External Hard Drive problems with Protools

[shameusf]

Hi there,

Has anyone had any issues using G-Tech external firewire drives with Protools? I'm using two external G Drives, one with my sample library and another where I save sessions and all my audio.

Recently it's been nothing but trouble. I'm talking spinning beach ball of death often for five minutes at a time. It's literally doubling the time all my recording sessions take as it's spinning for approximately 50% of the time. The activity monitor says Protools is only using 15% of CPU power so I'm assuming it's the g drive. And occasionally, when this happens, the mac will just stop reading the audio drive and I'll get a pop up box telling me I've disconnected the drive prematurely.

Really killing me.

[Phil Ogden]

IIRC, G-Drives ship with a DVD that includes advice re troubleshooting. Have you looked at this?

Does the HD mount OK?

Have you tried a different FW cable or socket (if you have one)?

[kolargol]

as Phil says u have to try others cables and connections...

BUT also do u have it on a HUB?
is it conected alone?
Is it happening when u are plugged on energy or on battery?

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by shameusf

Hi there,

Has anyone had any issues using G-Tech external firewire drives with Protools?

Yes. I use a G-drive mini with my MacBookPro8,3 as my audio drive.

Originally Posted by shameusf

I'm using two external G Drives, one with my sample library and another where I save sessions and all my audio.

Recently it's been nothing but trouble. I'm talking spinning beach ball of death often for five minutes at a time. It's literally doubling the time all my recording sessions take as it's spinning for approximately 50% of the time. The activity monitor says Protools is only using 15% of CPU power so I'm assuming it's the g drive. And occasionally, when this happens, the mac will just stop reading the audio drive and I'll get a pop up box telling me I've disconnected the drive prematurely.

The first symptoms sound to me as if you have a problem with the directory on the disk. Run Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) and choose to Verify Disk. If errors are found, choose to Repair Disk. If Disk Utility reports File System Was Modified (or something similar), run the Verify Disk command again. If errors are found again, then you probably need a more advanced tool to solve the problem. I have used TechTool Pro, DiskWarrior, and Drive Genius. Each one of those programs has strengths and weaknesses.

The OS claiming the drive being unmounted could be a faulty cable or controller on either the drive or the logic board. If the drive unmounting happens immediately after a SWOD where the computer is trying to do something with this drive, then I would suspect drive corruption as noted above.

[Darryl Ramm]

Have you applied all the standard systems optimizations? especially including disabling spotlight indexing on all these drives?

Darryl