Quick Sign In:  

Forum: General Discussion

Topic: External HDD

This topic is old and might contain outdated or incorrect information.

Has anyone else noticed when using an external HDD that there is slight lock up for a few seconds when loading a track onto one of the decks? Normally when playing I find that this isnt too much of a major problem, but I've found it significantly increases the time it takes to analyse an album.

Anyone know of any ways to speed this up? It doesn't affect the output of the music, just affects useability of the program for a few seconds. Anyone else noticed this? I dont think its a problem with VDJ, but rather with the transfere rate between my laptop and the external HDD

Nebula
 
Posted Fri 16 Mar 07 @ 2:51 pm
it depends on the rpm of your harddrive the faster it spins the faster the files load
 
yeah thought it might be something along those lines. thanks skyfxl :o)
 
I'm just in the middle of setting up external hard drive for Video gigs. My research I found you can get external HDs with Serial ATA connection, and a card to match for your laptop/pc. This would give you the fastest throughput speed.
 
 
Another thing that you have to keep in mind is that the more data you have stored in the HDD, the slower it gets, or at least, that's what I've noticed, for example, I have a 250 Gb IOMEGA External HDD and when I had about 75 Gb. the speed was awesone, but now that I have over 200 Gb, the HDD has become slower and the songs take a bit more to load than before, not to the point of the Software to freeze, but it does get slower.

 
Yeh Man, I have the same problem! I've had VDJ actually freeze on me loading songs from the external drive! But even if it doesnt completely freeze it still scares the shit outta me if I'm working in a club or doing a party or something!! People DO NOT take kindly to music stopping all of a sudden!! Especially the people paying you!!!
 
I never had a problem. I have a 250g hd using 2.0usb and it's a slower hdd.
 
I've got a 1/2 teraByte job, and it really slows down on video files and freezes sometimes on a top of the line shuttle!
 
The more data you store, the more fragmented the data gets. People who are having slow load times should defrag their driver. You will see a difference in your load times.
 
yeah, never really thought about a defrag for some reason :os lol ah well will give it a try :o) thanks guys
 
Pardon my typo above. I meant defragment your *drives*.
 
Try using Firewire as opposed to USB 2.0, I experience a vast difference in performace since USB is controlled via software, Firewire is more hardware based control. I have a external that has both connections, and the Firewire is much faster to load songs, and no freezing in VDJ.
 
thanks djbeware, will look into that. :o)
 
With HDDs
Speed is important! 7200 is the only way to go if you are using VOBs,
USB 2.0 is good, Fire Wire is better.
Large external HDDs need to have a fast seek time and a high buffer size helps too.

Segate has a great 750gb, 7200rpm, 16mb buffer with a 5 year Warrantee for around $400.
it has a USB 2.0 & Fire Wire conection also has a Fire Wire connection so you can chain several drives together and only need 1 Fire Wire input on your computer.

I am using 2 of these drives linked and it's running smooth, but I also have a Kick A$$ computer to support it.
 


(Old topics and forums are automatically closed)