Music directly from external hard drive?
Using VDJ directly from an external hard-drive, I’ve found to be extremelly unreliable! And either skips or crashes. But use music on the internal HD an it’s fine.
How do people find this with Traktor?
Sounds like you might have a power issue to me. I have run both vdj and traktor, and I have always mixed straight off of the external HDD. My HDD came with a USB chord that had 2 male ends, one for power, one for backup power. If I had both plugged, no issues. But if I had only 1 end plugged in, or a regular usb chord, SOMETIMES I had issues. Did your HDD have a chord like this?
No, it didn’t have a separate power supply lead.
However, I was running it to a desktop :-/ so I wouldn’t have thought it mattered.
I run to a desktop too. Maybe try a new USB chord. They can only pass so much information through them before issues start popping up. Most people don’t know that, I didn’t until I started working where I do. The software load department switches out USB chords every other day, because they start getting errors after the second day due to the load on the chord.
Ahhhhh, i did not have a clue about that!
I’ll give that ago and see how it runs.
The main reason I need to know is that we are DJ’ing an 18th next saturday and we are going to use my MPB instead of the Desktop that has all our music on it (12,000 songs (top40, old dads dancing albums for weddings 
you know the score). So we need this to be reliable.
Cheers
Take a thumb drive if you can then. Or, put your tunes on the MBP. You won’t have to worry then, and its one less thing to carry 
I use a powered hhd and have never had issues like that. That being said, I’m much more comfortable with all the tunes I need on my laptop.
yeh. i use a powered usb external drive as well, no issues w/ traktor.
I would never DJ off a hard drive that wasn’t powered.
Sorted then.
I’ll go invest in a 2Tb Western Digital powered HDD tomorrow then
Thanks for the advice
I have been happily working from an external HDD for several years.
Dont use the dual usb lead but do make sure I have good quality leads.
Personally I wouldn’t trust an external. Just adding another thing to the equation for something to go wrong.
Upgrade the internal HD size imo 
or get a second one installed instead of the CD drive.
For collection size and internal harddrive size limitations, I’ve always used an external powered one, no real problem whatsoever. One thing you may want is to use a faster port such as eSata, USB3, FireWire.
Yeah this is the kind of gizmo I would like to find for mine, but there’s nothing available as of now.
Anyone know of any decent priced thunderbolt externals for MB’s?
Your computer is prolly so overloaded with having to pull songs from the external hd when coupled with VDJ or whatever else you’re running. I have my external hd with all my songs and only the good, playable ones on my computer.
Dude get a FireWire external drive if you have to use external.
Ive used a LaCie FW (unpowered) with Traktor with zero issues.
Any links Karlos?
Exact one that i have. Totally bombproof, small footprint and genuinely bounces if you drop it. Dropped my from 4 feet and it was fine.
Firewire 400 and 800 and ive used both with no issues. I even ran Traktor 3 off this drive on an underspec iBook G4.
Native Instruments once recommended these on their website.
They arent cheap but you get what you pay for i think.
One word: Thunderbolt.