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FAO: Ben and other tech-heads

I'm looking to replace my external hard drive. Right now I have one of these:

Western Digital My Book Home 500 GB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH1CS5000N

but it's slow as fuck and it doesn't work with Traktor at all. It causes sudden audio dropouts and freezes all of a sudden. I don't have this problem at all when playing tracks stored on the internal hard drive.

I'm looking at one of these now:

Western Digital My Passport Studio 640 GB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800 USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAE6400ASL-NESN (Silver)

It has Firewire 800 (as opposed to the old one's 400) and it's portable, which is a huge plus for me.

Do you guys think this is a good buy, or do you have any recommendations of better models?

Thanks!

I had a similar problem with Traktor and a drive that is also much like the one you had. Idk if I'm really digging this My Passport thing, it seems a little ridiculous for the price and the gigs.

Here's a much better deal. No external power supply, and so far I have had no problems with Traktor.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16822136540

Edit: yes, that does say 1 terabyte.

Thanks, but I guess I forgot to mention that I need a Firewire 800 drive. The Macbook Pro only has 2 USB 2.0 ports which are already taken by the Audio4DJ and the Vestax VCI-100. That's why it seems expensive, Firewire drives always are.

What kind of audio drops are you having? Is the drive actually disconnecting and reconnecting? It could be a matter of upping your latency a bit more (I know you already did).

Mac fail.

I would say get a USB hub for a few extra bucks, but I'm afraid your equipment might not be getting enough power with one of those, which could result in a laggy VCI-100 or a slow harddrive, which you want neither.

No clue then. I guess the one you picked out might be okay.

Actually, a USB hub would work quite well. If I recall correctly, Brett has one on his laptop for him + Andrei's drives plus their controller + audio8.

quote:

Originally posted by bas Actually, a USB hub would work quite well. If I recall correctly, Brett has one on his laptop for him + Andrei's drives plus their controller + audio8.

I just saw one on newegg where a customer suggested that his external drive was very laggy when connected to a hub. Perhaps your soundcard will function properly if connected to the hub? That way the other two important pieces of equipment would be directly connected to the motherboard.

1) get a hub, specifically one that has its own power supply (it has it's own seperate AC adapter and doesn't adopt power via the USB cable from the computer run on sentence run on sentence)
2) vinyl 1, digital 0

Re: FAO: Ben and other tech-heads

My two cents is to get a smaller drive. That will hold the 20 or 30 tracks you wanna use in tracktor.


http://www.nextag.com/OCZ-60GB-Vert...888/prices-html

$180
60gb drive
ocz v2

enough to save your sets music.

Do not write and rewrite on the drives or add data it slows them down.

Do your track editing on a non solid state storage drive, then when you have finalized it for archive on your play drive transfer it.


You can of course buy an older model, or wait for the price to come down in a bit. As $180 is a lot for a hobby. If it is tax deductable though.... Oddly though this might be the price of a vinyl set with 20 or 30 tracks easily. If you don't have promo or pool mailings.

When your drive is "full" buy another. You can keep your old tracks on the SSD like a tape (audio cassette).

Then start all over with your new drive.

You can also keep your non real time retreival drives handy for all those "other tracks and samples" that you might just use but probably won't.

Re: Re: FAO: Ben and other tech-heads

quote:

Originally posted by ******** My two cents is to get a smaller drive. That will hold the 20 or 30 tracks you wanna use in tracktor.

Get out.

Re: Re: FAO: Ben and other tech-heads

quote:

Originally posted by ******** My two cents is to get a smaller drive. That will hold the 20 or 30 tracks you wanna use in tracktor.

I have a feeling woscar plays more than 20 or 30 tracks.

quote:

http://www.nextag.com/OCZ-60GB-Vert...888/prices-html $180 60gb drive ocz v2 enough to save your sets music.

#1) fucking ripoff
#2) it's not firewire compatible (you should really read threads before responding)
#3) 60 gigabytes is fucking childs play, I literally just posted a drive that had almost 15x the space than the one you did, that is also 70 bucks cheaper.

quote:

Do not write and rewrite on the drives or add data it slows them down.

Why the fuck not? Harddrives are designed for writing and rewriting, how in the hell do you think operating systems work?

quote:

Do your track editing on a non solid state storage drive, then when you have finalized it for archive on your play drive transfer it.

Why does it matter if it's solid state?

quote:

You can of course buy an older model, or wait for the price to come down in a bit. As $180 is a lot for a hobby. If it is tax deductable though.... Oddly though this might be the price of a vinyl set with 20 or 30 tracks easily. If you don't have promo or pool mailings.

This is definitely NOT tax deductible

quote:

When your drive is "full" buy another. You can keep your old tracks on the SSD like a tape (audio cassette). Then start all over with your new drive. You can also keep your non real time retreival drives handy for all those "other tracks and samples" that you might just use but probably won't.

Do you realize that we're living in 2010?

