music software ques. "hard drive too slow"

matamaticmatamatic 488 Posts
edited February 2008 in Strut Central
Just a quick inquiry... I tried to playback a session in my software and I got a message saying that my hard drive may be "fragmented or too slow to playback". So if I transfer that session to an external usb drive that's faster(7200 rpm) and not almost full will that make a difference?

  Comments


  • hemolhemol 2,578 Posts
    I've never experienced that problem, but it should fix it based on what you described.

  • twoplytwoply Only Built 4 Manzanita Links 2,914 Posts
    Or you could try defragmenting your drive. Download Diskeeper Lite from Majorgeeks.com here:

    http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207


    I use it to defrag my drive at least once a week.

  • bthavbthav 1,538 Posts
    7200 is standard for drive dedicated to music work... you should be fine now.

    [technerd]FYI: its best to keep your project on a drive seperate from you system disk especially if you are recording. Reading and Writing on a the same disk is pretty intensive.[/technerd]

  • In general it's a bad idea to keep active session files on an external drive. If you have more than one device on the USB bus you'll be competing for bandwidth. And even if the external drive is 7200RPM, the data still has to travel through the comparatively slow USB connection. The SATA and SCSI connections that internal drives use are several times faster than USB 2.0.

    That said, I keep session files on an external firewire drive that shares a bus with my audio interface, and it works fine for my projects. Just depends on how much data you have flying around.
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