Slow Hard Drive Performance

[timmeh]

Hey all,

I've been experiencing random crashes and out of memory errors with DP7 as of late and I believe the issue to be with my Hard Drives. On my Mac I have three 7200RPM drives (which I've had for approx 5 years) and I did a speed test using Blackmagic which produced the following results with the 1GB setting:

1) System HD (Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM) - 35 MB/s Read & Write
2) Audio/Projects (Seagate 500GB 7200RPM) - 69 MB/s Read & Write
3) Plugins/Samples (Seagate 320 7200RPM) - 50 MB/s Read & 40 MB/s Write

My orchestral library is on a slave PC so the only samples that I use from the Samples drive are from SD2 and occasionally Kontakt.

My question is would reformatting help or is it time to get some new hard drives? Also in either case will doing this make it difficult for me to open old projects?

[wylie1]

Before you do anything back everything up.
35mb/s is pretty slow if you do have a drive that's about to fail reformatting will usually kill it.
Sometimes a speed test will kill them.
After 5yrs the failure rate goes up quit a bit.
Time for new drives.

[mikehalloran]

Before you do anything back everything up.
35mb/s is pretty slow if you do have a drive that's about to fail reformatting will usually kill it.
Sometimes a speed test will kill them.
After 5yrs the failure rate goes up quit a bit.
Time for new drives.

Your tests of HD performance are telling you nearly nothing. Heat and capacity will also slow down an old drive. Such tests might miss bad sectors and tell you a drive is slow when, really, it is dead.

OTOH, I agree with wylie1. If re-formatting kills a drive, it was already dead. It will not harm a healthy drive if done properly - see below.

If any of your current drives are rated at 1.5G transfer (G5 spec), replace them - just do it. Newer 3G rated drives will be faster in the machines you have and the right ones will run cooler. I suspect that is the case with your 250G drive.

Drives get a lot slower once they pass the 85% full mark. Could that be part of the problem? If so, bigger is better and faster.

If neither of the above is the issue, go ahead and re-format. Have a source of new drives handy (I have Fry's and Micro Center 15 minutes away) in case re-formatting kills one or more.

Whenever you suspect a mechanical drive problem, you must re-format correctly. Select Zero All Data (or its equivalent) in Security Options. This will identify bad sectors and cause a new sector map to be written putting these bad sectors off limits. If the problem is fatal, this will also kill the drive permanently.

Make certain everything is well backed up. Time Machine is your friend here. De-activate any internet authorizations first - this will save you tech support calls later. iLok auths will be unaffected. DP will have to be re-authorized - no big deal.

[wylie1]

Drives get a lot slower once they pass the 85% full mark.

Good point I consider mine full at 75%

[timmeh]

Thanks for your replies Mikehalloran and Wylie1,

My system drive has 57GB remaining of the 250GB and all the drives are Sata II and therefore have the 3G transfer speed. I don't believe heat is an issue as the load on these drives are pretty light and they are stored in a cool room.

Ideally I would like to try the reformat method and see if that works before purchasing new drives. In either case my goal is to do a fresh install of everything, do you guys know if this will cause issues when I try and open old projects in terms of locating instruments and samples?

[wylie1]

It depends how organized your system is, in my case I keep 1 drive dedicated to samples and 1 for project/audio files so its pretty simple.
I really don't think it would be worth the effort with the old drives you may end up with the same performance.

[Steve Steele]

These older drives, even though they are 7200RPM have a much slower r/w time than a new generation 7200 drives with 64MB caches (which helps with short bursts), and 6Gb/s I/O (although you'll only see 3Gb/s). But you'll have to move up in capacity (2TB in general) to get 100+ MB/s speeds. (I'm referring to 7200RPM drives only)

I just bought a 2TB Hitachi (now HGST) for $109, and it's testing at around 120-ish (but that's burst due to cache, but still you'll see some snappiness).

