If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
DAW & Windows XP RAID Tips, ProTools error -9086
Hi,
I'm a relatively new ASUS P4C800-E owner. I'm using the motherboard in a PC to be used as a Digital Audio Workstation with a Digi002 Rack and ProTools LE software. I'm new to the ProTools world and this is my first experience with the P4C800-E motherboard, but I've been writing software and building PCs for over 20 years. I've been lurking a bit but thought my recent experiences might be helpful to others on a similar journey. I'll give a quick summary for those that want to get to the point, followed by a detailed story for those that want to laugh, cry and feel my painJ I originally wrote this message for the Digidesign User Conference, but felt there was enough information that could be valuable to a wider audience regarding the ASUS motherboard, disk performance and RAID experiences that I've posted it to usenet as well. While the ProTools specific tips might not help you out, I assembled this PC with 4 identical Seagate SATA drives and took the time to configure and performance test them in a variety of RAID configurations. The message contains the details of that experience and should be valuable to those interested in RAID, SATA and the ASUS MB. TIP #1: In the ProTools software, setting a limit on the "open ended record allocation" may eliminate the -9068 type of errors and improve your ProTools experience. TIP #2: I could not successfully use ProTools to record to a RAID0 partition provided by the onboard Promise controller on an ASUS P4C800-E motherboard. I was successful recording to a Promise RAID1 partition. TIP #3: ProTools successfully recorded to other drives without disabling the Promise controller in any way. TIP #4: I have successfully used ProTools with Windows XP built-in RAID0, but only on drives connected to the Promise controller. It did not work with drives connected to the ICH5R controller using default allocation parameters. TIP #5: I am able use ProTools successfully with RAID0 and RAID1 partitions on the ICH5R southbridge controller on an ASUS P4C800-E motherboard. Now, the rest of the story. I've been playing various guitar, keyboards, amd wind synthesis gear through my home "studio" consisting of a Mackie 1604, Mackie 824 monitors and various effects for many years. I have always wanted to be setup for recording and have dabbled at it, but I finally decided to get serious about it. After a brief stint with a Roland VS-1880, I decided to move to the DAW world and bought an M-Box (Jan '03). The M-Box was returned in short order due to lack of multiprocessor support. More research led me to the firewire-410 interface, which would have suited my needs pretty well if it would have been released! Frustrated by the wait, I again bought an M-Box (Sep '03) since multiprocessors were now supported and I was impressed by the ProTools software package. Arrgh. After days and days of trying to get beyond USB challenges (solved later, BTW), I got fed up and upgraded to the 002R. Despite moving to the firewire device, I still could not get ProTools to record reliably on the Windows PC I was using (Dell WS 410 with dual PIII 850s). I could play back the demo session just fine, but when I recorded a single channel of audio, I would get stuttering in the recording. I tried all of the DAW/Windows XP Performance tuning tips I could find, including replacing the firewire interface with a supported version. No improvement. I even removed the 2nd CPU to see if multiprocessing was the culprit. After a great deal of research, I found some good information on RME's web site regarding problems with PCI throughput on 440BX motherboards with a specific Intel USB chipset. I disabled the onboard USB controller in the BIOS and installed a PCI USB interface. Success! I was now able to record without the stuttering! In parallel, I was researching and purchasing components to build my next desktop that would serve as my DAW. It had to be both quiet and fast... I ended up with: Hardware Environment ASUS P4C800-E motherboard Antec SLK-3700-QBE Quiet Case Intel 3.0Ghz 800Mhz FSB CPU 1GB of TwinX Corsair memory 4 Seagate 120GB SATA 7200.7 drives Thermalright SLK-947U CPU cooler with a Panaflo 92mm cooling fan (with RPM!) Sapphire Ultimate Radeon 9800 Pro with the Zalman passive cooling heatsink built in (I added the Zalman ZM-OP1 fan as well) Creative Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card Seasonic 400W quiet power supply 2 Papst 120mm quiet case fans A