External Hard drive is hogging my processing power

[dj_fred_d]

I have a :
Mac G4 1.25 ghz, 512 mb Ram,
OS X.3.5
Pro Tools 6.4/002 Rack

I just bought a 160 gig, 7200rpm, 8mb cache external firewire hard drive. Everytime I use it to play back audio I get an error message saying "Audio buffer underflowed. Decrease HW buffer or disconect devices from firewire hub.
Do I need a smaller hard drive with a lower cache?
or
Is my computer to slow for an external hard drive.

Can anybody help me before my return policy on this hard drive runs out.

Thanks,
dj_fred_d

[Cyamarin]

I can't say for sure whether this is true without knowing what kind of a Hard Drive you got (wasn't a Western Digital, was it?), but it sounds to me like you've bought a hard drive that doesn't use the Oxford 11 chipset. It has nothing to do with your computer's processing power--it means the drive is not sending data to the firewire bus fast enough to play it back. Pro Tools is optimized to work with the Oxford 11 chipset, so despite the fact that a drive with an 8MB cache and 7200 rpm should be more than enough to play back 32 tracks simultaneously, when working with Pro Tools a drive that uses a chipset other than Oxford 11 will slow down immensely--slow enough that transfering even one track, it can't keep up.

That's what I would imagine it is. You need a different drive. I recommend getting a LaCie--I got a drive with the same stats as yours for $200 some dollars, and it's never failed me.

Only other thing I can think it might be would be maybe you have too many things plugged into your firewire bus? If you have more than just a hard drive and an audio interface, that might be a problem. But most likely its a chipset issue. I had the same problem a while ago.

[max cooper]

Having used both G4's and G5's with 002rack systems, I'm pretty durn sure that the internal hard drives are faster than firewire drives. If you have another place to put an internal drive, try that (a G4 has lots of places to put 'em). I'm not actually sure why the default data drive for PTLE hasd become a FireWire drive. As I understand it (if anyone knows different, I'll gladly be enlightened) the FireWire interface is less direct and slower than ATA.

Sure, FW is fast. It's faster than USB.

If FireWire was faster than ATA, wouldn't all those Alienware computers that run games really fast have FireWire busses on all the internal drives instead of ATA busses? They're expensive enough!

If you trade in a FW drive, I bet you can get an ATA drive with an Oxford chipset!

Max

[dj_fred_d]

Thanks alot, I was in the store and a guy told me to buy the western digital but they didn't have any that was Firewire. The drive I bought was a Maxtor. How will I know if the next drive I get has an Oxford 11 chipset?

[orage]

It's not the drive that contains the Oxford chipset, but rather the enclosure. It acts as a bridge between the drive and the enclosure's I/O.

[JFreak]

you need to have your firewire hard drive on different firewire buss than the audio interface, so buy a pci firewire card (about 40 bucks) and just use your firewire drive. i'm sure that helps, but if it doesn't (it should!) you can always open the firewire case and take the ATA drive out, and install it inside your G4. that would be cheaper than to buy another new hard drive

but, i'm sure the pci firewire card does the trick. try that first.

[JFreak]

your problem could very well be the 10.3.5 operating system, too, as digidesign hasn't yet qualified it and i have heard there's a firewire problem... if you can, downgrade to 10.3.4 which works very well.

[audioboffin]

your problem could very well be the 10.3.5 operating system, too, as digidesign hasn't yet qualified it and i have heard there's a firewire problem... if you can, downgrade to 10.3.4 which works very well.

A couple of points. Firstly there isn't a way of downgrading an OS upgrade, so the only way back to 10.3.4 is to reinstall. Secondly the chipset to look for is an Oxford 911 chipset, or for Firewire 800, an Oxford 922 chipset (there is a firmware update from Apple that needs to be applied to a number of Firewire 800 enclosures that use the 922 chipset).

The Lacie enclosures have proven to have some thermal issues for long term use according to several data restoration experts. I've done years of work with a TDM system using Sarotech Firewire cases with 24 bit 44.1kHz files in sessions with up to 64 tracks playing back at a time (after having to render out edits in a lot of cases), without dramas.

I used to use the ATTO utility with OS 9 to compare disk thruput of various SCSI and Firewire drives. At that time I was getting better performance with Firewire drives than the internal driv bus. Back about 4 years the internal IDE bus in a G4 was only 33 mHz, and then they jumped in later models to 66 mHz and finally to 100 mHz. As far as I know all the Firewire enclosures with Oxford 911 chipsets come with ATA 100 drive interfaces. If you are getting error messages, I'd recommend backing up, then repartitioning and formatting the external drive using the OS X drive utility.

Cheers !

[JFreak]

there isn't a way of downgrading an OS upgrade, so the only way back to 10.3.4 is to reinstall

bingo

[audioboffin]

I should also point out that I have a iBook G4 800 with max RAM, and an mBox. I use several Sarotech Firewire enclosures, with Western Digital, IBM and Maxtor drives, running PT LE 6.4 on OS 10.3.5, on that machine, also am using Mix hardware on OS 10.3.5 with the new release 6.4.1 with the same Sarotech boxes, and so far not a problem. The Digi guys might like to point out what the issues are with 10.3.5, but so far I haven't hit them.