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DJ that might have a problem with HDD

D

djasmooth

macrumors member
Original poster
May 24, 2009
36
0
Hello all,

I posted this on the Serato Scratch Live forum, http://www.serato.com/forum/discussion/391825#new

here it goes:

I just recently put a new Hard Drive in my MacBook Pro 5.1 2.66GHz laptop with 4 Gigs of RAM..

I put in a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 640GB HDD 5400 RPMs from a Seagate 500GB 7200RPM drive.. My laptop runs a lot cooler now, My battery life is better, but sometimes when I select tracks my drive will take a second to load and at first when I would record in SSL and have KueIt open I would get USB dropouts, however that hasn't happened since I've done the Repair Disk option in Disk Utility.

My Read/Write Speeds using the AJA Test System are:
Write: 79.7 MB
Read: 79.8 MB

Is this normal for my computer to take a second to load some tracks? I just want to make sure everything is normal, are there any procedures I should be doing to check if everything is perfect?

Should I look into getting a new Hard Drive? Maybe the Hitachi Travelstar 5K750, get an extra 110 Gigs and also have a more reliable drive?

Also, I should mention I just ordered 8GBs of Ram from MacSales, maybe this will help?

Thanks! Sorry for all the questions!
 
Yea bad move going towards a slower HD... I'm also a DJ on a 5400RPM HD Macbook who uses Traktor and Serato, and although it works good 95% of the time, i do get occasional hiccups when recording a mix for example, which is why i am switching to a SSD drive asap...

also, this is a no-brainer, but have you analyzed all your files in serato before loading them?
 
tjb1, well yeah, I know it's going to be slower but I was wondering if my drive might be defective. Also I see you have the Seagate Momentus XT, how's that holding up for you?

macdud, yeah, true.. i re-analyzed all my files, rescanned all id3 tags, etc.

the SSD drives are too expensive for their capacity. I store all my music in my computer..
 
I need to update my signature, I have a 120gb OWC Mercury SSD as the boot drive and the XT is just the music drive for itunes so that drive is sleeping 99% of the time. When I open iTunes it takes a little bit for the drive to wake up but after that it plays fine and it was close in speed to my SSD before I switched.
 
5400/7200 shouldn't make that big of a difference for seek time, not even a full 1 ms. However, most of the 7200rpm drives also have larger caches onboard which could cause a hiccup if that is missing on the slower drive.
 
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