Is my harddrive ok?

R

raximus

New member
Hi everyone!

I have the new intel imac with the FW800, a digi003R+ and I have just added a maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500GB firewire 400 drive to the setup.

It is setup as iMac>drive>003+

Ok, so the drive works fine, BUT, if i havent used the drive for 30 seconds and then i go to hit record, the Mac spinning wheel comes up for about 7 seconds, then it records (you can hear the drive loading up).

Is this normal or have i bought a drive that is too slow?

Also, ive been using it all day with no problems but besides that.

Suddenly tonight, i was playing something back in protools and it cut out and a message came up saying that the drive may have a problem accessing or that it was too slow or something like that (i should have saved the message). It was basically telling me that the drive was causing a problem.

Does this mine my drive is too slow? I hope not, because it means i will have to go back to the store and try and get my money back :(

Thanks for your help guys

James
 
raximus said:
It has a 400Mb/s transfer rate, 7200 RPM drive and a 16MB cache. Is that good enough? I couldn't find info on the seek time
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It sounds fine to me. Have you tried defragmenting it? Can you do that on a mac? Sorry, I know nothing about macs really.
 
The data transfer rate of that drive is not the problem. It is far faster than you will ever exceed while recording audio. In fact, you could probably record a few hundred tracks simultaneously and still not bog it down.

What may be occurring is that the drive (or the spinning disc inside) is powering down when not in use to conserve energy. Then to access the drive again, you are being made to wait for the drive platter to spin back up to speed.

You may be able to prevent this from happening by making a change in the properties of the drive or somewhere in the setup of the computer.
 
open system preferences, and go to energy saver,,,then uncheck "put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible"


hope that helps.
 
I tried the energy saver idea. That didn't work. I went to Terminal and tried the line that stops the drive sleeping and that didn't work. I've downloaded disksomnia, that doesn't work either.

Any ideas?
 
If you disabled the checkbox in Energy Saver, then the Mac isn't responsible for spinning the drive down. And no, FireWire ports don't get shut down if there's a drive hanging off the port with a volume mounted....

It's possible (nay, almost certain) that the FireWire enclosure is doing its own power management and sending spin down commands to the drive. If the drive case has a multi-position switch that says something like "on/off/auto" or similar, switch it to "on". Failing that, if it isn't screwing up the recordings, I wouldn't worry about it. If it is, about all you can do is switch to Finder and double-click the hard drive or something to force it to spin up before you start recording. :)

I don't think there's anything wrong with your drive that slapping around the FireWire case's firmware engineers couldn't fix. :D That said, I'd still keep regular backups. Hard drive reliability isn't what it used to be.
 
there are many things you can do to your computer to optimizing it for recording, the list is quite expansive. just do a google search, you will be surprised how it will affect your studio. i just upgraded my computer myself. before i optimized for protools i had lots of buggy issues. now its rock solid.
 
Steenamaroo said:
try reading this...


http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-16586.html


it seems like system preferences and osx settings wont cover firewire devices....
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That's woefully out of date. Mac OS X doesn't really even support crontab in 10.5 except as a legacy vestige. And that's a terrible way to solve the problem.

BTW, I'm about 98% sure that the Mac OS X settings do cover FireWire devices. They don't, however, cover brain damaged FireWire devices that do their own thing and spin down without being told to do so.
 
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