WD MyBook Drive?

[locosoundman]

I have been running PTLE 6.2.3 on a 12" Powerbook G4 for a number of years without trouble. My chain is basically 002r->LaCie d2->Powerbook G4 on a single firewire port.

In the past two weeks I have had several minor crashes (twice during record on one session and during playback on another) accompanied by an error message saying that "PT can't get audio from the drive fast enough - drive is too fragmented" or something like this. Mind you, the drive was freshly formatted last night, so fragmentation can't be the cause.

I am guessing it's possible that my LaCie d2 is finally giving up the ghost, so I am considering replacing it.

Someone mentioned the LaCie Porche drive, but my gut tells me it's too slow to run 16-track sessions. Anyone working with these?

Has anyone had any luck with the Western Digital My Book drives?

Is there anything else that could be the culprit? Bad cable? I have not stripped down my system drive ever.

[qwex]

I don't know how to diagnose your problem, but I do have a LaCie Porsche drive 80g 7200 rpm firewire. I run it off a similar system, with either my 002 or an mbox into my powerbook g4 17inch. I have had absolutely no problems with the drive being able to handle it. The most tracks I have done is about 24, with up to about 14 or 15 at one time, with no problems. Sorry I don't know more about the other problem, but I have nothing but good things to say about the hard drive. It has been good to me for about a year and a half.

Good luck,

Phil

[Goobs]

For whatever it's worth, I bought one of these drives, and then promptly returned it after I called Western Digital only to find out that are no longer using the Oxford chipset in their drives.

Just a heads-up,
Jeff

[douzanis]

I have been running PTLE 6.2.3 on a 12" Powerbook G4 for a number of years without trouble. My chain is basically 002r->LaCie d2->Powerbook G4 on a single firewire port.

In the past two weeks I have had several minor crashes (twice during record on one session and during playback on another) accompanied by an error message saying that "PT can't get audio from the drive fast enough - drive is too fragmented" or something like this. Mind you, the drive was freshly formatted last night, so fragmentation can't be the cause.

I am guessing it's possible that my LaCie d2 is finally giving up the ghost, so I am considering replacing it.

Someone mentioned the LaCie Porche drive, but my gut tells me it's too slow to run 16-track sessions. Anyone working with these?

Has anyone had any luck with the Western Digital My Book drives?

Is there anything else that could be the culprit? Bad cable? I have not stripped down my system drive ever.

I use a western digital external hard drive with digi 002 on intel imc. Works fine, would probably by another one, but read digi's support page on hard drive specifications first

[Bodenski]

I have had very little luck using WD MyBook firewire drives on Windows computers. The USB port works OK, but I have tried several different times to get the firewire part to work on my Windows machines without any success. If you hope to use the drive to share sessions between Windows and Mac computers I would avoid the WD MyBook drives.

Other's experience may vary. If you plan on only using it on a Mac I don't know how well they work.

James

[humpback]

FWIW, I have 2 of the triple interface .5Tb MyBooks. One on the MBP, and one on the PPC tower. Haven't had any problems with either! Both are connected via FW, and run without hitch.

[BFrederick]

I tried a firewire WD Mybook drive last year... After copying a session over and trying to load it from the drive, PT does not start. Too long ago to remember the error thrown. Also, a newly created session would not work properly if disk allocation was set to the Mybook drive. If I recall correctly, PT would crash immediately upon pressing record.

This was mentioned earlier in this thread - these drives do not use the any of the approved Oxford chipsets. Unfortunately, WD doesn't make this information easy to find.

Note that I have several other working Firewire drives in my setup, so my problems with this line of HD were not related to my PT setup.

Good luck!

[locosoundman]

Thanks for the info everybody

Anyone else using the Porsche drives? How about the Maxtor One Touch Drives?

[The Dougfather]

I have two Maxtor one touch original drives, the FW only models. They're great, i've been using them for several years, they're quick, quiet and very reliable.

Too be honest nowadays i'd recommend buying an OWC firewire enclosure and then installing an IDE drive of your choice. I'm currently using Hitachi travelstars and they're great drives, seagate are good too.

Cheers

[Alex T.]

Just picked up a WDMyBook 1TB and you can run it without RAID

I haven't tested RAID 0 or 1 with PTLE but I can at some point and see if it works ok.