Avid MC 201.12.14 / iMac 2017 40GB
When I'm working in Avid it is constantly accessing my external media drives. Just "whrrr whrrr click click whhr whhr click click" all day long. It disappears when I open a sequence or something, and then returns whenever I am idle for more than 10 secods.
I believe it is Avid because using Avid is the only thing that changes the access pattern and the accessing is not going on when I'm not editing (I don't believe).
I've also been getting these errors in console – but the project and editing seem to be doing fine so far (early days, no complex sequences yet on this project).
CONSOLE:
(I don't understand what my media cache should be set to, but I set most of it very high once I saw these errors, but nothing changed)
WARNING: BigBufferPool::ResizePool did NOT allocate enough, Requested 5120MB Actual 0MB
LocateBuffer Resize from 23552MB to 23552MB
Set persistent image cache limit: 5000.0 MB in /Users/Shared/AvidMediaComposer/AvidImageCache
BuildPipes Concurrency Alert - BuildPipes starting with BuildPipes in progress!
Are you familiar with the MacOs terminal? You can use the command
sudo lsof | grep /Volumes/Name_of_your_external_Volume
to get a list of processes that are - at that moment - accessing the disk.
Could it be Spotlight indexing your drive(s)?
Also, "whrrr click whhr" leaves room for interpretation. ;) But I guess you would sense if it was a hardware thing.
Thanks for the tip. I ran that command but it never displayed anything.
Yeah, "wrr click" I just mean lots of accessing – not like a failing drive (I don't think). What happens is when I run Avid at some point the drive begins accessing incessantly. The only thing that seems to stop it is doing things in Avid. i.e. If I am just looking at my timeline – it's "whrr whrrr whrrr", but when I start editing it does the normal access for whatever I'm doing but then is silent mostly for a little bit. The "silent mostly" is the expected behavior and it feels like something changed and now the drive is being constantly accessed.
Sorry for what might be a stupid question, but did you replace the part "Name_of_your_external_Volume" with the actual name of (one of) your drive(s)? Also, the command can take some time, like up to a minute or so, to return an output.
Besides Spotlight, which you could temporarily deactivate for a test, another thing crossed my mind: Does the "whrr click" happen in any project? Does it happen in new projects that you have created on the current system on the same version of AMC? Or is it maybe specifically happening in projects that you brought in from other systems or older versions? I am asking because I remember a project where for some reason the bin indexing "got stuck", which, I think, caused continuous disk access similar to what you described. You could check the bin index by pressing [Cmd + F] and then see whether the circle in the lower left corner of the find-window is fully green. When you hover on it it should say "Complete".
Spotilght has been disabled on my media partitions.
Both circles in find are green.
And I am pretty familiar with unix/bash, so I didn't just copy paste – but I appreciate you checking! I also tired /dev/disk1 just in case. Both /Volumes/MediaPartition1 or /dev/disk1 just "hang" on the terminal, but never write anything.
It does occur to me that maybe it could be something in the RAID waiting for "action" or preloading things? I dunno. I have switched computers and drives (new gig) but it is the same basic system – iMac and G-Raid – I had previously and didn't notice the constant whrrr.
I may just get a longer usb-c cable and stop worrying about it by simply placing the drive further away!
Ah, too bad. Hopefully someone with better kung fu chips in with a better idea. Out of curiosity: Did you ever, in order to maybe narrow things down, try and see what happens if you made a small MXF-folder, with just a few items, and a new project with just one short sequence? If it's AMC loading/organizing/indexing data, then this should minimize activity, shouldn't it? Oh, and did you ever - yeah, you probably did ;) - check whether the 'disk' tab in the activity monitor shows something out of the ordinary io-wise?
You know it might be Phrase Find. Today I see "Avid phoenetic indexer" taking up CPU cycles.
Is there any way to turn Phrase Find off separately? My memory is I can only deactivate everything in the Avid license app – not individual items.
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