Finally gettin all my music sorted onto one update hardrive. want to hear peeps thoughts on DJ'in straight off the external usb harddrive? All my tunes dont fit on int HD and now making way for production and samples only.
hmm..? risky bizznes for live dj'in?
Serato mixing off ext harddrive
Serato mixing off ext harddrive
Check out my soundcloud page at:
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
better yet, go cloud based so when you stuff up whilst DJing you can just blame your ISP.
He's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up.
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
errr... I don't understand 
mrj wrote:better yet, go cloud based so when you stuff up whilst DJing you can just blame your ISP.
Check out my soundcloud page at:
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
It was an unhelpful joke Mr. Dingo. 
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
ahhh yes- that ol chestnut.
Check out my soundcloud page at:
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
this is a forum.
its all unhelpful jokes.
its all unhelpful jokes.
He's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up.
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NinjaGaijin
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Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
Here's my methodology.
1. need a good hdd, good connection. If you can, preferably have an esata port, so that's the fastest connection atm.
2. You want THE fastest HDD... depending on amount of tunes, SSD's are amazing. A bit trickier to get a case for though..
3. Use external cases & internal hdds. Don't fall into the 'external drive' scam. One part breaks, your toast. Case + drive, replace one, good to go.
4. Buy a good HDD if SSD too small/costly.. I use FAEX 1TB WD blacks with 64mb cache.. only issue with these is they heat up quite a bit under hot lighting, hot weather etc, after 6-8 hours use..
5. To combat this and potential data loss, I have 2x of the drives, in the same Vantec esata/usb2 cases, with matching files. I take both of these anywhere I play so that if one dies or overheats, another ready to go.
6. I have a WD green drive 2TB for non-dj musics and another external with a 1TB samsung F3 for a home backup of the DJ drives. So that's 3x drives external with same stuff.. in case the two I take to a show somehow die or are stolen/lost, act of god etc..
7. Make sure you have a power supply for ANY case or thing you will be running USB etc.. any power use of USB sucks power away from performance of your device. So everything needs external power, nothing off bus. If you use serato, make sure the power supply is plugged in!!
8. Get HIGH quality belkin or similar USB cables. Treat them nice. Nothing worse than USBs failing and drive dropping..
9. Learnt the hard way. PATA drives don't cut the mustard for playing 3x large wav files at once. Need to get a nice HDD.. Samsung F3's in Vantec and Macpower cases would keep dropping out as external drives, on ANY connection (fw400/fw800/esata/usb2).. but are fine internal drives. So make sure you get the right drive. 7200rpm none of the green crap.. look at platter speeds and count, check internet for any issues people might be having with specific drives and models..
10. future proof by getting at least 1-3TB drives. I'm almost full on my 1TB, even though I keep trying to cull stuff I wont DJ.. it just keeps filling up.
11. Make sure you regularly backup your main drive. Error check too. Leave the 3rd backup drive (the 'home' backup) ONLY to be backed up BEFORE a show etc.. that way, if say the 'gig' backup drive corrupts some files, then you use that to copy backup to your main drive, you've copied the corrupt stuff over.. but if you leave the 3rd drive alone until before a show, you'll have the older non-bitrotted files still hopefully there..
12. Stress test all drives and cases for heat and errors.. I spent $160 on my first external case (Macpower & Tytech Pleiades SK3500) and it not only heats up more than the $30 Vantecs, it also had a bad bridge when I bought it so had to spend a month RMA'ing it. Also, if you want 2TB drives in external, at the moment only Astone external cases guarantee pretty much most 2TB drives will work. My Vantec cases pretty much just go up to 1.5TB.
13. Use HDTune or similar program to regularly check your SMART data and other error checks.. you want to know when a drive is failing and return RMA ASAP! I buy Western Digitals because they have 5 year instead of regular 3 year warranty...BUT having said that, while i've had issues with other brands, I've NEVEr had to return a WD, as well as STILL having 6+ year old 40-80GB IDE WD drives that are running perfectly..
14. Keep your eyes on your drives! Label them, make them obviously yours, and DONT let them out of your site. hehe! Never had an issue but always concerned about that!
15. If you use firewire don't daisy chain!!! Can lead to killing ALL the drives on the chain if some surge or something goes wrong...
