So I am working with AVID support to troubleshoot an issue in ProTools where the "workspace" of ProTools seems to be hanging trying to "collect subfolders" seeming associated with my sound effects library that is stored on my unRAID server. And one of the questions they asked is if "[unRAID] is optimized for OS X" which seems like a bit of a silly question to ask since SMB 3.0 is officially supported on OS X so I really don't see how unRAID really would have much to factor into this. But since I can't seem to find any documentation say specifically that OS X is supported connecting to unRAID via SMB I wanted to reach out here and see what you all had to say, and if anyone knew specifically about OS X compatibility.

 

On a side note, a few more details about my issue seeing as it might be storage related. There are A LOT of small audio files that ProTools is trying to catalogue, and I wonder if that is the hang up of why this isn't working so well. I am running unRIAD on a 45drives AV15 with WD Gold HDDs on a Supermicro motherboard. I am connecting to the server via 10GbE from a MacPro 7,1 but obviously the spinning rust is the bottleneck in this situation not the network speed. If you need more details than that let me know, I'm happy to swamp you with as much info as you find helpful. 

 

My guess as to what is going on is the latency of accessing info off the array seeing as there is network overhead (however little) + array ZFS overhead + overhead in accessing info on a spinning disk. So I wonder if I would see an improvement in performance, and a resolution to my problem by moving the SFX libraries over to an SSD? And then would I be able to edit off the array if all projects were off an SSD? I just find this weird because I was told by a few people (over at 45drives and AVID) that spinning disks should be fine for editing off of on a NAS, but I have not found that to be the case at all. I appreciate you time in helping me with this. And maybe unRAID can become every ProTools owners dream, all the storage you ever needed and expandable when you run out to edit off of. 

Cheers!

Edited August 13, 20205 yr by Falcowe

if your tiny files are spread out all over spinning drives, you're going to have a bad day.  Get a two SSDs and put them in a raid 0 pool/cache  OR if you're paranoid like me, get 4 and go raid 10. 

 

as far as OS X compatibility, there are a few quirks here and there. try changing the following: setting: smb:enhanced Mac OS interoperability. If it's on, turn it off. If it's off, turn it on. probably won't change much though.

 

 I can achieve video file transfers of over 400MB/s to and from the ssd pools on my array to and from an OS X vm (which is actually hosted on another ssd pool on the came machine.) I haven't tested small files so I'm not much help there. but seriously, SSD's.

 

Gosh it has taken me too long to respond. Thanks for the reply 1812 I'm looking at getting an SSD to put the sound library on but haven't pulled the trigger yet. Once I do I'll be sure to report back here though.

So an update to this topic. From initial testing the 4TB SSD I put in the server seems to have fixed the issue with ProTools, and therefore rendered the OS X compatibility moot since the overlying issue seems to be resolved. As such I'll mark it solved for now. But if anything new arises I'll be sure to document it here. Thanks 1812 for the suggestion!