Inconsistent playback on a big external drive

I recently consolidated my iTunes songs onto one hard-drive; running 7.0.1 on a late model pre-intel 1,25 ghz, 1gb RAM MacMini. It's a lot of material, over 400 gb. When I used to have the songs split over two roughly equal sized drives, one drive would play fine and the songs on the other drive would not: they would pause every twenty seconds or so. This prompted me to consolidate everything onto one disk, a Firewire WD 500gb myBook, 7200 rpm.
However, now the problem occurs regardless of what song I play. twenty seconds, pause for a ferw seconds, another twenty seconds...just trying to figure out if the problem is with the RAM, with the fact that the drive is so full, whether it's becasue it's MS-DOS formatted, or what. Or are there any speed tweaks I can use in iTunes or the OS?
Help, this is really annoying!

Looking at the specs. of your system, I wouldn't expect this to be a problem.
I had my library on an external for some time and never experienced these kind of problems. I didn't have such a huge library though.
If you say the same problem occurred with one of the drives you previously used, that makes me think it could be a transfer speed problem.
How long does it take to copy a GB of files from the 'My Book' to your internal HD?
One large file should transfer in about 1 minute, a bunch of small files will take some more time.
Did you connect it via USB or FireWire? Although USB 2 has a higher theoretical transfer speed, FireWire usually is faster and more reliable.
M

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Time Machine and partition on external drive

Planning to buy a big external drive, but, is it possible to partition the external drive and make TM work on one ?

Absolutely, in fact it is recommended to give TM its own partition. Use the first partition of the drive (that's the one that ends up at the top of the list in Disk Utility).
Make sure the partition is double, if not three times, the size of what you will be backing up.
Note that you have the option (Sys Prefs-TM-Options) to exclude drives and folders from backups. This may save a lot of space and is useful for the applications folder (as you likely have that stuff on CD/DVD), for music (if you have it on CDs), the downloads folder etc; see [this page|http://www.ryanblock.com/2008/05/good-folders-to-exclude-from-time-machine -backups] for more ideas on what to exclude so as not to backup unnecessary stuff. Also, if you work with scratch disks (in Photoshop or video applications, for instance), exclude them as well as that's just unnecessary.
/p

External Drive = Dropped Frames in Playback

Hi there Al--
Here's the gear I have...and the problem I'm NOW having.
Gear:
PowerBook G4 with OS X 10.3.9 and 45GB disk space
768 RAM
LaCie D2 160GB Harddrive
Panasonic MiniDV cam and Sony PD 150
Final Cut Express HD
Problem: I can capture to my internal HD fine, and playback sequences on projects located on my internal HD fine. BUT I cannot capture to my external Lacie drive using either the Panasonic MiniDV cam or Sony PD 150 cam. That's not such a big deal, as I can capture to the internal hard drive and transfer the captured footage to the lacie external drive--however Final Cut won't let me do anything from the external HD. Whenever I try to view footage on a project from the external drive I get a "dropped frame" message from Final Cut (I can't even just play an individual quicktime file from the external drive). I'm a bit baffled...as the lacie drive i'm told is the "pro" drive for editing with final cut.
Thoughts?

That's great news !
Regarding the format - I'll admit that I stand by Will Rodgers' advice (If it ain't broke, don't fix it) ... if things are working fine now you probably don't have to worry about the format ... but you might want to check it just to know what it is (I suspect it's Mac OS Extended, anyway)
cheers !

Are the FC Events and capture scratch the same thing? Also, how big of an external drive do you need if you plan on making lots of 3-5 min movies?

Are the FCP Events Folder and the capture scratch the same thing? If not, what is the difference?
I've set the events folder and the projects folder to an external drive (400 GB) but it's filling up quickly. What are appropriate external drive sizes?

FCP X Events folders are the same as the old FCE/FCP Capture Scratch folders.
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I have a friend who finds the 80GB drive on his 2004 iMac more than sufficient!
Other people can use hundreds of gigabytes a day.
So it all sepends on your particular usage and the only answer is get one as big as you can.
The reason FCP X fills up HDs so quickly is because it usually converts footage to ProRes 422 which uses about 50GB per hour of video.
Whenever you render the footage it is done in ProRes 422 so the drive space is incredibly rapidly eaten away.

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I have completed a backup onto an external drive using Elements 12 on my PC running Windows XP. I am now trying to restore this backup onto my new Mac using another external drive as the destination as the catalog is too big to fit onto the Mac internal HD. All seems OK until I click the restore button then I get an error message "The Disc Drive in Mac HD does not contain a valid backup" The file names on the backup drive are visible on the Mac so I presume this backup must be valid so why is there a reference to the Mac HD?

