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Mac-External-Microwave Thread PROBLEMS ugh

Jonny_PaycheckJonny_Paycheck 17,825 Posts
edited June 2009 in Strut Central
2 questions for dudes that play out often:1, My external was working fine last week and up until yesterday. All of a sudden last night, songs started dropping out/skipping for 1-2 seconds at random intervals. New purchased MP3s, vinyl rips, CD imports, didn't matter. Got worse as the night progressed. Now this morning it's happening every 30 seconds or so. I have a WD Mybook 320 on firewire.I'm certain it's something in the hard drive because it continued when I switched to internal. Now at home, I tried running it with no sound - and every time, before the drop, the hard drive makes a "thinking" noise - you know, the kind of noise when it is "working". Then the drop. Then the track comes back on in time. What teh hell is going on here?2, what is the most heavily cosigned external out there? This is the 2nd WD Mybook to die on me, so I'm basically never giving them a dime of my money. Recommendations?Thanks for the input in advance.

  Comments

  • dreskieboogiedreskieboogie 951 Posts
    I never had a problem with WD. I have had the same one with me on all my travels and it has continued to work fine.

    I have heard good things about Glyph but havent tried them yet:

    http://www.glyphtech.com/

    Dress
  • Jonny_PaycheckJonny_Paycheck 17,825 Posts
    Hmm, I seem to recall Phill's HD crash being WD-related... I bought both problem drives at once, on sale from amazon... seems maybe you get what you pay for...
  • keithvanhornkeithvanhorn 3,855 Posts
    make sure you are using the right cable. in my experience, the wd passports only worked well with macs if i was using the firewire/usb combo cable. otherwise, i got a delay every time i loaded a track.
  • Jonny_PaycheckJonny_Paycheck 17,825 Posts
    hmmm, that is interesting. I'm using the f/w cord that came with the drive. Thought about switching it out last night... but didn't.

    A little while ago I unmounted/ejected the hd, rebooted, and the problem seems to have gone away for the moment.

    I rebooted during the gig last night, but didn't unmount the disk... it did not solve the problem.
  • hogginthefogghogginthefogg 6,098 Posts
    J, does your WD drive have a USB option, too? If so, give it a shot. I don't find that firewire is necessarily better than USB for Sir Otto purposes.

    And FWIW, I've used a USB-powered WD Passport several times and it's been fine, but I've heard failure stories about Western Digital AND Lacie (even though both have been good to me). I think Maxtor has a pretty solid rep, too, but nothing's 100 fail proof.
  • Jonny_PaycheckJonny_Paycheck 17,825 Posts
    Yeah, it has a usb option I believe. I'll check into that.
  • prof_rockwellprof_rockwell 2,867 Posts
    I've been using the WD passport USB external with a black macbook for the past year, minimum twice a week with no problems.

    One thing I did discover is how your external drive is formatted can affect performance. My Passport came stock formatted to work with both Mac an PC, and I had long loading times and whatnot. After I formatted it as a Mac OS Journaled drive it has not had a problem since. A cross-platform formatted external can have issues.
  • keithvanhornkeithvanhorn 3,855 Posts
    Yeah, it has a usb option I believe. I'll check into that.

    you can only use a short usb cord with a mac and wd passports. this sounds strange, but it's true.
  • Jonny_PaycheckJonny_Paycheck 17,825 Posts
    Yeah, it has a usb option I believe. I'll check into that.

    you can only use a short usb cord with a mac and wd passports. this sounds strange, but it's true.

    As opposed to firewire?



    Nelson and Ross - passports seem to work a little better than mybooks, which I've read/heard all sorts of problems about.

    But I was absolutely thinking about the formatting, as mine is formatted out the box for PC/Mac.

    Stupid question: Do I have to copy all my data back onto my internal in order to re-format the drive (eg, will it erase everything when I format?)
  • prof_rockwellprof_rockwell 2,867 Posts



    Nelson and Ross - passports seem to work a little better than mybooks, which I've read/heard all sorts of problems about.

    But I was absolutely thinking about the formatting, as mine is formatted out the box for PC/Mac.

    Stupid question: Do I have to copy all my data back onto my internal in order to re-format the drive (eg, will it erase everything when I format?)

    can't comment on the passport vs mybook performance. as for formatting for Mac only, that solved any performance issues I had. I can't remember if I backed up before I reformatted or not, as it was over a year ago now, and I probably was in a hazy shade of kind buds for such tedious work. I probably did though, knowing me, just to be safe. And it's not a bad idea to have that info backed up anyways.


    P.S. - looks like you should back up, the data will remain but directory files get erased

    http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html
  • pcmrpcmr 5,591 Posts
    lacie has been good to me but all the brands mentionned have had horro stories
    i just always buy one up and cross my fingers
  • street_muzikstreet_muzik 3,919 Posts
    I put a 320 gb internal in my MacBook to avoid any problems like this. Lovin' it so far.
  • OptimusLimeOptimusLime 227 Posts
    Whatever you do, don't buy any full size drives, 100% of problems with protable drives here at work (we have over 150 of 'em) has been with fullsize drives.

    The 3.5" ones are a LOT more reliable. The best ones in my eperience are G-drives, from GTech. And yes, the name rocks as well.
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