Re: Re: FAO: Ben and other tech-heads

quote:

Originally posted by ******** When your drive is "full" buy another. You can also keep your non real time retreival drives handy for all those "other tracks and samples" that you might just use but probably won't.

holy fuck stop using quotation marks.

quote:

Originally posted by ziptnf Mac fail. I would say get a USB hub for a few extra bucks, but I'm afraid your equipment might not be getting enough power with one of those, which could result in a laggy VCI-100 or a slow harddrive, which you want neither. No clue then. I guess the one you picked out might be okay.

quote:

Originally posted by bas What kind of audio drops are you having? Is the drive actually disconnecting and reconnecting? It could be a matter of upping your latency a bit more (I know you already did).

They're really weird. I might be playing a track and all of a sudden, sound will stop coming out of the speakers and headphones but you can see that the track is still playing in Traktor. The waveform still moves normally, but the lights on the channel fader on the screen will show that there's nothing going through them. Sometimes they will last only a few seconds, sometimes more than a minute.

They also happen when I load a track that had not been analyzed before and Traktor beings to write the tags on the file. But the difference here is that the whole Traktor screen freezes up. This usually happens for more than a minute.

Anyways, I'm sure that it is the hard drive because when I play tracks directly from the Mac's drive I don't have any issue at all and this sort of thing happens on my work PC as well. Sometimes, transferring the 20 or so tracks that I just bought on Beatport can take over 5 minutes.

I have tried the powered USB hub too and the same shit happens. That's another reason why I'm sure it's the hard drive.

And holy fucking lol @ ********'s reply.

********'s reply is suggesting you use a Solid State Disk, which is leaps & bounds faster than a magnetic disk, but as you can see it's small & expensive.

Have you confirmed that the external drives is the culprit of the slowdowns? Have you put some tracks on your internal harddrive to make this conclusion?

A faster connection I don't think will really clear up your issue, as I'm pretty certain a single external drive isn't saturating the 400MB/s available with Firewire 400 (Unless Firewire 400 is 400 Mega-bits per second instead of Bytes which would only equate out to 50MB/s).

What's the Cache & RPM of the external you have now? What will it be if you go with the new drive? Amazon, fails to give those specs.

EDIT: Nevermind, I didn't read your last post well enough. Hmmm. Does the issue happen after the track you want to play has been analyzed?

did this problem always occur whenever you used that external hd? or is this a new problem?

if it's a new problem.. it could be that your hd is just pooping out.

edit: and don't external hd's that are powered by firewire (as opposed to using an external power source) have issues of burning up? this is something I remember from a long time ago, so who knows if this is old news and they already fixed these issues... but it'd be something to consider.

go big dude.

cop one of those 2TB drives from newegg at like 99-120

get an external case for it at like 40-50ish

boom 2 tb external for ~200.

When Ableton used to lock up for me during import, it was because my whole PC sucked. I built the new one and used the same external drive and the problem immediately went away. I'm not entirely sure what causes the audio dropouts during playback, though. I have them happen once in a while, too. My sound card is beginning to get all sorts of messed up, though, and the dropout problem's been increasing in frequency, so I'm guessing it's something with latency, rather than the HDD.

As for the actual drive, I'm done with WD. Of the last 3 I bought (2 mybooks, 1 raptor), 3 had complete failures within 2 years. Gone to Seagates about a year & a half ago, & no problems yet. Running the 3 of mine (2 external, 2 internal) all on (e)sata. More consistent, and I have no plans on powering the externals off the pc, anyway.


also, ********...not even going to bother.

Thanks for the tips, guys. And yeah, I've tested things by trying to play tracks directly from the Mac's hard drive and even from a USB stick and the issues only happen when I'm using the WD drive. This sort of thing didn't happen before. I recorded my last mix using the Mac and that hard drive. I think it's beginning to fuck off.

I've heard that the MyPassport drives from WD work well and that the MyBooks and other desktop drives are the ones with issues. Unfortunately I had already bought this crap I have right now.

As for the Seagate drives, the problem is that they don't have a FIrewire drive with the capacity I want. The biggest one they have is 320GB, and I need at least 640GB. I checked their website and they have a line called GoFlex that can be upgraded from USB 2.0 to Firewire 800 but it costs an extra $40 which brings it to $190.

It sounds like it could be the actual hard drive itself or maybe something with Traktor. Which version are you running? Is it cracked?

I've had issues with Traktor when playing tracks off an Ipod and an older external HDD. My guess is it's Traktor causing the conflict. Just because you isolated the problem to the drive doesn't necessarily mean its the drive itself causing the issue. Traktor may just not like that drive for whatever reason. But in any event you'll need a new drive either way, so I guess its a moot point lol.

Bas, I'm positive that it's the hard drive because my sister has the exact same drive and I tried it out and it doesn't give me any problems in Traktor. I tried both on them on my laptop and on my PC at work and hers works fine. Mine is very slow at transferring files to and from. I guess I'd better act fast and buy a new one right away because it can go down the shitter any day.

yeah back up all that junk if you care for it

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