System Preferences - Sharing. If you cannot find System Preferences, then use Command - Spacebar and type System Preference and when you see it in Spotlight (uper right) hit return.

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Thanks guys. I did what you said and am about to choose option #4. I cannot really back up this drive before starting rebuild as I don't have a backup of this library exactly, but it is a copy of my entire iLibrary off my old laptop, which I copied over on Nov 20th, so I should have a complete copy of this Library though 11/20 date on my old laptop. I will just potentially lose any photos I've taken and downloaded to external drive since then (luckily not many or any since I haven't downloaded my SLR camera since Dec 5th, so all pics are still on my camera). One last question...is it worth doing the rebuild, or would be be safer (long term...this external library on this drive will be my primary source of ALL my 2008-2014 photos) to just copy over my original library again from my old laptop to this drive?
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THe disk utility cannot repair these problems.
Now I'm at the 3rd drive getting corrupt in the last week.
Is Apple coming out with an update to resolve these issues?
In the meanwhile I saw this page on the Seagate web sites.
https://seagate.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/seagate.cfg/php/enduser/popupadp.php?p_sid=dLEqXr6j&p_lva=&p_li=&p_faqid=5005&p_created=1195077097&psp=
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You can get dozens of "not me" or "yes" opinions, but you might want to look at reader feedback reports first on MacFixit (subscription required after 3 days) or MacIntouch, or handy olde Google.
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By 3rd drive, I assume same case? rather than disk drive, or same make model in each case?
For the record, years of using Oxford based and no issues, I avoid all the name brand cases in favor of the 'build it yourself' or OWC FireWire/USB Mercury (not that there aren't a few reports of problems, but I think much less).
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http://www.macintouch.com - hard drives a good start.

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I'm starting with a blank slate and zero knowledge.
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I bought FCP X from the App Store and put it on my internal drive along with Motion and Compressor..
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This is all new to me, Thanks

Mac Book Pro - SATA vs FW800 external drives

I am pruchasing a MBP this week for road editing and I have a few storage questions for those in the know.
In the past I have always blindly trusted a single external FW drive to capture, store and edit my projects. Since these jobs would be 5-10 days straight work and then playback at the end, there is little time for backup during a project. You hardly have enough time to sleep. Thankfully, I have never experience a hard drive failure and have always completed the dedline. But, I have collieges that have run into nightmare harware failure and lost everything one night before playback. So, with the cost of external drives so cheap right now there are several options to explore for my new road system so that I never experience this, EVER.
Which one is best method for FCP editing in DVNTSC, DVCAM or HDV for reliabily and mirrorer backup during a quick, but always important job on-location job?
1. Just continue to buy multiple individual external FW800 or 400 drives and mirror them using software, like chronosync ...This is what I do now and this works for nightly backups in house, but what about for jobs that last for days and store 100's of gigs of video? There is no time for this daily backup...
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And... which drives are better over all for this FW 800 or SATA drives? I even saw some drives with quad interface... that's cool.
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Keep in mind a RAID 1 only protects you from hardware failure of one of the drives. It does not protect you if the hardware raid/chip set decides to take a vacation. Also, if FCP corrupts a file, it is written as corrupt to both drives.
I'm a big fan of separate but equal. Two drives. One goes to the site, the other remains at the hotel. At night, you back up the site disk to the the hotel disk. If something happens to the computer and the disk at the site the next day, you at least have the material back at the hotel.
eggs. baskets. that sort of thing.
good luck.
x

