A recent experience involving hard drives...

[AlexLakis]

I was in session yesterday and ran into a snag.

Macbook Retina i7 2.7, 16GB RAM, SSD. I record to an external 7200RPM drive via USB 3. DIGI 002. OSX 10.8, Pro Tools 10.3.9.

I had about 14 tracks of guitars going while recording 10 tracks of drums (don't ask). No VIs, no plugins, buffer size of 64. Monitoring via sends/aux.

For some reason, during the same part of recording the take, disk usage would skyrocket to 100%, and Pro Tools would freeze (spinning pinwheel). Had to force quit to get out of it.

I tried several of the usual things, moving CPU utilization settings around, increasing buffer size to 128, etc. After this troubleshooting (and noticing the disk usage spike), I wound up moving the entire session to my Mac's internal SSD.

Problem went away. Disk utilization was way down as well (down to 2% from around 14% on the external.)

I'm guessing maybe I've got some bad sectors on the external drive. This setup had been rock solid for me for over a year before yesterday.

Just thought I'd share this experience with the community. It goes to show that sometimes doing something that is NOT recommended (recording to the system drive Pro Tools is running off of) can work out. For the meantime, I'll be running all of my sessions from the system drive and moving to another external solution (most likely SSD) once costs go down a bit.

Party on, Wayne.

[Darryl Ramm]

OK, out of interest in this mystery...

What make/model SSD is in the external enclosure? (not a Samsung 840 Evo by any chance?)

Does that SSD drive have the latest firmware from the manufacturer installed?

How full is the external SSD drive?

What Model number or year code is the MacBook Pro Retina? e.g. "Mid-2014" ?

Any disk related errors on the OS X Systems Console (Console.app)

Did you run verify disk on the external drive?

[AlexLakis]

Hey, Daryl! Thanks for replying!

The MBP is mid-2012.

The external drive is not a SSD, it's a 7200 RPM IDE. It's a HGST Touro. It's a 500GB drive that is around half full. I ran Verify Disk on it last about a week ago and it was fine. Here's the Newegg link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145518

I have a second HGST Touro that I keep as a mirror backup of the first one...I suppose I could swap them to see if its a drive error. Otherwise, I'm moving forward on the system drive at least for a week or two until I can incorporate an external SSD solution. I'll keep this thread posted if I run into any problems with that.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by AlexLakis

Hey, Daryl! Thanks for replying!

The MBP is mid-2012.

The external drive is not a SSD, it's a 7200 RPM IDE. It's a HGST Touro. It's a 500GB drive that is around half full. I ran Verify Disk on it last about a week ago and it was fine. Here's the Newegg link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145518

I have a second HGST Touro that I keep as a mirror backup of the first one...I suppose I could swap them to see if its a drive error. Otherwise, I'm moving forward on the system drive at least for a week or two until I can incorporate an external SSD solution. I'll keep this thread posted if I run into any problems with that.

Oh OK, I was just curious.

You don't have time machine or the HGST backup software installed/configured and possibly trying to do a backup at that time do you?

I would double check that HDD is marked private for TimeMachine. And see if that makes a difference, I very occasionally still see bizzare behavior with time machine indexing if it is turned on.

Yes SSDs are so fast that you can often get away with working on the system drive. Your MBPr uses a small card type SATA III SSD, newer MBPr use a significantly faster PCIe connection to a basically identical looking card. Those newer MBPr *really* change the rules about recording to a seperate/dedicated audio/session drice.

[AlexLakis]

Yeah, eff time machine, I've always done backups manually.