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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: My WD Passport Ultra is not well. But, a silver lining......
Sadly, I have to report I am now having lots of error issues with my external WD hard drive.

I have a 2tb WD Passport Ultra hard drive which was 11 years old in September! Yes it's old but has not been any problem until this last 2 weeks. I also have a 2tb WD Passport (not Ultra) that is around 7/8 years old and has only been used as a weekly clone of the Ultra.

The issue I'm having is unmounting from the computer. For years I have been very careful to count to 30 seconds after the icon disappears from the desktop before unplugging. When I plug it back in the Ultra does not mount and just sits there flashing it's activity light. Apple's disk utilities cannot 'see' it to try and repair with the first aid facility because it is not mounted.

I found an article on the internet regarding SD Cards requiring repair in macOS using this command in Terminal;

sudo pkill -f fsc

I fiddled about with it and found my Ultra would mount again. However, after using it then unmounting the drive after 30 seconds, trying to reconnect I would get the same errors occurring. I also found loads of my playlists had lost contact with the music file, I spent hours repairing them. So, I needed something more reliable. I decided to swap the drives and copy the databases from the Ultra to the newer Passport and make that the regular gigging drive. After this process I noticed that there was considerably more space after getting rid of some dead weight and found I had (800 gb) available. I had thought about an SSD but would have needed a 4tb SSD which is way beyond my budget, but, now I could get a 2tb SSD with plenty of spare room.

It was a lucky streak that this week Amazon Prime Customers had discount promotions on Tuesday and Wednesday and I found that a 2tb Crucial X9 SSD was available for £95!!! Yay, result. So, I am now in the process of copying my databases to the X9 SSD and looking forward to using it with VirtualDJ. Can’t believe the small size of this thing!!!
 
Posted Thu 12 Oct 23 @ 2:02 am
With Carbon Copy Cloner I copied over 1.24 gb from the WD Passport to the Crucial X9 in 4 hours last night. The Crucial X9 has a 5 year warranty and was pre-formatted ExFat to be able to use on PC or macOS.

The plan now is the WD Ultra that keeps showing errors will be kept at home as the last defence, the good WD Passport will be carried in my gig bag as backup and the Crucial X9 will be the main gigging storage drive. I had a tinker about with VDJ loading tunes last night, the X9 is quick! 😳 Looking forward to a happy partnership with it. 😊 Just need some gigs now, nothing lined up atm. 🤷‍♂️

Systems Specs;

Main System
M1 MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2022), Apple Silicon M1 Pro, 16gb, 500 gb SSD, macOS Sonoma 14.0, VirtualDJ Early Access v2023-m b7692.

External 2tb Crucial X9 SSD formatted ExFat containing 50k Music & Video databases.

Controller - Numark Mixstream Pro Go, +engine dj 3.2.0
 
Posted Thu 12 Oct 23 @ 8:27 am
I saw the Samsung T7 2tb was on Prime sale for £80 or something like that which is a great deal. I got the 1tb one a few months ago and it's great.

Serioulsly nobody should be using mechanical drives these days for backup as they are generally pretty unreliable.
 
Posted Thu 12 Oct 23 @ 8:38 am
Mechanical drives unreliable? Mine has lasted 11 years before it started getting errors over the last few weeks. My other WD is around 7/8 years old and is still running perfectly.

I've been holding back on an SSD due to their price when they first came to market and my WD drives were working fine anyway. My WD that has just failed was £99 11 years ago and my 7/8 year old WD was around £75, I think I've had my moneys worth. 🤣 This Crucial X9 was £95 in the Prime sale, but before the sale it was £109. It is the right time to purchase.😊

I also picked up an HP Deskjet wireless printer/scanner for £30 in the sale, £52 outside the sale.😊
 
Posted Thu 12 Oct 23 @ 12:38 pm
Pretty sure you've just been really lucky Les :)

I always had a backup of the backup of the backup.

Don't bother now with the reliability of SSD drives.
 
Posted Thu 12 Oct 23 @ 12:40 pm
Mechanical drives tend to be unreliable for how most of us use them.
I mean, mechanical drives hate vibrations. And most booths are full of vibrations (e.g. from subs)

I had several mechanical "DJ" drives fail on me despite taking measures against vibrations.
I had not a single mechanical drive "fail" on me out of the blue at an office environment.
In fact I still have a lot of old mechanical drives around that I retired because I just upgraded them for more storage or better speed after several years of work.

The only other environment that mechanical drives are prune to failure, are NAS systems / RAID configurations.
But on NAS/RAID you can afford to loose one drive and replace it without loosing your data.

So, personally I always suggest DJs to upgrade to SSD. Not for speed. But for reliability. After all, an external (or secondary) SSD that just holds media files, is not going to get constant writes anywhere close to what an OS SSD would. This means that it's life expectancy is way beyond it's usage expectancy :P

PS: After 8 years, 2 months ago I had my first SSD failure. It was a Samsung 840 PRO SSD that was used as an OS drive on a computer that runs 24/7/365
It didn't fail because of write cycles, but from a nasty power surge. Even then, 8 years of everyday usage from a SSD that was produced 8/9 years ago (when SSD technology was relatively new), is way more than acceptable for me!
 