Can No Longer Burn To External Drive

About two years ago my then six-year-old 800 mhz flat panel iMac's SuperDrive started acting erratic. Rather than replace the internal drive I purchased an external LaCie firewire drive. I was able to both read and write from this drive.
I am not positive, but I believe that I subsequently upgraded to OSX 10.4.11. And not too long ago I had no trouble burning a music CD from an iTunes playlist in the LaCie drive. In any case, the other day I tried to burn a simple data DVD of some photos to a DVD in the LaCie drive. I have been completely unable to burn a disc. I've tried burning from the finder, burning via Backup, and burning via Toast. All have failed.
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Blank media inserted in the LaCie drive takes a long time to appear on desktop, and appears as a folder with a "burn" emblem on it, not as a disc. I've tried swapping Firewire cables but that hasn't made any difference.
The internal SuperDrive is completely dead by now. If I insert a disc into the internal drive there is no startup noise, no whirring, etc. Eventually the machine just spits out the disc.
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Daniel,
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Your desktop icon struck me. I fiddled with 'System Preferences', but couldn't reproduce it. (My choice for blank media is 'Disk Utility.) Normally, only mounted devices appear on the desktop: this means a file system compatible with the Mac's was recognized (after a lot of handshaking) and attached to it. Hence you can drag an object from the drive to the Desktop.
The other thing that struck me was the variety of errors, rather than one. This tends to support BDAqua's suggestion of power problems. I'd check the cable and its plugs carefully. If yor Superdrive reported a variety of errors as well, I'd suggest a problem with your iMac.
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When a optical drive dies a natural death (all is ephemeral), the DVD lasers get knocked out of alignment or burn out first. CD continues working.
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How big a drive for 3 hours of video encoded with animation codec?

Sorry if this seems a strange question - but I've run out of fingers and toes to count on.
I'm planning a video project that will have approx three hours of selected video to work with. Will be cut down to approx 90 minutes.
The video will be include a lot of chroma keying and also be graphic heavy. Many alpha channels.
I have determined the best work method is to upload the video using the Apple Animation codec. I am reliably informed that said Animation codec is a hungry bugger and eats up drive space.
Can anyone with more toes and fingers than me give me a ballpark for how big an external drive I should budget for this?
So to recap that's a a minimum of three hours of video encoded using the Apple Animation codec plus all the graphics, audio and rendering.
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The Animation codec isn't an editing codec. You'll have a DICKENS of a time trying to work with that. Besides needing VERY fast drives...I'm talking a 4-5 drive RAID with 300+MB/s throughput (Firewire won't cut it...eSATA would be pushing it..thunderbolt? Pushing it)...it'd still stutter on playback. No one edits with that codec. I mean no one. It's a good way to transport media LOSSLESSLY, but when editing...best to use an Editing Codec. As Michael said, ProRes 4444 would be good...even ProRes HQ is good enough quality. I deliver shows to air in that codec.

UPS Energy Saver on MacBook Pro for External Drives

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I have multiple FW drives connected to my MacBook Pro. The MBP is connected to an APC Back-UPS RS 1200. OSX does not make the UPS Energy Saver autoshutdown preferences available on the MBP, the reasoning being that a laptop shouldn't need UPS autoshutdown because it has its own battery which is likely to run for far longer than the UPS would.
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"You are not doing anything on the computer so no files should be writing to the drives."
Big assumption there. With today's notebooks so capable of acting as desktop substitutes, they are often left running unattended to complete demanding tasks overnight or while the user does other things.
To be able to suspend such activities and gracefully power down an external drive or drives in the event of a power outage, the Mac would have to have instructions from each third-party application or process that is running about how to interrupt its activity safely and without jeopardizing the integrity of whatever hard disk directories are in use. Then it would need to unmount the drive(s) and, if they were bus-powered drives, turn off the power to each of them at the port to which it was connected. I bet it would be possible for all app developers to write such instructions into their apps' code, but where's the incentive for them to do so? This isn't a feature that most users would gladly pay extra for, I suspect, and the cost of adding it to apps that don't have it now and testing it for reliability and proper function under all conceivable circumstances would not be trivial.
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Hey everybody!
I'm about to buy an external drive for my mac. I am reasonably capable on a computer, but I've never done formatting or partitioning so I have two questions:
1) I just want to check that I do not need to buy a mac-formatted drive. A little big of googling told me I could do the formatting myself with Disk Utility, just wanted to double check that that was true.
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Hi,
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You won't need different formats for Time Machine backups and storage space partitions. However, given the size of your hard drive, 500 gb for Time Machine may not be enough. You could buy a separate one for Time Machine, budget permitting.
Check the size of your startup disk, and if it is only 250 gb or less, then 500 gb for Time Machine may be OK, for a while. It will soon fill up, but the older backups will be erased.
Regards.

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Thanks John, that was it. To tell the truth, the name Migration Assistant finally came back to me even before I saw your message, but that was pure luck. I was disappointed that searching on my Mac and the Apple support site did not bring up that term. Even having found the tool, the creators had apparently not thought of migrating from the another drive on the same computer. Pretty big oversight to me. Luckily I've been using Time Machine on another external drive and that option was available and worked.
Thanks again because if I had not thought that name and you had not responded, I would be veeeeerrry frustrated.

Inconsistent playback on a big external drive

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