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Heeeeeelp! Please!
My Lacie 500GB external HD is on the fritz.
It seems as if it’s slowed down it’s performance dramatically.
For instance, if I open up a DV NTSC clip in QT, it doesn’t playback smoothly. The audio cuts out every couple of seconds, and the video is jerky, and stalls every few seconds – as if it’s trying to catch up with itself.
I haven’t had any problems with this drive before – and I have nearly 20% free space on the drive.
Any suggestions, please?!?!
I’m under a seroius deadline here!
Thanks in advance.
Wayne
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10 Replies
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Forgot to keep the info in the Subject line specific!
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[Wayne K.] “I haven’t had any problems with this drive before – and I have nearly 20% free space on the drive.”
Ok, that’s a pretty full drive. When was the last time you re-formatted the drive? It sounds like you’ve got some severe fragmentation on there. Drives need to be cleaned as often as possible to maintain optimum performance. I erase after most projects or at the very least, every four months.
If you have another drive available, dump all the material off to that drive, reformat the LaCie and then move the material back.
Short of that, export a self-contained movie from your timeline to a drive that’s less full and try to play that off.
Once you cross over 75% full on most hard-drives, performance will start to suffer and in particular if the drive has not been cleaned for a while.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Walter,
Thanks so much for coming to my aid.
I’ll definately give that a shot.
Thanks,
Wayne
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Just out of curiousity is your External Lacie 500 the single 500 or the dual 250 raid?
Peter McAuley
Axyz Edit
Toronto
G5 dual 2.0
4 gigs ram
10.4.3
FCP 5.03
QT 7.03
Kona 2 v1.1.4 with K Box
4 X 250 gig external F800 Lacie firewire drive
2 X 23″ Apple cinema display -
Hi,
It’s the External Lacie 500.
Hurrumph!
W
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Check out the history of users who are using LaCie Firewire drives. The failure rate is close to 30% within the first year. Around the http://www.lafcpug.org site LaCie leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
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ya i build my own drives, and keep my lacie as purly storage, it doesn’t see much action
the problem is the drives are “striped” so if one crashes they both go kaboom,
but hoepfully you can get cleared out and be ok
good luck
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Lacie is the devil. We just had 4 drives dying on us within the last two months…
You should not have these problems. 20% free space is plentiful.Here is what I would suggest: As long as your drive is still running: Back up your project on an internal SATA drive or something else.
Usually what gives up is not the drive itself but the bridgeboard between the drive and the ports…
Just another idea: If you are running firewire 800 and another 400 device from your computer, you can run into issues because they share the same port. I had the in the beginning until I installed an additional firewire 800 card.
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[Axel Ebermann] “Lacie is the devil. We just had 4 drives dying on us within the last two months…
You should not have these problems. 20% free space is plentiful.”Ok, LaCie is not the devil and that’s quite an unprofessional statement to make on a public forum.
Second, 20% free space is NOT plentiful on any drive when doing video work. I’ve been reviewing hard drives for years now here on the Cow and in my own testing I’ve seen that just about every drive manufacturer will show a slow down in speed at 75% full. The further you fill the drive beyond 75%, the more the slowdown. The only exception to this is Med
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Walter,
I appreciate your input. I’ve been working in the postproduction field for 10+ years and I never had such problems with any other harddrive before.
the only thing I can say is that I see drives going down left and right (including some of our drives), and all of them have ‘Lacie’ written on them.
Our drives sit in an airconditioned, dustfree environment and are only expspected to spin…
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