16. Since Serato is usb2 input, try to not use any usb port for things, if you have ps2 mouse port and need mouse use that instead to save usb bandwidth.. also try to use fw800 or usb3 or esata connections if your external drive & laptop have these ports.. they are all faster than usb2 and also saves the USB strain just for your Serato uses.
1. need a good hdd, good connection. If you can, preferably have an esata port, so that's the fastest connection atm.
2. You want THE fastest HDD... depending on amount of tunes, SSD's are amazing. A bit trickier to get a case for though..
3. Use external cases & internal hdds. Don't fall into the 'external drive' scam. One part breaks, your toast. Case + drive, replace one, good to go.
4. Buy a good HDD if SSD too small/costly.. I use FAEX 1TB WD blacks with 64mb cache.. only issue with these is they heat up quite a bit under hot lighting, hot weather etc, after 6-8 hours use..
5. To combat this and potential data loss, I have 2x of the drives, in the same Vantec esata/usb2 cases, with matching files. I take both of these anywhere I play so that if one dies or overheats, another ready to go.
6. I have a WD green drive 2TB for non-dj musics and another external with a 1TB samsung F3 for a home backup of the DJ drives. So that's 3x drives external with same stuff.. in case the two I take to a show somehow die or are stolen/lost, act of god etc..
7. Make sure you have a power supply for ANY case or thing you will be running USB etc.. any power use of USB sucks power away from performance of your device. So everything needs external power, nothing off bus. If you use serato, make sure the power supply is plugged in!!
8. Get HIGH quality belkin or similar USB cables. Treat them nice. Nothing worse than USBs failing and drive dropping..
9. Learnt the hard way. PATA drives don't cut the mustard for playing 3x large wav files at once. Need to get a nice HDD.. Samsung F3's in Vantec and Macpower cases would keep dropping out as external drives, on ANY connection (fw400/fw800/esata/usb2).. but are fine internal drives. So make sure you get the right drive. 7200rpm none of the green crap.. look at platter speeds and count, check internet for any issues people might be having with specific drives and models..
10. future proof by getting at least 1-3TB drives. I'm almost full on my 1TB, even though I keep trying to cull stuff I wont DJ.. it just keeps filling up.
11. Make sure you regularly backup your main drive. Error check too. Leave the 3rd backup drive (the 'home' backup) ONLY to be backed up BEFORE a show etc.. that way, if say the 'gig' backup drive corrupts some files, then you use that to copy backup to your main drive, you've copied the corrupt stuff over.. but if you leave the 3rd drive alone until before a show, you'll have the older non-bitrotted files still hopefully there..
12. Stress test all drives and cases for heat and errors.. I spent $160 on my first external case (Macpower & Tytech Pleiades SK3500) and it not only heats up more than the $30 Vantecs, it also had a bad bridge when I bought it so had to spend a month RMA'ing it. Also, if you want 2TB drives in external, at the moment only Astone external cases guarantee pretty much most 2TB drives will work. My Vantec cases pretty much just go up to 1.5TB.
13. Use HDTune or similar program to regularly check your SMART data and other error checks.. you want to know when a drive is failing and return RMA ASAP! I buy Western Digitals because they have 5 year instead of regular 3 year warranty...BUT having said that, while i've had issues with other brands, I've NEVEr had to return a WD, as well as STILL having 6+ year old 40-80GB IDE WD drives that are running perfectly..
14. Keep your eyes on your drives! Label them, make them obviously yours, and DONT let them out of your site. hehe! Never had an issue but always concerned about that!
15. If you use firewire don't daisy chain!!! Can lead to killing ALL the drives on the chain if some surge or something goes wrong...
16. Since Serato is usb2 input, try to not use any usb port for things, if you have ps2 mouse port and need mouse use that instead to save usb bandwidth.. also try to use fw800 or usb3 or esata connections if your external drive & laptop have these ports.. they are all faster than usb2 and also saves the USB strain just for your Serato uses.
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
Cheers ninja- great advice
Check out my soundcloud page at:
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
http://soundcloud.com/nativedog
Mixes and productions by Native Dog
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
Man, Gaijin there is some good info in there but I'm gonna call you on the PATA drives not doing 3x wav files. This really doesn't have anything to do with the interface; both PATA (UDMA66+) / SATA have more that enough calzones to run that amount of data.
