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Topic: An external hd's End of days..?

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I use western Digital Passports for all my music. I was dj ying a pool party and noticed that the music stop playing for a second or two. This happened like 5 times.. Its strange because i never had this before. It might be a slight delay in the seeking. Better update before i can't use it anymore. Has anyone ever experienced this before... ?
 
Inviato Sun 31 Aug 08 @ 11:23 pm
You using a notebook? If not just upgrade to a larger secondary drive.

If you are using a Notebook, Make sure your power adapter for your harddrive has no loose wires; same with your hub. Repeated winding and unwinding of cords can cause an internal short pretty fast.

Maybe a larger internal drive would be more reliable
 
Also, make sure there are no conflicts.....
 
I have 2 120 gig Hds and a 160 Gig Passports. The Hds are usb powered. I use only one of them and the other 2 are just sitting around waiting to be updated with what i currently have in the main HD. Out of the 120 gigs, im only using 50 % capacity. Im gonna try the other HDs with the same equipment i used at the party.
 
I had a seagate drive that acted similarly for some time. And it never got better. Ol' chap won't start at all nowadays. Obviously your best bet is to back it up just in case.

It's worth noting that for generally being called back-ups, external hard drives have quite short life spans.
 
I use a firewire 160GB drive, and I have to say, this has never happened to me. Hope you get it sorted out ;)
 
I would just pick up an enclosure that has power and get a 1tb drive.
 
discobrian24 wrote :
I would just pick up an enclosure that has power and get a 1tb drive.


Not a bad idea these days!
 
I used to use a 160Gb external powered from the USB port, it lost connection with Windows a couple of times in the middle of a gig, so I stopped using it. I now use an external 500Gb Hard Drive with it's own independant power supply.

Earlier this year I had an issue of overheating due to too many USB items drawing power (PC to TV Convertor, AK1 Soundcard, Logitek Infrared mouse, Vestax VCI-100, cooling plate). The laptop sits on a cooling plate, however, sucking too much power from the USB ports overheats the chips inside.

I now only have the cooling plate, mouse and soundcard drawing power.

I have recently purchased a powered USB 2.0 Hub, which means I could draw power from that instead (not used it yet).
 
Something similar happened to me at last sunday mornings wedding. Hard drive actually dissapeared twice, the first time only for a second or two the second time i had to unplug and replug the power cord and finished the afternoon off. At my second wedding that evening i used my back up .
The week that followed that day was hectic so i wasn't able to do much about it before this saturdays gig so when i got there i said what the hec and tried the troubled hard drive, finished the night with no problems. I read from other members that it is a sign of the h.d. coming to it's end so if i where u i would probably get another hard drive ready.
I just bought a lacie 1 TB drive from J & R at a decent price for my mac. Once i get the mac up and running (Hopefully this coming weekend) I am going to send the faulty western digital drive back to get looked at by W.D. as it is still under warranty.
Good luck with your drive.
 
uuuhhhh here's chuck's " cheap but it works great solution " ........ i use a 500 gb drive which is stood up in place in a plastic box , about 5$ at

Staples ..... it is foamed into place so it doesn't move ....next to it is my presonus firewire soundcard .... also foamed into place .....and facing them both is a teeny little 10$ fan that cools everything off ......all of the above is plugged into an extension cord .... so plugin one plug and it all works .... also there are other holes drilled into the box for ventilation and for the 3 lines out to the mixer from the soundcard and the firewire line out from the laptop ........

this has 3 connections to my/ the clubs mixer ..... 2 to the laptop , just one to the electic outlet ....... it's simple , straightforward , cheap, everythings foamed in and has it's own cooling fan ..... what's not to like ??

i'm not a fan of really huge drives cuz that's a lot of stuff to lose ... or to scan ......

i drilled a 1 inch hole behind the fan for an intake for the fan ....various ventilaion holes on all 4 sides , and the bottom has feet so even the bottom can breathe , then there are the holes for the various mixer and laptop and power connections ........

the fan , extension cord .....and box ..... less than $20 .......drilling manly holes with yer manly drill in yer manly basement .... about 5 minutes
the foam cost zero ....from boxes the equipment came in ........if you wanna get really crazy , and spend another 4$ you can take the 3 lines to the mixer and wrap them in the large size tubing from radioshack and take the usb and the firewire connections from the laptop and protect them in the skinny size radio shack tubing ..... and you can easily tell what's what from the visual clues when you are in a huge hurry .....and all the wires are separated and protected ........

