I rememeber when I had my PC(window based) laptop I could increase virtual memory and increase Page cache, or things to make it faster. Is there a way or a program that chould help me increase the settings I need so I can play vids at a higher quality. Currently i play vids on Medium with 2 gigs of ram in serato. I have a MBP 17" 500g 2.5ghz with 4 gigs of ram with a Geforce 8600M GT. I feel my computer should play faster videos. I did just install a new hard drive but its 7200 rpm and is fast everwhere else but serato. I think it may have been a little faster when I had the 150gig hd. I have installed Persian,Quicktime,Divx. Are there any other programs that have codec that is needed to play vids better?

only thing i can think of is instal a SSD "solid state drive", mos def get 4 gig's of ram, & don't put anything you don't need on the lap top, the more free space on the drive the better it will preform

On a Mac, programs don't waste RAM unless they're running. So, really there isn't anything you can do.

HOWEVER, you can install only the stuff that's needed on it. There's a ton of garbage that shouldn't be there like a ton of different languages or printer drivers.

good looking guys. I gota few programs tinker tool, and onyx. I would look into it.... twice as fast bro..... its kinda weird.. And I price SS drives every day.LOL Im not ready for on. Im grouping my files and doing a few other little tweaks. I cant believe I made it faster. The problem I am now is the video slowwing up after awhile, Then It will kinda clip or freeze frame a little. Then I will lowwer the quality and it will be fine. I lowwer seratos buffer which help with the video. I still cant play high quality... Im close.. And I mean set the out put video quality to "HIGH". i can play hd vids just fine. Just not in hd

I would expect that computer to play in "high" quality pretty easily. One thing you might try is turning down the VSL cache setting down to 1gb and see if your "freezes" go away.

What OS version are you using, and are you using SMCFanControl to turn up the fans when running VSL? Also what kind of temperatures are you seeing in typical use after some time? (With SMCFanControl running, the CPU temperature will show up in the menu bar).

If things seem slower after adding a 7200rpm drive, as implied in your original post, that may indicate a problem with the new drive. Is it a Seagate, by any chance?

Just for reference, I was able to get VSL playing in "high" quality on an early-2008 non-pro plastic MacBook with the second-generation Intel GMA3100 integrated graphics, and only 2gb RAM installed.

For DJ-ing with videos, the real-world benefits of either a 7200rpm or solid-state drive are basically none. Modern 5400rpm drives are more than fast enough for this (the newest generation are actually quite a bit faster than previous-generation 7200rpm drives).

Another thing to try: in System Preferences/CDs & DVDs, set all options to "ignore".

That basically tells the OS to stop polling the optical drive for an inserted disk.

I think that setting mattered more when computers were a lot slower, but it's worth a shot.

WOW! good looking i will try your suggestions and get back to you.
my drive is a seagate... 500 gig. is there something wrong with seagates?

i7 would help.

I guess the question about Seagate drives partly boils down to personal experiences...but I've had (and seen) really terrible reliability results with their drives to the point where I now avoid anything of that brand. There have also been (aside from my personal experiences) several fairly widespread cases where large numbers of Seagate drives experienced failures...one of those affected a lot of Apple MacBooks a few years ago.

You may want to download "SMARTUtility" (www.volitans-software.com) ($25, but you can use it "free" a few times) and see if it reports any trouble with the drive. $25 seems like a lot for this software, but it's helped me diagnose a couple of otherwise-puzzling problems I've had in the past...it does a much more in-depth diagnosis of the drive hardware than anything else I've seen for Mac.

The fastest laptop drive I've ever used, and the one I have installed in my two MBP's now, is Western Digital's 750-gig 2-platter 5400rpm drive: www.newegg.com . I mention "2-platter" because there are also WD 750-gig and 1-tb drives with three platters (non-standard 12.5mm height and slightly slower spindle speed) which I do *not* recommend.

Nice. And if you have a mac, make sure you use firewire 800 brother. Its delicious.

I use G-tech personally for my externals.

Wow excellent info right before i was about to buy a 750gb. How can you tell its two platter? I cant see that in the description.

The two-platter 750gb drives are standard height (9.5mm): www.wdc.com

The three-platter 1tb drives (and the short-lived previous generation of 750gb drives) are non-standard 12.5mm height: www.wdc.com

Either size will fit into a current "unibody" MacBook Pro, but will not fit into most other laptops or most external drive enclosures.

If you absolutely *must* have a 1tb drive in a MacBook Pro, the WD 3-platter 12.5mm drive is the only option at this time. I would guess by the end of 2010 that capacity will be available in a standard-height drive.

