Help!! hdd problems

[brian_johnstone]

Hi guys, im pulling my hair out here and dont know what to do...

my external hdd started acting up a few months ago, disconnecting and reconnecting itself (no it wasnt pulling the usb out all on its own ) ant then working fine for a few days once unplugged and plugged back in.

however i was playing out one night and my laptop froze up, luckily i had my ipod plugged into the mixer and quickly hit play to give myself time to sort it out, i noticed that the hdd enclosure was really hot to the touch, so instead of carrying on with it i unplugged and continued with a basic set that i had backed up on a dongle.

I thought that it may just have been a problem with the enclosure so the next day i bought a new one and all was good until last night, my computer popped up saying "a usb device has malfunctioned" i unplug and reconnect and all is good for about an hour.

has anyone had any experience with this?? i have managed to get about 90gb of music off it to use tonight! and i did a performance scan on the drive itself and it says that its working at 99%

im just a bit confused as to what to do?

cheers, brian.

[BradCee]

sounds like it's maybe spinning too quick/long/often? you on mac or windows?

[brian_johnstone]

windows mate, if its any help its a western digitial caviar green 1tb, original problems started in the enclosure it was shipped in, then swapped to a new cheapo enclosure, could it be taht its getting too hot, thought of trying this: http://www.google.co.uk/products/cat...CIwBEPMCMAU4Cg but dont want to if the hdd itself is buggered

[MattM]

whatever you do make sure you backup all your data immediately. It could fail at some point soon, or it couldn't. Never know.

[ElectricPulse]

I've had an issue like this come up due to a faulty USB cable. Try using a different one for the external drive and see if that helps.

[BradCee]

hmmm.. think it's western digital that's the iffy company to get from... not most reliable etc...
if you've put it in a new enclosure, that might be part of the problem now.

which windows version? if you go into the power options and look for the 'change settings' option, in the advanced section there is a part turning hdd's off after so many mins.

might worth setting that to something low like 5 mins, basically then if it's not reading anything at that point it should stop/slow the disk, might help.
i think the tracks get cached after loading, so in theory; load > cache > stop spinning, and if you've loaded the next track quite soon after mixing into previous, you should have getting on for 10 mins of downtime on disk

i know 'turn off disk' applies to externals in 7, and i think vista. beyond that not sure... but worth a shot.

[discothan]

External drives enclosures or drives themselves tend to have issues with the USB cords or where the connectors are on the device and/or laptop.


always important to backup your 'frequently used' music onto flash drives.
do it on multiple flash devices if you can.

the 8GB and 16GB devices are CHEAP now a days.


More and more I would recommend people to move off of mechanical external drives since they tend to break with a lot of use. They are good for storage, but for djing a set, you could just copy what you need on a flash drive and go! You don't need all 2TB of music for a night of djing.

[brian_johnstone]

i managed to got some of the data off before it crashed again, but did try changing the usb and same issue, if i copy all of the data to a new hdd will all of my cue points, loops, track loads etc.. still be there??

[brian_johnstone]

@ discothan: would it maybe be wise to have different flash drive for different genres etc.. ideally id like a ssd but theyre not exactly in my budget lol.

[BradCee]

i managed to got some of the data off before it crashed again, but did try changing the usb and same issue, if i copy all of the data to a new hdd will all of my cue points, loops, track loads etc.. still be there??

yeah, but best to pull the collection.nml file to as that holds all the info traktor needs to keep the collection intact.