Yesterday I finished most of the system upgrade I did on my Pro Tools workstation. I still have a few programs to put back on, but it’s mostly there. Probably the coolest thing about the upgrade has been the new driver for my ATTO ExpressPCI UL3D SCSI card. The new 3.10 driver for Panther is brilliant! Finally we can once again hot-swap hard drives like we used to do under OS 9. It doesn’t work exactly the same way but it is still much faster than a shut down and reboot.
You have to download the driver I mentioned above and the ATTO Configuration Tool v2.61. Once you have those installed, run the Configuration Tool. You turn down a few of the arrows on the left like opening folders in List View in the Finder, until you see the ExpressPCI SCSI card listed. Click on it to select it. Click the “Advanced” tab on the right side of the window. Then click the “Rescan” button. The software will look for any drives attached to your SCSI card and mount them. Very easy.
I did notice a couple of things to watch out for.
- Pro Tools grabs a hold of all drives on your desktop while it’s running. You have to quit it before you do any SCSI mounting.
- You have to remove all drives from the desktop before mounting any new drives. (Even if you want to continue using drives that are currently mounted.) Throw all drives into the trash or hit Command-E to eject them. Then do the steps I mentioned above to mount all the SCSI drives you want to work with. If you don’t eject all drives first you will get an error message when you run “Rescan” telling you that your drives were improperly put away and that you may have lost data. Better safe than sorry.
The ATTO 3.10 driver is (dare I say it?) “The Bomb”. I strongly encourage everyone running Panther with a UL3D SCSI card to check it out.