Hard disk causes DP crash

[kristupes]

I am running all my samples from a Maxtor One Touch external hard disk. My mac has the hardest time sometimes finding the drive even though it‘s new and should be working fine. Then when it does find the drive, I start up DP. Sometimes DP crashes when it starts up and other times it crashes while I‘m running a session, especially if I‘m trying to load a new sample. There seems to be some communication problem between the computer and the drive, and/or between DP and the drive. Any suggestions how to fix this very annoying problem??

Thanks!

[emulatorloo]

even though it‘s new and should be working fine.

Dunno, sounds to me like there is problem with the drive.

However, if it were me, the first thing I would try is reformatting the drive with Apple Disk Utility.

That is assuming that you didn't already do that and are just using it as it came out of the box from Maxtor.

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[kristupes]

I did do that already. And now if I start up disk utility with the drive connected (but not showing up on the desktop), it says "gathering disk information" for an eternity.

[Timeline]

There have been hundreds of complaints for one reason or another regarding hard drive causing crashes. It ends up usually being speed related.

Over the years I simply bought 15k spin SCSI drives and never once had a an HD related crash unless I totally abused the drive with excess VI media and source audio files. I have had to reorganize my four internal drives and move data around to suit the VI's for instance I use Hypersonic on the slowest SATA drive and VSL on the faster 10K SATA drives. 15K Scsi is just incredible always.

Once in a while I'll run DW.

[dosuna11]

Try Diskwarrior.

[Tonio]

Are you getting kernal panics along with DU- SBBOD(spinning beach ball of death)

Could be a sign of the HD on its way out. I assume you allready have the stuff backed up?

T

I did do that already. And now if I start up disk utility with the drive connected (but not showing up on the desktop), it says "gathering disk information" for an eternity.

[kristupes]

No kernal panics. Just the beach ball of death!

[kassonica]

Is your drive USB 2 or firewire?

[emulatorloo]

I did do that already. And now if I start up disk utility with the drive connected (but not showing up on the desktop), it says "gathering disk information" for an eternity.

I think your drive is hosed. . .contact the store or maxtor.

Personally I have had many a maxtor drive fail.

FWIW their customer supt is good and they will replace the drive for you easily if it is under warranty.

Best drives for me have been IBM/Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital -- I will never buy another Maxtor.

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[WSVP]

Every single Maxtor drive I have ever had has failed. Including brand new ones. I did some online research a while back and found an excessive amount of problems with Maxtor.

[emulatorloo]

LOL -- the last of my Maxtor drives failed YESTERDAY.

Happily there was nothing significant on it -- It was kind of a junk file repository.
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[bjornln]

All drives fail sooner or later. Check the stats of the drives failure rate (MTBF).. higher is better....
When you talk about externals, the casings come into play as well = more things can go wrong.

Usually the "enterprise" type drives have a MTBF that's a little better.
A better environment is a +, not too warm, not too cold, not too humid, not too dry,
But as always, YMMV.

/B

[Hideout]

I'd just replaced the two 250 gig Maxtor drives in my G5 with a pair of 400 gig Hitachi drives. There was an article at ZDnet about which hard drives were the most reliable - Hitachi came out on top and Maxtor was at the very bottom. As another possibility, I wonder if the bridge board on your Maxtor is bad. If you have one, try putting the drive in another enclosure and see if that fixes things.
Good luck