ULTRALITE troubles with chained Firewire Hard Drive ?

4MuLA · Post by **4MuLA** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 9:22 am

Hi I was looking for users with similar issues. Situation:

-MOTU Ultralite is powered by Firewire port of my MacBook Intel.
-There's an external HD chained to the 2nd Firewire port of the Ultralite, a LaCie Porsche 160GB (desktop version).
-Cubase SX reads the projects from the external Hard Drive.

I started experiencing loud cracks, clicks and pops on all the outputs at the same time, just with more challenging projects (several audio tracks). At first I thought this was sample rate-related but it was happening at any sample rate (from 44.1k to 96k). Until I switched hard drives and everything works fine.

Now the weird factor: the external drive that works is a portable one (QPS 10GB) and has a spindle speed of 5400 RPM while the ones that don't work (and make the MOTU produce the clicks and pops) run at 7200 RPM. So I'm wondering if anyone had the same problems, right now I was thinking of buying another external portable HD -bigger than 10GB to host all my projects and virtual instruments- but obviously I"m confused on the choice, since it looks like the spindle speed doesn't really matter.
It looks more like a data transfer rate issue... Any ideas?

Thanks

mothra · Post by **mothra** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 2:35 pm

I know it sounds wierd, but try swapping the order of the devices in the chain..

For awhile I had my Powerbook->828MKII->Lacie firewire drive working just fine.. One day things refused to mount.. Swapped it so the chain went Powerbook->Lacie->828MKII and everything was fine again.

Moved everything a couple months ago, and put it back with the 828 coming off the Powerbook again.. Worked fine mysteriously for about a month.. Added another firewire drive at the end of the chain and once again, worked fine for a couple weeks.. One night, turn everything on, brand new Maxtor and 828 not recognized but my Lacie was...

Moved around the connections so its now laptop->Lacie->Maxtor->828 and its worked without a hitch...
And Im almost positive both of these drives are 7200 RPM (they might even be Serial ATA as theyre both fairly new) and work just fine..

FW is supposed to be plug and play but sometimes it does do some wierd things hehe..

kuene · Post by **kuene** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 8:48 pm

i have my ultralite --> firewire --> macbook. no problems. however, i record to y internhardrive so im not testing out the full scenario.

4MuLA · Post by **4MuLA** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 8:56 pm

After several tests, emails and phone calls I think I tracked down the issue.
The core of the matter seems to be the Access Rate and the buffer size of the hard drive. I tried several others hard drives and spoke to the tech guys @ Apple that also confirmed the LaCie Porsche as being one of the less reliable hard drives around. I had the same problems with a BeyondMicro 250GB btw.

No problems at all with drives smaller in size, that run at 5400 RPM and infact, have a faster access rate and decent buffer size. I hope that changing the LaCie Porsche for a better hard drive will do the trick.
Thanks to you all for the precious help.