Drive too slow...

[Grindcrusher]

Hi guys and girls...

Running Pro Tools 9 with a 003 rack and a MacBook Pro. Audio disk is a WD Studio Edition over Firewire800. It's been running smoothly before, but now days, on different sessions, the disk-meter on the "system usage" window hits bottom after a while. It starts to tick low, then goes really high after a few seconds.

The sessions where I've had the most trouble I've actually tried copying the session to the system drive and had no problem what so ever.

What is causing this behaviour?

Track-count about 16 tracks of audio...

[Kenmillerjr]

Are the HDD and 003 on the same firewire chain/bus? I've had that issue before with a high-track count session. I am looking at investigating in a eSata bus for the MacBook Pro.

[Grindcrusher]

No separate bus... Drive on my firewire800 port and 003 on my FW400 port.

[Dism]

Originally Posted by Grindcrusher

No separate bus... Drive on my firewire800 port and 003 on my FW400 port.

That's the same bus, on a Macbook Pro. Both ports are on the same bus.

[Grindcrusher]

Oh. Bloody hell. Had no idea... So what do I do?

[albee1952]

Anytime I hear ticking from a hard drive, I get worried. I would copy everything that matters to another drive.....just in case its a sign of impending drive failure

[Dism]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Anytime I hear ticking from a hard drive, I get worried. I would copy everything that matters to another drive.....just in case its a sign of impending drive failure

Indeed.

When it comes to hard drives, unusual noises is almost always a first sign of trouble.

[Grindcrusher]

This is getting really funky now...

The drive is a WD Studio, with usb and Firewire800. I have two of these, one 1.5TB and one 2TB.

It's the 2TB disk I'm using as audio drive.

I have tried running same project (16-20 tracks) from both WD drives, one old USB drive and the system drive.

System drive outperforms all of them.

Old USB drive performs same as my 1.5TB drive on USB.

My 1.5TB performs just about the same on USB as daisy-chained FW400 or on my FW800-port.


My 2TB disk however - goes up to 95% after just a few seconds. Mind you - it starts fairly normally, then goes up to max and most of the times hits the peak and stops playback. It does this in FW AND USB.

Disk is filled by 800MB of data, and is not indexed by spotlight. Formatted in HFS+ with journaling.


Should I contact WD?

[albee1952]

Contact WD, but only AFTER you copy everything to a new drive(and I would not buy another WD firewire). Once you send that drive in for repair or replacement, consider everything on it as gone. I would get one of the OWC Mercury drives, or a Glyph. There seems to be a difference in WD's internal high-end drives like the Caviar Black and their externals(I would be interested to know what model drive they use0. I own 2 older WD firewire drives and the first one crashed completely at 6 weeks old. The replacement started acting as you describe within 2 weeks. So now I use them only for backups and transfers.