Hi,

My external drives green light fades and returns LFO-style. What is this about? I dont know if this is supposed to happen, I only took notice of it today.

Its USB powered, not AC adaptor.

The drive and files are still accessable. Projects in my DAW open with the samples on it. No problem.

Im just worried it might be dying...

Also what format should the drive ideally be for holding/using the samples in a DAW? There is some setting (I read years ago) that optimises external drives for use with a DAW but I forget. anyone know what Im talking about.

Thanks in advance!

 

The light of my two external hard disks does the same thing, I think it is normal... *yes*

 

Thanks. I Google'd the issue but all the info I came across was people who cant access the files or is not recognised so they were no help really!

Any idea about the second part of my question? Best format for "streaming" samples? What the optimum settings are?

 

Are you talking about the allocation unit size you set when formatting? Bigger is better- or, I should say, bigger is faster.

 

watch out!!!!...my seagate started doing this a few weeks before it died on its arse completely, get some backup chap.

 

To be honest I have no idea what Im talking about! Im not too informed on computer tech.

Ill check the setting you recommended. This won't affect the data on the drive?

 

harddrives have a selftest : S.M.A.R.T it checks itself ie. how long does it need to spin up or how fast does it read etc. if it encounters an error, it will tell you. perhaps the flashing is the sign for a failure. in internal hdds you can read the smart status through the system. on mac it is readable with disk utility on pc i dont know at the moment. for external drives the manufacturer should supply some kind of program (western digital does).
perhaps this is helpful I dont know. The only thing I know is when the smart status indicates a failure, it is most of the time too late.

 

You guys have me spooked!

Tune Up Utilites disk error check should tell me how the HD is doing? Or should I just move all my files off it ASAP?

 

check for errors but be prepared to backup, important files first.

 

Well, yes, it will. I'm talking about formatting, so of course, if you format the drive, you'll lose everything on it.

When you execute the 'format drive' command on Windows, you have the option to set the size of the memory units- basically, this just refers to how big each individual unit of memory will be in the format. The bigger the units, the faster you'll be able to 'get around' inside the drive.

 

Only advice I can give at this time is: Back up your drives and get Western Digital hard drive. Although I can't speak for anyone else on this site but myself.....Nothing but problems with Seagate drives. I refuse to buy them anymore

 

Im ignorant to tech but even I know format wipes the drive I didnt know you had to format to allocate the size though. Thanks.

Ok Im gonna cut and paste the contents of the drive to PC, copy paste BACK to the drive and run the disk error test. Ill see what happens then. Ill probably continue to use the drive just to see what happens (if it starts making noise, the light becomes more erratic, whatever...), it'll be a learning experience.

Cheers for the input peeps. I must look into SS drives in the future.

 

You can check SAMRT with CDI for example.

And no, format does not wipe the drive. At least not the quick format. The data remains accessible with special tools.

Br,
Olaf

 

The usb port on a computer supplies 1/2 amp, 500ma at 5 volts specification

most of the eternal hard drives that are usb powered probably need about 700ma, if you were to take the drive apart you would see 5 volts at 600ma printed on the
drive, manufactures used to send a usb hook up that used 2 usb ports on the computer, one for communication and one for extra power. 2 ports 1000ma, they do not do
this now, most of the laptop hard drive need 500 to 600 ma, so one usb port is just on the edge for this power requirement,depends on how close the motherboard follows
the spec , your light may fade as the hard drive draws more power than the usb port can supply .

S.m.a.r.t may not be able to talk to the computer about the hard drive over a usb port . so you will not get any data about the condition of the drive

Over the years different hard drive manufactures have had different problems with their drives , so no hard and fast rule of who is best, lately Western Digital is my choice
great drives especially Western Digital Caviar Black, but 5 years ago I used to curse WD and only buy Seagate

As to the file format NTFS, FAT 32 has a 4 GB minus 1 byte file size limit, so if you wanted to store a 5 GB iso image and you had 100 GB free It would tell you it did not
have enough space, because of the file size limit not the storage space available, NTFS file size is 16 TB minus 64 kB ,as to cluster size I have always left it to the
default amount , 4 KB, you would need to do some research to see if a different cluster size would make a difference in performance. I think file transfer speed would
have a greater effect than cluster size, so anything you can do to improve that would be a benefit

Normally I put as much ram into my computer as it can take, then I make a ram drive, with SuperSpeed Software , look for it you will find it, then I make a ram drive and set up
the computer to use this as a swap file or even load the program into it and run it all from ram , 1000's faster than a hard drive, try to set up the program to swap to the
ram drive in the background and read from it when it needs it, I do not know if this will work with all programs

As to the value of your data , never try to guess if a hard drive is going to fail , always ask yourself how valuable is my data, did I just work on something for two months
and now I am going to take a chance on losing my data, Hard drives are cheap , not as cheap as before the floods in Thailand, but they will get back down again . I always make
a backup of everything. I have had hard drives fail that worked perfect just a second before, no warning, s.m.a.r.t or sound , and I have had ones that sounded like they were
grinding themselves apart
, copied my data off of them , and stopped using them not because they failed , but because they were just too dam noisy

Hope this helps

 

Korgrog,

Thanks for your very good and useful infos.
I would like to add that the auto-sleep mode from many Western Digital external hard disk drives can not be adjusted nor stopped via a proprietary hard disk manager as with Seagate drives. This is particularly annoying since it can cause audio dropouts. The only way to prevent those (stupid) drives to go into auto-sleep mode is to use a little program called NoSleepHD (http://nosleephd.codeplex.com) which writes an empty text file every few minutes to your external hard disk drive.

Of course, SS drives are the way to go... when money is not a barrier :dancing: .