Hard disk misery- Help?

[Mark LaPierre]

Gentlemen and Ladies,

I have recently added several things to my library of sounds. I have two hard drives for samples- one is 120GB, and the other is 300GB. I have filled up the 300 to about 200GB of samples right now. It is not functioning well. Everything I play from it pops and clicks no matter what I do with buffer settings. The 120GB drive has only 26GB of space, and everything functions just fine off of it. Do you think it is a bad hard drive? Or did I overfill it? All advice is sincerely appreciated, since I am (of course) on a deadline.

Thank you for the help,

Mark LaPierre

[Nickie Fønshauge]

Is it defragmented?

How many instruments can you play from the problem drive before they start to p & c?

How fast is it (RPM/seek time)?

Internal/external?

PATA/SATA/eSATA/USB/Firewire?

[dvincent]

I've had this happen to me several times when adding libraries to my drives. I've found it to be one of three things for me.

1. File Fragmentation. Defrag the drive with software or move to another drive and back to the original drive. (I'm on a Mac)

2. HD space inadequate. I try to minimum 25% empty space on each drive, more if possible. Looks like you checked this out already.

3. Too many instruments with lots of layers. MOD controlled dynamics work the HDs harder even though "only one note" is playing. They add up quickly.

Good luck!

[Mark LaPierre]

Yes it is defragmented. 7200rpm. Internal ide drive. NO NOTES CAN PLAY WITHOUT POPPING. None whatsoever. Totally freaking me out. The drive is only a year old, so I guess I'll call Seagate today and see if they have anything to say. Any other thoughts?


Thank you.

Mark

[Nickie Fønshauge]

Have you tried exchanging the drive's IDE cable? I remember something like this once came up. I seem to remember it was due to a faulty/wrong IDE cable.

Use an 80 conductor IDE cable.

[cmdratz]

Use a S.M.A.R.T tool to analyze the drive(s) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T). One can find some free drive analysis tools wich support it at http://www.tucows.com. Assure that the critical categories are of acceptable status. Poor performance in any of those categories can be grounds for RMAing a drive for a replacement.

[Mark LaPierre]

So I've replaced the IDE cable- no dice. I'm now using Seagate's tool to analyze the disk itself. So now I get to suffer for 4 hours while I wait for it to tell me something! I'll let you know what this is when I get it solved. Meanwhile, if anyone else has more clues- please chime in!

Thank you.

Mark

[Nickie Fønshauge]

Meanwhile, if anyone else has more clues- please chime in!
None, except make sure the BIOS is set to the correct DMA Mode (UDMA5).

[Mark LaPierre]

Closer and closer it seems. My Tranfer mode for the hard drive that is unhappy is PIO right now. I will unistall it and reboot and see if it bumps it back to DMA 5.

More in a bit!

Mark

[cmdratz]

Seatools to my knowledge does not offer S.M.A.R.T information; I Highly recommend using a tool that does. As you observe, if your your drive throughput was choked by the transfer mode, that could be the simple cause for the problem.

[Mark LaPierre]

First of all- thanks to everyone for chiming in to help.
Problem is solved!

Nickie- you are the best. This is the second time you've saved me. It turns out the if Windows XP detects any problems with your drivee (and there would have been, because I had a 40 IDE cable, not 80 at first) then it will dump the drives back to PIO. So the answer is uninstall, and reboot, and it now works perfectly. Thank you so much.

Mark