Hard drive problem

[Seanie B]

I recently bought Pro Tools M-powered, I installed it and everything is working great except I have one problem. I have a second internal hard drive that I want to use as my audio drive. It's connected as a slave to the master hard drive I believe. When I run a session in ProTools that is saved on the system drive, it runs fine, but when I try to run a session on the second hard drive, it tells me that my hard drive is too slow, or fragmented to play audio from it. It couldn't be fragmented because it's a new drive and I only copied a couple sessions onto it. I tried reformatting the drive and that didn't work. I know the drive itself should work, because when I bought it, I bought two. One for home and one to use at school, and I never get that problem at school. At school we connect the drives with firewire. Any ideas how I can fix this problem?

[dub3000]

the drive is probably running in PIO mode (not DMA mode). go into windows device manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, one of the IDE channels will show the drive running in either Ultra DMA mode or PIO mode. PIO is bad bad bad and can be caused by bad master/slave config on your HD (look for the dip switches, you want everything (HD/CD/DVD) to be set to "cable select" or CS mode, warning some cheapo CD ROMS can bluescreen the system if that's set), if that doesn't work hit the forums on the net.

[Seanie B]

I checked both the primary and secondary IDE channels. The primary says DMA for device 0 and PIO for device 1 and the secondary says DMA for both. Would the PIO on the primary IDE channel affect the secondary drive? How would I know how to set the hard drive in cable select mode?

[dub3000]

There's a little switch or jumper on the back of CD and hard disk drives that controls the mode. If it's a jumper it'll be like a tiny bit of plastic with metal on the inside. There'll be a printout on the top or bottom of the drive showing where to put the jumper for different modes. It's different for every drive.

Some more info:

http://www.racelinecentral.com/HarddriveSpeed.html

"ATAPI devices such as optical, Zip and tape drives are jumpered in pretty much the same way as hard disks. They have the advantage of often having their jumpers much more clearly labeled than their hard disk counterparts. Most optical drives, for example, have three jumper blocks at the back, labeled "MA" (master), "SL" (slave) or "CS" (cable select).

If you are using two drives on a channel, it is important to ensure that they are jumpered correctly. Making both drives the master, or both the slave, will likely result in a very confused system. Note that in terms of configuration, it makes no difference which connector on the standard IDE cable is used in a standard IDE setup, because it is the jumpers that control master and slave, not the cable. This does not apply when cable select is being used, however. Also, there can be electrical signaling issues if one connects a single drive to only the middle connector on a cable, leaving the end connector unattached. In particular, the use of Ultra DMA is not supported in such a configuration."

As above, you want everything selected as Cable Select. You might need a different cable (80 pin) for highest performance. I also try and keep CD drives on a separate IDE channel to HD drives. It can be really frustrating getting it right though, sometimes you need to swap drives around.

Oh, and backup everything before you do anything scary, there's always a tiny bit of risk associated with messing with drives like this.

[viewstart]

It couldn't be fragmented because it's a new drive and I only copied a couple sessions onto it.

That's not strictly true, new drives often need defragmenting once they've been set up. If you're on XP then Analyse your second disk with Disk Defragmenter, see what it has to say.

[dub3000]

the built-in XP drive defragmenters have always bothered me. it always seems to leave the disk in a fairly ugly state, fragmentation-wise.

you should be able to do this to defragment a drive:

1. move all files off drive onto a spare drive
2. format original drive
3. move all files back

(make sure you've backed-up first)

if the OS is doing what it's meant to, the drive should be totally defragmented when you copy everything back. probably a lot faster than the defrag apps, too.