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  #1  
Old 06-16-2021, 09:53 PM
L-Dogg L-Dogg is offline
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Default Drive speed.

Hi all.

Since moving to my laptop and using a dedicated external drive…….I’ve been getting error messages with ridiculously low track counts and maybe one or two plugins. This means I have to go to the 1024 H/W buffer size with the result of crappy latency while tracking. I’d like to be at 128 or lower but no go.

Even at 1024 I quickly get error messages. Look at this particularly bad instance…..2 stereo tracks no plugs. Pathetic!


I actually currently have a session I imported which has 17 stereo audio tracks, a stereo master and two aux's with no plug in's on them. It's hit and miss whether I make it through.

Then I remembered........that in the past PT always was recommended to be used with 7200rpm drives...... which I made sure all my Mac Pro internal SATA drives were. I’m pretty sure my external Western Digital EZstore or whatever, that I'm using with my MBPR, is a 5400rpm drive. I cannot find a spec for this.

Could this cause issues? Or is it all about transfer rates and are the newer drives fast enough even if only 5400rpm?

What external drives are doing well with Pro Tools?

Thanks.
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  #2  
Old 06-16-2021, 11:15 PM
Reml@P Reml@P is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

Why bother with a mechanical spinner? Sure, they're fine for project archive but for real-time sessions, get yourself an SSD.
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  #3  
Old 06-17-2021, 01:10 AM
Sardi Sardi is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

USB3 case, Samsung EVO, done.

Throw that other drive in the bin.


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  #4  
Old 06-17-2021, 04:04 AM
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Ben Jenssen Ben Jenssen is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

Why do you think a CPU overload error is caused by slow file transfer speed? I'd rather be asking myself; what has changed on my system lately? Presuming this setup worked well before. Any new plugins? Try pulling out all plugins from the plugin folder.
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  #5  
Old 06-17-2021, 07:26 AM
sw rec sw rec is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

5400 rpm drives indeed don’t have the throughput to keep up. I will echo the previous recommendation to put an ssd in a usb 3 case and go to work. After you disable usb power management, of course.
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  #6  
Old 06-17-2021, 07:28 AM
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JFreak JFreak is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sw rec View Post
5400 rpm drives indeed don’t have the throughput to keep up. I will echo the previous recommendation to put an ssd in a usb 3 case and go to work. After you disable usb power management, of course.
This.

It has been DigiDesign/Avid recommendation since last millenium that whatever (spinning) drive you use must be at least 7200rpm and lower than 10ms seek time (latency)
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  #7  
Old 06-20-2021, 03:54 AM
musicman691 musicman691 is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by L-Dogg View Post
Then I remembered........that in the past PT always was recommended to be used with 7200rpm drives...... which I made sure all my Mac Pro internal SATA drives were. I’m pretty sure my external Western Digital EZstore or whatever, that I'm using with my MBPR, is a 5400rpm drive. I cannot find a spec for this.

Could this cause issues? Or is it all about transfer rates and are the newer drives fast enough even if only 5400rpm?

What external drives are doing well with Pro Tools?

Thanks.
What exact model EZstore do you have? Google should be able to help you find the specs or at least point you to the Western Digital site and you can contact them. In a quick search it seems like some of the recent ezstore's are ssd's. I know some of the big capacity models are spinners.
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  #8  
Old 06-20-2021, 10:11 AM
Tweakhead Tweakhead is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

Western Digital used to be one of the most reliable drives around. These days they are garbage. I recently had a 10TB G-Tech thunderbolt archival drive die within 15 minutes of opening the box and using it. I opened up the casing, and inside was a WD. It was stone dead. I'd had it unopened for several months so I couldn't return it . . . big mistake. I will always test a drive purchase from now on, even if I don't need it straight away.

I replaced the mechanism with a server-level Seagate and it's been perfect ever since, so the actual housing was just fine. I had no idea G-Tech had been bought by WD and were pulling this crap. No more G-Tech purchases from me now.

As Sardi said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sardi View Post
USB3 case, Samsung EVO, done.
Throw that other drive in the bin.
Yes, get yourself a Samsung SSD / USB3 case for fast loading, and enable Pro Tools Disk Cache (loads all session files into RAM) for immediate response times. For such tiny sessions you could even just allocate 4GB and you'll be fine.
https://ask.audio/articles/pro-tools...-cache-feature

Last edited by Tweakhead; 06-20-2021 at 01:22 PM.
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  #9  
Old 06-20-2021, 11:52 AM
dominicperry dominicperry is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

If you really want to go down the spinning-drive reliability rabbit-hole, this is a good place to start...
BackBlaze (who run a cloud backup service) publish their drive failures - and as pointed out, there are not that many drive manufacturers any more - lots of companies have been bought out and continue to make drives with the old name but the manufacturing gets transitioned over to the parent company, so you end up with a different drive than you imagined...

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...stats-q2-2020/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...stats-q1-2021/

Personally, for audio, I think SSDs are the way to go for everything. Internal & external - session drives, backup drives, even small drives for posting to people. USB-C is fast enough for most, as TB enclosures are rather expensive.

Dominic
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  #10  
Old 06-20-2021, 12:35 PM
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paul_g paul_g is offline
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Default Re: Drive speed.

As an engineer who architects high-performance NAS solutions for large companies, the first thing I always talk about is IOPS.

Number one statement I always here is, "We're not concerned about performance, just price and storage capacity." They opt for 7200 RPM NLSAS drives and with a max performance (on a good day) at about 13K IOPS, and try to drive 30K IOPS and wonder why their applications are tipping over.

It's a matter of physics. You can not put 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag. Read this: https://community.broadcom.com/syman...brarydocuments



I personally would stay the heck away from spinning media. Ten years ago we didn't have much choice unless we wanted to pay an arm and a leg. And as home users we were bound by bus speeds.

My suggestion is to look into a NVME Ram/SSD. Pricing these days is dirt cheap. You'll obviously have to scope out the carrier box for it, but there are companies that make them. A quick google search yielded me a Samsung 990 1TiB NVME SSD for $139...

A 5200 RPM drive is roughly 50 IOPS = 3.x mbps
The Samsung 980 is roughly 17K IOPS = 3200 mbps

Your bottleneck is your audio disk you are trying to write too. Reads will also kill your performance as well.
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