Posted Thu 12 Oct 23 @ 1:03 pm
I have a few used hard drives (and computers) lying about;

60gb - My 1st external HD a Samsung Firelite - 21 years old and now only used for my accounts on my Dell Inspiron 6000 (retired DJ laptop)
160gb - Freecom ToughDrive - Still works but unreliable due to a dodgy USB connection.
500gb - Maxtor OneTouch 500gb (720 spin speed, mains power only & stands upright not good for gigging) Still works fine & is storage for lots of video & music projects.
1tb - Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1tb (current Time Machine used weekly)
2tb - WD Passport Ultra 2tb 11 years old and has become unreliable
2tb - WD Passport 2tb database backup and working fine (around 7/8 years old)

2tb - and finally Crucial X9 portable SSD 2tb my new main database drive

All these external drives started out as music database drives for DJing, most have been repurposed. Only the Freecom ToughDrive and now the WD Passport Ultra have become unreliable, all the rest are still working fine and mostly taken out of DJing service due to fast growing Music & Video Databases.

Should I open a museum for ex computer equipment?
I’ve got a few old computers as well going back to my Atari 1040 STe & Pentium 60. 🤣 🤣 🤣
 
Posted Fri 13 Oct 23 @ 9:10 am
djles.co.uk wrote :
Should I open a museum for ex computer equipment?
I’ve got a few old computers as well going back to my Atari 1040 STe & Pentium 60. 🤣 🤣 🤣

You actually made me laugh..!!


and then thought.. I have not seen requesting, VDJ to run on an Atari system.. yet !
 
Posted Fri 13 Oct 23 @ 9:24 am
IIDEEJAYII wrote :

You actually made me laugh..!!


and then thought.. I have not seen requesting, VDJ to run on an Atari system.. yet !



Ha ha ha, likewise. They're out there.........🙄
 
Posted Fri 13 Oct 23 @ 9:28 am
Ah, the legendary Atari ST - my first computer.

I bought it to run a sequencer (Steinberg Twelve and later Pro 24) as it had built in MIDI sockets, but soon realised all the other things a computer could do...

They were to be found in recording studios across the land for years, with the SM124 monitor. That thing was so crisp and clear.

Later upgraded to an Atari Falcon so I could run Cubase Audio (8 tracks of digital audio in 1993).
 
Posted Sat 14 Oct 23 @ 3:46 pm
Yep, last time I checked it still worked (about 10-15 years ago ha ha ha). I have a 100mb hard drive for it too, wow!!! I bought it in 1990 along with Steinberg's Pro 24 then on to Cubase. I wrote a New Age instrumental album for the Venture Label a subsidiary of Virgin Records from 1990-94 with it. It was the MIDI in/out that attracted musicians to it. Still have all the synths, effect modules, etc.

This is off the album I did with the Atari and Cubase (or was it Pro24, can't remember);
Twilight
 
Posted Sat 14 Oct 23 @ 4:05 pm
After all the above issues I've had over the last few weeks with my external WD Passport hard drives, it turns out that there is nothing wrong with them, it was a bug in macOS Sonoma 14.0 😳



Although my drives are not encrypted, after updating to macOS Sonoma 14.1 all 3 drives are now working as they should. Taking a positive from it all, I now have a Crucial X9 Pro SSD as my main storage. The WD Passport drives will be backups.😊
 
Posted Sun 29 Oct 23 @ 12:12 am
As I have reported in another thread;

I have been having a bit of a nightmare with my trusted WD Passport HDs, they were getting corrupted everytime I dis-connected them from Sonoma. I then bought a 2tb Crucial X9 SSD external drive which came pre-formatted for ExFat so interchangeable between macOS & Windows. I still had problems of corruption and being unable to 'mount' the SSD. Eventually I had to 'bite the bullet' and reformatted the SSD to Apple's APFS filing system. The SSD is more responsive and much faster with Apples native formatting and it mounts instantly.

So, it appears that Sonoma works much better with external drives formatted to Apple's native APFS.😊
 
Posted Fri 03 Nov 23 @ 1:19 am
TBH. I never liked or trusted ExFAT. For many, many reasons.
Personally I format all my drives to NTFS. On my MAC I have installed Paragon NTFS in order to be able to write to NTFS drives.
Never had an issue with this setup.

PS: I have ONE SSD that I did format as APFS, as it's only connected to the MAC, so it made sense.
All others as I said, NTFS
 
Posted Fri 03 Nov 23 @ 1:38 am
Yes, my 2 previous Macs, which I still have, have got the Paragon plugin and never had a problem. When I got this M1 Mac last year I decided re-format my WD Passport drives to ExFat to avoid getting the Paragon plugin again. I’ve had no experience with ExFat and had no reason to not trust it. They were fine with Ventura it was after upgrading to Sonoma when all my troubles started. Hopefully everything should be OK now. My 2018 Mac has Ventura on it and is Boot Camped with Windows 10, so, I’ll be keeping it around, the WD Passport drives can be used on there.
 
Posted Fri 03 Nov 23 @ 2:28 am