Odd eSATA Issue

Lacie's eSATA Hub

A client of mine is having an odd problem. He's using a 4TB G-RAID as an edit drive and we're connecting it to his iMac via eSATA using Lacie's eSATA Hub.  The hub converts the eSATA to Thunderbolt. We have a faster 4-drive eSATA RAID (from OWC) connected to the other eSATA port on this hub.  The OWC eSATA enclosure has had zero issues, but we're having problems with the G-RAID. 

If the computer and drives are off, and then we power on the drive, then the computer, the G-RAID mounts on the desktop each time without issue. But, if the computer is already on and we try to connect a SATA cable and turn the drive on, the G-RAID will not mount. So something, either in the G-RAID's controller board or something inside of the Lacie hub is preventing hot swapping.  (PS - hot swapping is having the computer turned on, plugging in a drive and powering it on. It should mount to the desktop.)

I began to do some digging to see if I could find any similar issues on the net. I did run across a few folks reporting issues with SATA connectivity using 4th generation G-RAIDS.  It just so happens my client's problematic drive is a 4th Generation G-RAID.  In a few of the cases the remedy was to update the drives for the SATA card. Unfortunately in our case, the Lacie is a driverless piece of hardware, so no update is available.

My client has one other 4th Gen G-RAID and it has the same problem.  We also tested with older G-Drives, also from G-Tech, and they hot-swap just fine.  We also have an
OWC Mercury Elite Pro and it has no problems hot swapping.  So it seems to be limited to 4th Gen G-RAIDs.

Thankfully we can at least get the G-RAID to work when we start everything up from power off.  However, there are times when hot swapping will come in handy, so I'm hoping a remedy is found soon.  

Stu on CS6

There's always been a fairly noticeable difference between the way Premiere Pro performs on a system with a CUDA video card vs. Open CL thanks to the hardware acceleration CUDA owners receive over the basic software-only Open-CL gets.  Even with the recent additions of the Macbook Pro GPUs to the hardware acceleration, the balance of power is still very much in the direction of Nvidia and CUDA.  But the difference in performance between CUDA and Open CL with the ray tracing feature in After Effects is night and day different.  Hours vs. days in terms of render time!

Stu over at Prolost has a great write-up about this and really, in a sense, lets Adobe have it over this disparity.  As always, its a great post and the comments are just as interesting as well.  Please check it out.