And, if you reformat, or install on a new disk it will be placed on the faster inner part of the platter.

[timmeh]

Wylie1,

I do keep my drives organized as you described. I have a System drive, projects/audio drive and a samples/plugins drive, so based on what you're saying I shouldn't have any problems installing everything fresh (as opposed to restoring from a backup) onto these new drives and then needing to open up old projects right?

[wylie1]

Good it should be fairly strait forward then.
Only possibility of unforeseen issues and with me that more probable than not but I think that's just me
Good luck.

[mikehalloran]

I have gone through a similar process in the last year and a half as I finish migrating from my G5. I have 26 years of old crap that I am still cleaning up.

As you migrate, restore etc. your permissions may get out of whack. Even if you run Repair Permissions at every major step, as you should, you may find DP having issues opening your files. If this happens, do the following: Do a Get Info on your project folder. Grant Read &Write privileges to all accounts and check Apply to enclosed items. For some reason, DP 7.24 is far more finicky about this than earlier versions. Some of the files this fixed started life on my G5; others were started in DP 2 & 3 on my Beige G3 ( a great computer for its day).

[toodamnhip]

I used black magic drive test and noticed that my VI library drive reads slower than my audio drive.
Both are 7200 rpm.
The audio drive reads around 130 MB/s
The VI drive reads around 102-108 MS/s

I’ve used 660 Gig of my 1 terabyte VI drive, could that be it?

I don;t understand why this could be so. I am running heavy VI libraries such as LASS.
I need the VI drive to be at optimum. I even recently de fragged the VI drive.
Any info from everyone would be appreciated.

[mikehalloran]

Do you have a utility for reading the SMART status?

Disk Utility only says if it passes or fails. There's a lot more to it than that. TechTool graphs 18 parameters - as drives age, that graph starts looking like an old broken comb. I imagine there must be other utilities that can read and graph SMART tests.

WD will allow a warranty exchange when the graph looks pretty bad - even if DU says it still passes. It must fail before Seagate will do an RMA.

[FutureLegends]

This was interesting... Did the test on my machine (other info in sig.)

System Drive: 250GB Western Digital - ca 30 mb/s
Audio Drive: 500GB Seagate - 45-50 mb/s
Samples Drive: 500GB Seagate - 90-100 mb/s

The system drive is the one that came with the computer, I believe, so it should be 5-6 years old. The audio and samples drives are the same brand and model (I think!?) but bought maybe a year apart with the audio drive being the older one.

The biggest surprise here is that the samples drive is twice as fast as the audio drive...

[timmeh]

This was interesting... Did the test on my machine (other info in sig.)

System Drive: 250GB Western Digital - ca 30 mb/s
Audio Drive: 500GB Seagate - 45-50 mb/s
Samples Drive: 500GB Seagate - 90-100 mb/s

The system drive is the one that came with the computer, I believe, so it should be 5-6 years old. The audio and samples drives are the same brand and model (I think!?) but bought maybe a year apart with the audio drive being the older one.

The biggest surprise here is that the samples drive is twice as fast as the audio drive...

[timmeh]

This was interesting... Did the test on my machine (other info in sig.)

System Drive: 250GB Western Digital - ca 30 mb/s
Audio Drive: 500GB Seagate - 45-50 mb/s
Samples Drive: 500GB Seagate - 90-100 mb/s

The system drive is the one that came with the computer, I believe, so it should be 5-6 years old. The audio and samples drives are the same brand and model (I think!?) but bought maybe a year apart with the audio drive being the older one.

The biggest surprise here is that the samples drive is twice as fast as the audio drive...

I believe your audio drive probably has a lower read/write speed because it has more data written and deleted on it which can cause fragmentation therefore reducing its read/write speed. There are other things that could cause it but offhand without knowing more about the drive I would say that's the likely case. I'm willing to bet if you were to format the audio drive and then re copy everything back onto it you'd get higher speeds. But I'm by no means an expert.