It is rare, but not impossible for a single drive to saturate a bus. And you don't need 66MB/s to read a few wavs at a time.
When you start running multiple drives / ssds then the bus can become the limiting factor; but DJ'ing / Abletron'ing isn't really terribly I/O intensive. It really isn't even that CPU intensive for live application.
Next up : USB bandwidth limitations.
Fact : The amount of power a device draws does not have a correlation to the performance of the USB hub (which is what your ports are connected to, internally.) Most computers actually use several 'Root HUBs' As its a 'hub' the bandwidth is shared.
USB 2.0 provides 480Mbp/s on each root hub; along with a standardised amount of amperage per port (500mA). So, split your devices up along all the USB root hubs and they won't compete for bandwidth (ports are usually grouped by which hub they are connected to).
USB is host based so it does mean you do take a hit on the CPU for everything that happens over it. This is a trivial amount of overhead for any modern computing platform (say, anything later than Pentium 3).
A good thing to do is put all the music you play at a gig ON your computer; and back it up at home on something external. That way you don't lose any USB ports or speed for your music. If the hard-disk in your laptop dies while playing, then you've got bigger problems than silence; no amount of external storage will help you.
7200RPM drives are good too; but once again live performance really shouldn't be terrible disk intensive; if you've got the RAM / Page file set up correctly.
It is rare, but not impossible for a single drive to saturate a bus. And you don't need 66MB/s to read a few wavs at a time.
When you start running multiple drives / ssds then the bus can become the limiting factor; but DJ'ing / Abletron'ing isn't really terribly I/O intensive. It really isn't even that CPU intensive for live application.
Next up : USB bandwidth limitations.
Fact : The amount of power a device draws does not have a correlation to the performance of the USB hub (which is what your ports are connected to, internally.) Most computers actually use several 'Root HUBs' As its a 'hub' the bandwidth is shared.
USB 2.0 provides 480Mbp/s on each root hub; along with a standardised amount of amperage per port (500mA). So, split your devices up along all the USB root hubs and they won't compete for bandwidth (ports are usually grouped by which hub they are connected to).
USB is host based so it does mean you do take a hit on the CPU for everything that happens over it. This is a trivial amount of overhead for any modern computing platform (say, anything later than Pentium 3).
A good thing to do is put all the music you play at a gig ON your computer; and back it up at home on something external. That way you don't lose any USB ports or speed for your music. If the hard-disk in your laptop dies while playing, then you've got bigger problems than silence; no amount of external storage will help you.
7200RPM drives are good too; but once again live performance really shouldn't be terrible disk intensive; if you've got the RAM / Page file set up correctly.
"Anybody want some motherfucking Earl Grey?" -Cleveland
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youthful_implants
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Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
uh oh this thread just got serious. 
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
only a tiny, tiny, tiny cpu hit really. all the data transfer is done with dma, which doesn't really involve the cpu much at all.*catalyst wrote:USB is host based so it does mean you do take a hit on the CPU for everything that happens over it. This is a trivial amount of overhead for any modern computing platform (say, anything later than Pentium 3).
other than that, on point.
oh yeah, and don't get green drives. they're slow as balls since they power down at every opportunity, and take ages to power back up.
basically, the biggest thing that's likely to go wrong is the power supply for your hd getting knocked out.
myspace / too much! / photos (flickr) / photos (tumblr)
aroes wrote:promising, but lost me at offensive mid range snarl
Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
Yeah, I was implying its a trivial CPU hit. Don't know why people care any more.
"Anybody want some motherfucking Earl Grey?" -Cleveland
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NinjaGaijin
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Re: Serato mixing off ext harddrive
Thanks man love to get all techy with it 
as far as the PATA drives, I was running crapper USB2 ports for a while too, combined with older PATA drive, did NOT want to work on Serato without dropouts.. since going to WD black, not an issue.. or rather, so rare not really notice, like once every month or 2 randomly once only (usually I figure is just my laptop doing some windows service crap or something)
as far as the PATA drives, I was running crapper USB2 ports for a while too, combined with older PATA drive, did NOT want to work on Serato without dropouts.. since going to WD black, not an issue.. or rather, so rare not really notice, like once every month or 2 randomly once only (usually I figure is just my laptop doing some windows service crap or something)