And at the risk of "information overload" I'm going to re-mention that any of these newer WD drives (as well as some other manufacturer's recent drives incorporating "advanced power management") will require an "hdapm" hack to give best performance/reliability in a Mac: mymacfixes.blogspot.com

I've posted this info here before more than once, and I've confirmed on several different Macs that it does exactly what it's supposed to to. Use of SMARTUtility to confirm that the load-cycle count on the drive is not increasing at a high rate after applying this fix would be a good idea just to be sure.

Without the "hdapm" fix, the drive will accumulate a very high number of load cycles quickly, which can cause it to run slower and make it fail prematurely. Unfortunately the Mac OS without this fix does not properly support the newer generation of apm-enabled laptop drives. (DJ TURN SIGNAL, this may be affecting your Seagate drive if it's not one of the ones Apple ships in their machines).

Well i just ordered the 750gb 2 platter. I will check it with smart utility once its installed. I checked my current drive with it and couldnt figure out where it shows the load cycles but i will pm you for help once i get this installed. Thanks for the info :)

In the "Attributes" section, click on "Show All". it'll be in the list, along with a lot of other things, as "Load Cycle Count".

Note that once launched, Smart Utility does NOT update any of that info...you need to relaunch it to see if the load-cycle count is increasing or not.

Ideally, load-cycle count should not increment at all with the machine running. Without the hdapm hack, you'll probably see the drive add a load-cycle every minute or two.

^^Just a little update. I installed the 750gb this morning with no problems at all. I put it into a external enclosure, then formatted it to mac, then used Carbon Copy Cloner to back up a complete bootable drive to it. Then simply put it into my lappy and all is exactly how it was but with more space :). It was much easier then reinstalling osx and restoring with time machine.

Checked the drive with SMartutility and it passed with load cycle at 200. Checked it again 30 min later and load cycle is still at 200.

So no need for the hdapm hack?? Right?? :)

whoa I got 37516 load cycles and I have had this same drive in for about 3-4 weeks. I guess I do have to do the hdapm hack

went to 37520 by the time I posted this

hdapm hack, here I come

holding at 37604

successful hack


DJMark,

Thank you for posting great information consistently.

wow 37k?? My 500gb internal i just replaced was at 169 and checked again after 30 min still at 169.

I wonder what it all means though lol, if my brand new drive has 200 and my old one after months and months of use only had 169......

you may need the hack

did you rescan the drive in Smart Utility?

169 seems low, did you rarely restart your comp?

What column are you looking at? Value, worst or raw value?
500 Gig Hitachi and the value is at 83. Raw value is at 172325. I installed it about 4 or 5 months ago and I rarely shut my laptop down.

Guys I'm tracking this too because I installed a few days ago the exact same 750 WD drive as DJMark in my MBP, and since then I noticed quite a slow down:
On my original hd, I could load a song on a deck and if the turntable was spinning, I would get the sound right away (great for quickmix), but now I've got this horrible delay (maybe 1/2 second to 1 second) before the song plays. (even offline)

I installed SmartUtility, I got Value=196 / Worst=196 / Raw=12492

I'm gonna leave the MBP running for a few hours and then restart SmartU to see if I need the fix. (I hope it will solve my slow drive problem)

Just have smartutility rescan the drive And if it goes up at all in a couple minutes, do the hack. It's really easy and I had never done anything like that before.

Since you have the 15-inch MacBook Pro, you may actually have two separate issues:

1) if you've got 12492 load cycles on that drive, you absolutely do need the hdapm fix (you could not have possibly turned your computer off and on that many times since that drive was installed);

2) some of the 15-inch MBP's have some SATA controller weirdness that makes them misbehave with newer 3gb/sec SATA-2 drives. I dealt with this a few months ago, trying to get a friend's 15-inch MBP to behave with a new drive, and the ultimate solution was "downgrading" the computer's firmware.

Apparently the Apple Store Genius Bar people are aware of issue #2, and have the means to do the downgrade. There's also info (and a "downgrader" patch) floating around online, but I would advise that bringing it into an Apple Store is the safest way to do it. If anything goes wrong in the "downgrade" process (or anyone posts a malicious "downgrader" online) there is a very real chance of "bricking" the computer.

One way to test for issue #2: put on two videos in SSL, and do some fast sustained spins. If the SATA bus is misbehaving with the new drive, as I saw on my friend's machine, you'll probably be able to make SSL "run out of waveform" (audio stops playing till the drive catches up) pretty easily.

