Sonnet Card E/sata Access Freezes Computer

[BuckoSama]

I am a video editor using a Dual 2GHz G5 with 2.5 GB RAM running Final Cut Studio on OS 10.4.2. I know my way around computers; I've been building PCs since 1999, but my Mac knowledge is less than my Windows or Linux knowledge, as I've only been using a Mac for a little over a year.

I have a Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA 4+4 card in the Mac, which allows four internal SATA connections and four external SATA connections, along with a Apple-branded Gigabit ethernet card. Whenever I use the Sonnet card (that is, when I turn on the drives attached to it) after a period of time, any attempt to access any data on ony drive results in the Spinning Beachball of Death, which remains indefinitely (allowed 16hrs+ on multiple occasions). The card did work for a period of about two months before this problem appeared.

My own attempts to troubleshoot were as follows:

1.)Turn off any sleep functions on the Mac. This had no effect on the problem.

2.)I removed the PCI-X Gigabit ethernet card to check for incompatibility on the bus. I also moved the Sonnet card to each available slot. This had no effect on the problem.

3.)Reinstalled OSX and all programs, including Final Cut. This had no effect on the problem.

4.)At the time, all the drives were internal. I moved all drives to an external housing using brand new cables. This eliminated the possibility of it being a faulty cable. This had no effect on the problem.

5.)I tried each drive separately as the only drive conencted to the Sonnet. Each drive was able to crash the system independently. The computer does not crash with no drives connected to the Sonnet.
Each drive was put in a PC where the DOS utility provided by each drive's respective manufacturer was run. Each drive passed all tests.

6.)Called Sonnet. We cleared and regenerated KEXT files and made sure that the firmware was up to date. This had no effect on the problem.

7.)Obtained a new card from Sonnet. The new card did not work either.

8.)Thinking at this point that the chances were very unlikely that I got two cards in a row with the same problem, I contacted Small Dogs Electronics, a Mac-Certified technical support outlet, and sent them the G5 to test for logic board and PCI bus hardware issues. The G5 was given a clean bill of health.

9.)Having eliminated hard drives, cables, PCI bus conflicts, PCI bus hardware issues, OS issues, driver issues, and kernel issues from the list of potential causes, I return to the Sonnet Card as the most likely culprit. I called them again, and a third card is on the way, but I worry that I will have the same issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to do next, or has anyone spotted any omissions or oversights on my part?

This issue is very important, as I need that card functional in order to continue work on editing this movie.

Thanks a lot for any help!

-Justin Buck

 

[Lance Lee Davis]

A couple days ago I just got the same card for my dual 2.5 G5 OS10.4.2 system and am having some similar problems which seem to be sleep related (still trying different configurations to see if I can figure out what seems to cause it; if it's strictly sleep related then I'm not that bothered). Right now I have two Western Digital RE2 400gig drives striped for speed using Disk Utility and when the system wakes the system either hangs when attempting to access any drive, or if I can make it into disk utility, disk utility reports one of the drives as failed and unmounts the RAID. Console advises that errors may be the result of sleep functions.

At the moment it is running okay...

 

[joeblack105]

I also have the same card and am experiencing the same issues. I have a g5 dual 2.7 os10.4.2. I have 3 drives connected internally, 2 set in a raid config and an additional one, they are all seagate 400gb. I find that it can freeze even when trying access applications that are on the main Hd, I have spent hours between the phone with Mac support and dont seem to be able to get anywhere. Has anyone got a solution?

 

[Lance Lee Davis]

I talked to someone at Sonnet (BTW, they have great tech support) about my issue and they said that the problem had come up in a few models of from my G5 generation (July 2004) and they hoped to fix it in a firmware upgrade. They told me to until then disable automatic sleep, which solved the problem. The machine can still be put to sleep manually (through the Finder menu).

Also, to joeblack105: You _might_ have too many drives drawing too much power off your machine. Before I got an external box I had 4 drives (3x400gb+1x160gb) running off my internal power supply and the system had serious problems on power-up; the PMU automatically shuts the system down if it thinks there is too great a pull off the power supply, and the newer 400gb drives draw a lot more power than the drives that were around when my G5 was released. I think it's mainly a boot-up thing. I read that you can trick a G5 into running 8 drives off the system power if you power them up one by one. But anyway, your drive problem sounds like the one I had that was related to automatic sleep.

When I moved everything to an external box then I had problems with the eSATA cables--they were really sensitive and my RAID would sometimes drop offline and crash the system because of a bad connection where the cable plugged into the card. I used a multilane SATA connector for the four internal connections (works great and cable is secured by screws) and then I finally bitched to Sonnet about the eSATA problems and they advised trimming some plastic off the end of cable and sent me some jpgs of what they were talking about, which solved that problem. The eSATA cables aren't as solid as the SATA multilane but at least they don't spontaneously disconnect themselves anymore. Hopefully Sonnet will manufacture a dual multilane card on the next go-around.