Please Help!! 'Permissions' issues & Media Offline!!!

Hi - I'm hoping someone would have any suggestions on how to fix my issues, I have tried so many things and cannot get Davinci to work for my project, and I really really need it to work asap!!!

I keep getting the error "Failed to write to database folder...make sure you have permissions"

Also the error "Failed to save project"

Also I will randomly have some media go offline when it's not actually offline, I restart davinci and it's there.

Also sometimes my drives won't load in Davinci's Media storage panel

This has happened in Davinci 14.1 + 14.3 Davinci 15beta5 + 6
It has happened in El Capitan, Sierra, & HighSierra, on fresh SSD OS installs.

I have gone through and repaired permission, I do not believe it's a permissions issues.
The scratch and cache is set to the local SSD.

My System
Mac Pro Mid 2012
Processor: 3.2 GHx Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 32 GB 1066 MGz DDR3
Graphics: NVidia GeForce GTX 980 TI 6144 MB
Red Rocket-X card - latest firmware + drivers

We are working with a lot of Red 5-8K footage.
All the footage lives on external OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad - Raid5 drives connecting via usb 3.0


Any insight or ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!!!

I would suspect the external drive. USB 3.0 is not much for R3D files, plus you may get time-out problems.

That's an old MP (aka Cheesegrater), right? Get another internal SSD for the database (hang it anywhere into empty space) and fill the other slots with RAID'ed harddisks. Or get an eSATA card and an external RAID with an eSATA interface.

Works very well for us with a similar machine (upgraded 5,1 with Titan-X) for Red footage.