As far as I know, issue #2 only affected the first two generations of the 15-inch MBP.

Glad this is helping some people...I posted similar info some months ago in the main forum, and it seemed to unfortunately get lost amongst a lot of noise. I suspect these issues are affecting a lot of people.

My bad thx dj MArk...Ish slipping...

omg. it was 2-3k.. it was 27k cycles so installed the hdapm.dmg.. little window popped up and said complete... so.....What next DJ MARK.. Sorry to give create to some one else for your brains, my bad. Im sorry

So I install Hdapm and teh cycles are still increasing. in 5 minutes it up 40 cycles. this must be bad......

I didn't even see where someone else got "credit for my brains" (LOL) and I'm not too worked up about it anyway...

As far as "what's next" you want to make sure the hdapm hack actually worked (it installs a LaunchDaemon that sets the power-management level to "max")....so you want to power-cycle the computer (full shutdown and back on) then verify the load-cycle count isn't still increasing at a fast rate.

Also you can open Utilities/Console, select "system.log" on the left side, then in the search thing up top-right type in "hdapm".

If the patch installed correctly, you'll see three items corresponding to each recent system boot similar to this:

Jul 14 03:40:31 2010-MacBook-Pro com.yourusername.hdapm[45]: disk0: WDC WD7500BPVT-00HXZT0
Jul 14 03:40:31 2010-MacBook-Pro com.yourusername.hdapm[45]: Setting APM level to 0xfe:
Jul 14 03:40:31 2010-MacBook-Pro com.yourusername.hdapm[45]: Success

Did you carefully follow the directions on that blog post I linked?

You're not just installing hdapm, you're also creating/installing a LaunchDaemon (in Lingon) so the hdapm level is set whenever the computer is rebooted.

Oh.. I figure restart was the only thing I didnt do. I did copy paste in Library/something....


thx again.... I will restart now.. thx again smart guy.. I never thought this fourm stuff would be so helpful..

I didn't see an answer. Are we supposed to look at raw value, worst or value?

CheLu, according to what Mark just said above above the 2 issues I might have, I'd think it's the raw value.

First things first, so I just tried to solve the 1st issue....

The Hack doesnt seem to be working for me, when I go to /Library I dont have any /LaunchDaemons folder inside, only a /LaunchAgents folder but the com.yourusername.launchd.hdapm.plist file is not in there?

Just to be sure, can Mark or Dub confirm what I'm doing wrong please?

1-open the hdapm.dmg from my downloads, grab the hdapm file inside and drop it in the /applications/utilities folder (as opposed to whats written in the tutorial, it didnt ask me to authenticate).
2-start Lingon, follow the procedure. I know it must have worked because now I see on the grey area on the left: com.myusername.launchd.hdapm under "Users Daemons".
When I saved, it asked me to authenticate and restart.
3-After restart I cant see any /Library/LaunchDaemons folder like I said.
4-Start Messages Console, the last message is from 3 days ago, there's nothing looking like the 3 lines com.AaronShep.launchd.hdapm

^^^^ * CheLu, according to what Mark just said above ABOUT the 2 issues I might have, I'd think it's the raw value.

Update, I was typing hdapm in the search box of the Console to no avail.
But when I went to "folders log" on the left hand side, I found the 3 lines allright, so I'm good for issue #1.

Now I'm just tried loading songs real fast (offline mode), I just cant beleive it, it's back to normal, fast as lightning, I'm amazed.
Mark, thanks a thousand times for this tip, I'm much obliged really!
Maybe you should add a link to this thread in the thread about swapping HDs on macs.
I'm gonna go and plug the 68 see how it rocks now, I dont even think I'll need to look for the 2nd issue you told me.

Update2
Everything worked fne offline, I plugged the 68 and loaded a track on the right deck, the sound played fine and as soon as I tried to load a track on the left side I got the spinning wheel of death. I Left it iddle for 5 minutes and had to force quit.
I hope it's nothing to do with the hack, and if it is I hope it's reversible because I'd rather have a slow mac than a mac that crashs SL.
I'll go ahead and post a bug report (I used 2.1 PB3)
www.scratchlive.net

So I updated the Hack restarted but my Mac and the cycles seem to still be climbing. I have to say My Mac Is RUNNING A LOT SMOOTHER IN SERATO...AND I MEAN A LOT>>>> Thx guys.

