Zoom-in Online

It's been six weeks since the Mac Pro 8-core 3.2 arrived, and it's been a dream among dreams-come-true. Fast as the day is long, and performance in tasks like encoding, transcoding and rendering have been as lickety as split can be. As the man says, "Ay, I can't complain." And for the first time in my life, one of my internal hard drives has had a code brown and I invoke the man once more, "ay, I can't complain." RAID 5 and its Leopard implementation have saved my butt.

I was working along the other day, making a few tweaks to a video edit for a client, and was doing my "Export as QuickTime Movie" after having rendered the new titles I had inserted over picture. My Media scratch discs, and render discs are all set to my internal RAID. I have three 750GB drives running together as RAID 5, alongside my single 750GB boot drive in the tower. I dropped my .dv file onto the Flash CS3 Video Encover to make my .flv file, and while I watched its progress bar move across so fast that I was smiling, but then...Suddenly an error dialog popped up, and I neglected to snap a screenie of it so I can't tell you the exact wording of it, but it was something to the effect of "RAID + severe problem = you still happy; please hold." Seconds later, RAID Utility auto-launched and displayed the report in the above screen shot. I was 20 seconds into reading the report when it sank in that I had not sank. My .flv encode was still working, writing to the RAID, and concluded its export without fail. My system was still up. I double clicked the RAID drive on the desktop, and it opened fine. Browsed files fine. For those of you who have had a RAID array running before, or do now, this is obvious to you; and it is obvious to me as well, although this is in fact my first RAID (amazing, given the amount of video and film work I've done), and I was experiencing it handle a critical failure - and I was firmly in so-far-so-good land.

As I am writing this post, I have not yet swapped in the replacement drive I had the foresight to purchase with the new box. It's sitting on the shelf next to me, waiting to be retrieved and inserted in place of the bad one. I wanted to write this post in the middle of the experience, in hopes of getting through it without a hitch and reporting on the process as I go along.

As of right now, the RAID Utility says that I have had "1 Severe Event" and that my RAID 5 array "RS1" has "degraded." All I need to do is shut down the machine, (this RAID is internal mind you, not in a hot swappable desktop array chassis), let it cool for 5-10 minutes, discharge my static, take out the bad drive (Drive 3), replace it with the new one, reboot, and all should be well, as the RAID will rebuild itself back up to normal status. That sounds really easy. There's only one way to find out. Here I go.