote on 6/23/2003, 2:36 PM

The stalls were happening at various times. You could have just a gig or two on the drive or it could be full. These stalls were different from "Delayed Write Errors". In fact, they were more like read errors.

You could have NTFS or FAT32 partitions at any cluster size.

You can have drive caching turned on or off. Usually makes no difference to playback stalls.

There's a document at the Oxford site that talks about perceived drive performance. It mentions several overhead points that effect drive performance and shows a chart that says the 1394 disks should see better performance at higher cluster sizes. (Not checking facts here- I THINK the term is "clusters" and not "sectors". Please forgive me if I've got my terms mixed up here.)

"Delayed Write Error" is another problem, not the same as stalls. I found that I was having it with an IBM drive installed in a new ADS case. The problem in this instance was heat on the circuit board on the bottom of the drive. The ADS case has no clearance below the drive and hardly any fan. Putting the drive up on drive rails in this enclosure improved the airflow and solved the problem. This problem occured with both USB2.0 and 1394.

That's just an example of one cause of "Delayed Write" failure.

Bokan (below) has found a firmware upgrade for the Oxford 911 bridge chip at the Triumph site. It is provided for their products but Bokan says it works on any Oxford911 based bridge board.

That may be true but I'd look at my particular vendor's site before using another vendors firmware update. At least get your vendor's opinion-if they have one. Many don't because they just buy the hardware and box it up.

If you try the firmware update on a non triumph drive, please post your results to the forum here. I'm sure we'd like to hear from anyone willing to be a guinea pig.

In my case I have a 911 based bridge board supplied by Granite digital. They seem to tweak their boards for their own purposes. They have provided a firmware update of their own (which doesn't solve the playback stalling problem.). I'd be wary of using a firmware update before talking to them about it.

Also, bear in mind that the firmware update at the Triumph site is ONLY for 911 bridge chips. Of the people reporting playback stalls over 1394, only a small percentage of them have been using 911 chips. It seems that most people using the 911 chips have had very good luck. HOWEVER, I think this firmware update is also designed for larger disks so that's another possible reason for trying it. I think the ATA5 limit was more like 137GB but I could easily be wrong.

137 is pretty close to 70% of a 200GB drive and you may well be having a problem with the drive being to big for the bridge card to address. Your OS may have no problem at all but the bridge board may. You could use the triumph update, check with your enclosure vendor, or divide your drive into two partitions. That last may or may not work-you may not be able to do it while it's installed in the enclosure.

Rob Mack

sdmoore wrote on 6/23/2003, 4:32 PM

>If you try the firmware update on a non triumph drive, please post your results to the forum here. I'm sure we'd like to hear from anyone willing to be a guinea pig.

I just updated my 911 firmware - my enclosure was made by a Taiwanese company called St John Technology. At first I just tried flashing without reading the instructions too carefully and found afterwards that the default setup is set to 900 configuration. Ended up with my drive no longer appearing in XP and unable to re-flash it!!! After a few choice swear words and gnashing of teeth I decided to take a closer look at the (really rather good) .pdf file. I found there is a utility to force a basic firmware update to enable me to re-flash it correctly. It's all working again now 8o) although I have yet to try capturing directly to it since I don't have access to a camcorder at the moment.

Scott

rmack350 wrote on 6/23/2003, 5:45 PM

The fact that it's working is great.
The fact that you were able to recover from a mistake is great.
The fact that it let you make the mistake in the first place isn't so good.

Rob

ssalazar wrote on 9/10/2003, 11:22 PM

Add me to the list. I have a Maxtor 3000DV that 'freezes' in programs like Sonar and Vegas. It must be the enclosure, because I can pull the drive and install it as a slave in my system without performance problems. I'm running Windows XP Pro with all patches, drivers, etc. up-to-date. Any help on a resolution for this problem would be greatly appreciated...Maxtor doesn't seem to have a clue, and they are pointing the finger on software. The bridge is starting to look pretty suspicious.

Regards,
Stephen Salazar