Bitten by Snow Leopard?
So on October 7th at 10:30pm, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Snow Leopard.
Now there was no uber-compelling reason to do this. Granted I was curious about the reports of “snappier” system response times (true), and really curious about Grand Central, but there was no “gotta have” things in the new system that couldn’t wait a couple of months.
But I did it anyway. I took some precautions: upgraded software where I could, cleaned up the hard drives, etc. As far as software goes, things went pretty smoothly. Of the 350+ AU plug-ins I have only 14 did not pass AU validation with LOGIC. (And no, I am not insane; a number of those are demos and freeware…Ah who am I kidding.) Updating key software apps like CarbonCopyCloner really helped to keep things smooth. Yep. This upgrade stuff was pretty easy…
Surprised by Sonnet?
Except that none of my external SATA drives (you know, the ones with my samples, sounds, and patches) would mount on the desktop.
After MUCH investigation, I figured out that Sonnet’s Tempo SATA E2P card is NOT Snow Leopard compatible. In fact, as of 7 October* it wasn’t compatible with ANY Mac OSX system (LEOPARD, PANTHER, TIGER, or JAGUAR) if you have more than 2GB of ram in your system. From their support page:
The current driver (1.1.9) does not support systems with >2GB of RAM in any version of Mac OS X. Some users had no issues with > 2GB of RAM with Leopard (10.5). If just worked by accident if the driver and buffers loaded in low memory. An upgrade to Snow Leopard (10.6) exposes the problem, so we do not recommend upgrading to Snow Leopard if you are using one of these cards. Sonnet should have a new driver posted by October 2009.
I have 9GB of ram. I guess I was lucky that the problem had not been “exposed” until now. The question of course was what to do. True I could hookup the 2 drives in question via USB 2.0, but the performance is lower and the CPU overhead of USB 2.0 is higher than that of eSATA. As I stream lots of samples occassionally, I figure I should stick with eSATA.
I researched a number of alternatives. I ended up with a Newer Technology eSATA Extender Cable. Essentially this thing is a simple breakout cable that lets you run external eSATA devices off of the two extra SATA ports on the MacPro’s logic board. (Note that later MacPros use one of these internal ports for the optical drive apparently.) So problem solved, right?
Screwed by SEAGATE!
I’ve invested heavily in Seagate drives. (That loud noise you hear is my credibility ratcheting down with many of you out there I’m sure.) I have 2 internal Seagate drives in the MacPro (a 500GB and a 1.5 TB) as well as 3 FreeAgent drives (2 x eSATA 750GB and a firewire 1.5TB). The internal 1.5TB is used for TimeMachine backups of my internal drives, and the external 1.5TB is used to backup my two “soundsets” eSATA drives via CarbonCopyCloner.
Some months back, Seagate discovered defects in a huge number of recently manufactured drives that resulted in frequent and catastrophic data loss/failures. There was much, much churn on the net about this. Seagate posted a lot of info on the drives affected including serial numbers of the affected models. If you had drives with this serial numbers, you needed to back them up. Seagate eventually posted firmware updates for them, but the updates required hooking up the drives to Windows machines (not an option if like me your windows machine is ancient and has no eSATA card).
Anyway, one of the downsides to the Sonnet card is that it masked the serial number of the hard drives connected to it. And there is no way to open the Seagate case to see the drive directly and read the number. (Info on the web notwithstanding; It is near impossible to do without destroying the case.) So, all I could do for my eSATA drives was back them up and keep my fingers crossed. However, one of the unanticipated benefits of using the Newertech breakout cable is that the system could now read the harddrives’ info and status and all I had to do was run system info to see that…
…One of the 750GB drives S.M.A.R.T. was listed as “failure”. A quick run of DiskUtility confirmed this. It still showed up on the desktop, and I could still write and read to the disk. So I wasn’t too worried AND this drive was backed up to the FW 1.5TB here on my desktop…right here on my desktop…the drive was…right…here…
You probably see where I am going with this.
What are the chances that I would have a drive AND ITS BACKUP fail at the same time?
So I needed to copy the files off of the 750GB before it failed completely AND I needed a new back up drive. I bought another [Seagate] 750GB external ($99 from Buy.com) and 1.5TB HD (to put in a spare case I had around here) to 1) recreate the drive, and 2) to create a new back up of my sample drives.
After a number of attempts, I accomplished both of these goals. The old 750GB completely died midway through, but I was able to re-install the sound files from original disks.
PIA truly.
* – On October 12th, Seagate released new drivers for the card.
I’ve heard there are some wildlife groups trying to get Apple to do more stuff with the actual S.L.’s lol. I don’t know- people are saying it’s good PR for Apple- they should jump on that.