Not the most exciting of questions, but im in the process of making the switch from vinyl to scratch pro running off my macbook, im looking to buy a new portable harddrive to hold all my music that has firewire 400 because it definitely seems for continually streaming data FW is most reliable and consistently faster,
my current thought is a western digital ‘my passport studio’
mainly because ive had a ‘my passport’ with USB for a while an put it through hell and it still works fine,
so has anyone got any suggestions?
does anyone know if this is a decent drive?
Please read the forum rules before posting. I’m moving this to the General Discussion forum. Also, please use the search function as this has been discussed already.
Word of warning. Ive got WD in my laptops and they are great but ive read issues with the external ones that they “spin down” quite a lot which causes problems and device management is difficult with them.
Like i say this something ive read, its not fact or even an opinion, just something worth looking into.
Just sayin’, ive got no complaints with my internal WD hard drives.
I was about to post on this but you beat me to it. It is a fact. So, the current literature on WD’s site says that ALL their external drives have the “spin down” feature built into the drive firmware, and that this can not be modified. The drive will spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity. WD external drives also do not respect the settings made in the energy saver control panel. Obviously this is not the best news for anyone doing time critical work like live audio.
Fortunately, there are solutions! I’m not very familiar with the Windows approach, though I’ve seen stuff out there on how to deal with it. For Mac, there are scripts you can implement that “touch” the drive at a specified interval to effectively prevent it form ever spinning down. For the less scripting-minded of us, a very cool someone has put together the necessary components into an applet with a GUI. I have one on my internal drive to prevent the spin down if the external HD is attached, and another on the external drive itself to prevent spin down if used as a startup drive.
I recommend setting up your WD drive as a bootable backup with all your music files and audio programs, along with this applet, because the benefit is that in the event of a catastrophic drive failure, you can run your set (and OS) off your external alone, and never be worried about it spinning down. Not to mention you can restore your entire system in a pinch. It’s awesome peace of mind, and you don’t have to carry around a bunch of cds.
Another word on Macs and using the WD externals as a bootable backup with Firewire: It is also not officially supported. The workaround is to leave the drive unplugged, restart your mac, and hold down the option key. This allows you to select the startup disk (this doesn’t work for a firewire connection via system prefs/startup disk - you can select the external, but it won’t actually start up using this drive). Once you see you main drive, plug in the firewire connection, and the external becomes available as a boot drive.
ok well currently i have another portable HD form LaCie which has a more basic version of a bootable backup with the current WD ‘passport’ serving as my main track storage and then running Traktor off the laptop, so the plan was to just use this new WD one as my main music storage device for playing out with, will definitely look into the scripts though because it does sound like some the pauses in load time are due to the drive spinning down.
i still feel confidant in the drive and especially with the newly gained control from the applet, so think im going to go for it!
Another option is for an internal hard drive and an enclosure. I love these because of the modularity of it. I want a bigger hard drive? Just swap it out and swap in a new one.
may sound stupid but, im presuming the WD passport drives are intentionally coded to spin down, but do you think theres any possbility that they would become more unstable if kept spinning than a drive that did acknowledge energy saver settings? or is this something thats been coded purely to attempt to prolong the life of their products?
and DvlsAdvct this is true, but wouldn’t the enclosure need an external power supply?
if you’ve got the money i suggest G Raid drives, i use one Mini for my music and another for my video. They are small, solid, and can take some beating. Plus the option of firewire 800 allows for insanely fast data transfers that i’ve yet to find on a better HD for macbook/pro. my harddrive has never let me down.
the price is a little high but well worth the money.
Supposedly they do this to prolong drive life, though there’s some debate as to whether or not the drive always spinning up and down is more abuse than spinning constantly. I don’t know, I just use the external for backup, so I’m not too worried about it. As for stability; the spin-down feature is actually in the drive’s firmware, and by using the applet, you aren’t actually messing with that, you are just physically accessing a file on the drive before the 10 minute mark, to keep things spinning. I haven’t heard that the firmware code makes WD drives unstable with regards to mac energy saver settings.
I don’t know the exact specifics, but in layman’s terms you can think of your HD as a spinning platter. To access info on it, the platter physically spins like a CD. Spin up refers to when the platter begins spinning from not spinning. Spin down refers to when it stops spinning after spinning.
The whole issue with WD HDs is that they are programmed to spin down (stop spinning) if no data has been accessed in about 10 minutes. This is thought to promote the life of the HD as spinning down results in less wear and tear on the HD. The downside is, the next time you want to access data on the HD, it will have to spin up again. Instead, it would be ideal for the HD to always be spinning.