OR you can just whine like a b!tch when yer cables croak in the middle of a gig or yer lappy can't see the ext hd ......

uuuuhhhhh fer whatever it's worth ... i have a low opinion of seagate and maxtor drives .......
 
What a manly man. It actually crossed my mind that the heat might have had something to do with it. The wedding at which my H.D. played houdini in was at a catering hall with a nice patio area in which they have peacocks "Huh huh he said Cock" and cockatoos and parrots, rabbits and so on running around on their grounds so at the time of the incident the doors leading to the patio where open and the room was actually rather warm. I'll try the fan trick before i send the drive back.
Thanks mr. wimp, I mean hmm chuck.
 
I had a simmiler problem a while back, turn out to be the hard drive enclosure.

I put the drive in a new enclosure, problem solved. there was something screwing up with
the enclosures electronics.

Dave
 
I was having some issues with my external drive and my RMX on my lappy. Turned out I had a USB conflict. I turned off one USB root hub and now everything works just fine....try that
 

What is the estimated lifespan of an external HD?

Anyone here had one running well for a long time?
 
to Binky ... i use externals as my main drives for the music and video ... i also always carry with me a backup that is totally ready to go also so as long as the C: doesn't crash i'm good ..... if the C: does crash i don't lose my music, and if that happened there's the promo only's locked in the trunk of the car ....... i don't allow the C: to get more than 50% full , and i don't allow the processes to exceed 40 ........i also use a cpu useage widget to monitor that as well ( second opinion to the one in the software) ......

heat does matter .... i'd say at least every month or two this happens ........one of the guys with the cool hat cocked sideways comes running in last second with his backpack ? and starts to setup to replace me in a big hurry ...... butt , his borrowed laptop with the dj boraz vdj edition can't see the ext hd ......

"uuhh look Einstein ..... how long since you last worked ? 3 days ...ok , and where has the backpack been for those 3 days ? locked in yer car ...ok .... look , here's what we're gonna do ...... i don't want us dj's to look like schmucks so this is how it's goin' down ..... you go take yer backpack to "biggie" , yeah the bar babe with the rack ....and tell her i said it's ok .... you open the top of yer backpack and we're gonna cool off yer stuff for 10 minutes .....by putting it in the bar cooler .......then you have 5 minutes to get up and running ...... or we can take it outside or you can take it up with management ..... there won't be a next time ......."

why are these buffoons so unprofessional ??????????????????????? what makes them think they can take my job ???????? at some point if they're 28 or 32 or whatever .... isn't that old enough to be responsible ??
 
I've been using two of mine for over a year Bren....so far so good...
 
my w.d. is over a year old .......

on the heat issue again ... use a cooler that draws power from it's own wall connection not the lappy ... those always have extra usb ports so that might come in handy
 
Use an Enclosure with an internal cooling fan. If you can keep it from vibration this is the main problem. Hard drives can fall victim to vibration. if you use an external hard drive for archiving and it doesn't vibrate It'll last a very long time.

Trouble is dropping, Bouncing on a Mixtable all night can be murder for hard drives. A piece of packing foam will help.
 
Well some of them are quite durable, got a Packard Bell one that's been running pretty much constantly for about 2 or 3 years now, which is remarkable because it's got no cooling whatsoever, doesn't monitor the computer, so as long as it's plugged into the wall, it's on. And it gets pretty much so hot I can use it to keep my toast warm in the morning.

Really the dropping is obviously the biggest problem, so for my latest I got a Western Digital 1TB with shock resistance. Haven't tried it out, but it hopefully is somewhat resistant at least, losing a TB in one go would be pretty shit.
 


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