Super Flower Fan Controller (Nice! I think the model number is SF-690) Plextor 52/32/52 CDRW 3.5" floppy drive Software Environment I am running under Windows XP Pro with SP 1 and all Windows Updates. The ASUS Motherboard BIOS version is 1011 The Promise drivers are version 1.00.1.30 The Intel Application Accelerator Raid Edition Drivers are version 3.5R I'm using Sisoft Sandra Standard version 2004.10.9.89 for performance testing BTW: I'm using two Windows XP hardware profiles, "Default" and "DAW". The DAW profile is really lean. I've removed most extraneous hardware, drivers, services and unneeded background tasks. To my great surprise, the hardware went together quite well and I had Windows XP Pro running fairly quickly. To my dismay, I still had problems running ProTools! Despite my best tuning efforts, I was only able to record a single channel of audio if the HW buffer was at 1024 and even then it was sketchy. I was continually running into error -9068, OS is holding off interrupts too long, try increasing the HW buffer size... Frustrated and tired, I again called Digi tech support and they helped me solve the problem. They initially thought that the problem was due to two of my drives being configured as a RAID0 (striped) pair via the onboard Promise controller, but I was having the problem while running/recording to a single SATA IDE configured as master on its own channel (I had two drives set up this way on the ICH5R southbridge controller, one as the system/OS drive, the other as my backup Ghost drive and pagefile drive). I went ahead and disabled the Promise controller in the BIOS to see if that would solve the problem. It didn't. Tech support suggested one more tweak which was to limit the max recording length for the session. In Setup-Preferences-Operation there are settings to control "Open Ended Record Allocation". The default is to use "All available space". Since my drives had more than 110GB of free space, this seems to cause ProTools grief when it pre-allocates for recording. I changed that to a 10 minute limit, and I realized instant success with ProTools operating behavior! I was now able to record to 32 tracks at a time without really taxing any component of my system (CPU, disk, etc.). I have not yet run the official DaveC test but I suspect (and have always expected) that this machine would be more than fast enough to excel on the DaveC test. So, TIP #1: Setting a limit on the open ended record allocation may improve your ProTools experience. I have not tried longer limits than 10 minutes yet. It would be nice to know why this is a problem and if it is related to pagefile / virtual memory settings. My current setup should have way too much pagefile with 1GB on the OS drive and 4GB on a separate paging partition. TIP #2: I could not successfully use ProTools to record to a RAID0 partition provided by the onboard Promise controller on an ASUS P4C800-E motherboard. I was successful recording to a Promise RAID1 partition. While I was successful recording 32 tracks to the Promise RAID1 partition, I did not get the feeling that it was a stable environment. More testing should be done before committing to a RAID1 Promise environment for ProTools. Interestingly, I could play the "Be There" sample session from either a RAID0 or RAID1 Promise partition. TIP #3: ProTools successfully recorded to other drives without disabling the Promise controller in any way. As mentioned, I tried first with the controller disabled. Next, I enabled the controller to make sure the mere presence of the controller didn't cause the problem. It didn't. This process led me to do more research on RAID & ProTools issues. After a pretty thorough search on DUC, Google Groups and elsewhere, I came to the following basic ProTools/RAID conclusions: 1) RAID is not a Digidesign supported configuration 2) Some folks can get ProTools to work on RAID configurations, some can't. 3) RAID is not necessary for good ProTools performance. Most modern IDE drives (if configured properly) are more than fast enough. This research didn't really answer my questions about RAID and ProTools. While I may not need RAID for ProTools performance, I would like it for digital video work and I might enjoy some of the redundant security that RAID1 provides as well. My original partition configuration plan with the 4 drives was to use 1 for the OS, 1 for the pagefile and Ghost backups of the OS drive and a striped RAID pair for digital media work. The digital media drive was expected to be a temporary workspace where speed and size would be appreciated. I also have a separate fileserver with RAID 0+1 for more permanent safe storage. Since I had two different RAID controllers onboard the motherboard, I decided to experiment a bit with the various RAID configurations. (Thank goodness for Ghost!) One configuration I was really interested to try was RAID provided by the built in software RAID capability of Windows XP. This is a RAID topic/configuration that I have rarely heard people discussing. I have not studied XP Home's capabilities, but Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Server (and various versions of Windows NT and Windows NT Server) offer the ability to initialize a drive as a dynamic disk (as opposed to a basic disk) and then join multiple dynamic disks in a variety of ways to create NTFS partitions. Windows XP Pro supports spanning and striping capabilities. Windows XP server also supports mirroring and RAID 5. These are setup and managed using the same disk management tools you use under XP to initialize, partition and format basic drives. I open the disk management tool using Run and typing diskmgmt.msc but you can get there from the control panel, administrative tools, . as well. So I tried just about every software and hardware RAID configuration that was easy for me to try. I never paired drives on different controllers and I didn't bother putting the OS on a bootable RAID partition. I have done this in the past and while it can be done it usually takes a bit more fiddling than I had time for. Here's what I found: TIP #4: I have successfully used ProTools with Windows XP built-in RAID0, but only on drives connected to the Promise controller. It did not work with drives connected to the ICH5R controller using default allocation parameters. I recorded 32 tracks simultaneously and the system load was pretty low. The filesystem performance was not as fast as either of the ICH5R or Promise RAIDs, but it wasn't too far off, maybe 8-10% slower. I have no idea why it worked with drives on the Promise but not with drives on the ICH5R. It gets even more interesting: TIP #5: I have successfully recorded with ProTools on RAID0 and RAID1 volumes created on the ICH5R hardware RAID controller. I was expecting this to fail in the same manner as the Promise "Hardware" RAID setups, but I was pleasantly surprised. This was the last configuration I tested late last night so it deserves a bit more study, but it was encouraging that ProTools seemed to work without any trouble. For those of you that would like some performance data, I've included the following figures. Please remember that they are relative figures from Sandra based on my configuration and usage, but they may be helpful for comparison. I created all of the partitions using the default allocation parameters so for audio you could probably improve the performance by bumping the allocation size to 32K. I'm interested in how that would improve the performance, but I wasn't certain how it might affect the Sandra benchmarks and thought this would be easier to compare against existing benchmarks. They are organized from fastest to slowest. ICH5R RAID0 72000 kB/s XP Software RAID0, drives on ICH5R 71973 kB/s PROMISE RAID0 69000 kB/s XP Software RAID0, drives on Promise 57984 kB/s ICH5R RAID1 39648 kB/s PROMISE RAID1 38510 kB/s ICH5R IDE MASTER 33000 kB/s PROMISE IDE MASTER 30695 kB/s Sorry for the very long message. I needed to both purge and capture the information and felt that it might be very useful for others on the same path. I am not a regular reader of forums and newsgroups so please don't feel offended if I don't respond right away. Hopefully this will be another useful data point and perhaps a catalyst for additional discussion. My apologies ahead of time for cross posting. I felt there was enough info that could be useful to those outside of the DUC forums that I also posted to usenet. All the best, Steve |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
help with motherboard choice | S.Boardman | General | 30 | October 20th 03 10:23 PM |
Does Windows kill the "bootability" other secondary hard drives it finds with the same OS on? | Kb | General | 3 | September 5th 03 12:33 PM |
Get message "Remove disks or other media" since converting from NTFS to FAT32 | Paul Hill | General | 1 | July 6th 03 02:03 PM |
A7V133 and Raid 0 | [email protected] | Asus Motherboards | 0 | July 2nd 03 09:32 PM |
With P4C800 Deluxe I don't need to add Ata Driver System? | Fogar | Asus Motherboards | 7 | June 27th 03 11:22 PM |