Is there anything else like this I may need to know when changing HD in a Laptop. I also agree with whoever meationed that this should be posted somewhere under tips
Changeing or upgradeing my HD has taking at least 2 months of trouble shooting,stress and desire for a new MBP. But now I have to say I am very happy once again with my MBP and 500 gig HD.

So what next since I have climbing load cycles...... Is there anything else i can do..Is it a problem since my serato seems to be running faster in serato I really dont care,BUT someone did meantion that if load cycles are high the Hard drive will fail fast? What do yuo think?

quote: "what do you think?"
I think that technology is fucking up our lives and that we spend more time fixing stuff than ever before, what was to fix with a vynil? (end of rant)

I was just like Turn Signal, and I suggest anyone who changed HD on MBP and has slow loading times on the decks to apply this hack asap.
I hear you on load cycles Turn, but at least if your speed is back to normal, to me that's all that matters.

Update on my situation, the bug has nothing to do with the hack. It's a bug in 2.1 with mp3s associated with video files.

your back

lol you're definately right bro, even more than you think because I used to carry around acetates (dubplates) as well as vynils.
But my back still needs fixing when I carry a udg creator filled with 57, MBP, Crane (heavy as a mofo), SL Vynils, Mic, Cables, Dicers, etc... the bag is more than 30Kilos!

That's what I'm talking about man. The gear bag to get all of this stuff rolling is getting bigger, but it's still nothing like lugging around crates or a big ass record bag.

Did the hack on my 15in MBP with a 500 gig Hitachi. Seems to be running faster after reboot than before. Haven't tried it with SSL yet. Good looking out on that one though DJMark.

OK well brand new drive went from Raw value 92 to 122 in about ten minutes. So hack is needed?

yes

at least its easier than taking the MBP apart...

OKie Dokie hack installed successfully. Man makes me wonder what my load cycle was on my old 500gb without the hack. I was always looking at the wrong value so i never did it......

Anyways took a few tries but slow careful reading and the hack was an easy fix. After checking smartutility multiple times my raw load cycle count is no longer climbing :)

Thanks everyone, now to try out vsl!!!!!

UPDATE: this hdapm hack needs to be stickied my raw value hasnt climbed from 247 for about an hour and everything on my lappy run smoother and faster including itunes, which used to throw beach balls every time i edit a tag.

Amazing fix cant wait to tr out VSL.

@ Res-Q when i first did the hack it didnt work for me because I was putting the hdapm file into my "Applications" folder because of habit and not my 'Applications/Utilities" folder. After making sure it was right in console i get the three lines its supposed to say. Hope this is what was wrong with yours :)

Thanks a lot CheLu, I'm sorted out. As a matter a fact I did put it in /Apps/Util but when I checked in the Console I was not looking under "Folders Log". So I could obviously see the 3 lines.
Everything works like a charm, expect for the 2.1 bug I found, which I thought was related to the hack, but it has in fact nothing to do with it (check my link above to the PB area for more info)
Anyway DJMark is now my #1 provider for Mac tips & hacks, much much much respect bro, you made my day!

A couple of you guys had me a little worried there when I first started reading the new posts, but it looks like you've got the hdapm thing working now (?).

One other thing I'll mention...don't try dragging your created LaunchDaemon for hdapm onto another Mac hoping to save a little time. It won't work, even if the hdapm app itself is in the same place and your username is identical. (I tried it).

Yes it's the "raw" value you want to be watching for "load cycles". With hdapm setting apm level to "max", the load cycle count shouldn't go up at all with the computer running (it will increment by one when the computer's powered on). So if you're still seeing it go up after creating the LaunchDaemon and powering off/back on, something's not right.

You can also run the command line from Terminal, to help you see if load cycles still go up due to a problem with your LaunchDaemon or something else:

/Applications/Utilities/hdapm disk0 max

Of course you need to have put the hdapm app into the "Utilities" folder for that to work.

If Terminal spits out something other than "success" after doing that, your drive probably doesn't support apm...and if you're trying to fix a performance issue you should keep troubleshooting.

YOur so right bro. But I do have to say since there are things like this(forums,hacks,smart F'n Djs) to help us. I thought is I was a Mechanic working on a car I dont think I just down load a program and talk to some people and SHAMWOW it works. So everyday I figure out a way to be thankful I'm a DJ, And when the girls dance on tables, and people point at TV screens cause I put a funny blopper or sick slam dunk,etc or sick video mix, bro those are teh moments not to forget!!!

u KnoW!
Turn

So is there stil a problem with mp3 and image file being attached? and was the bug from putting album artwork or from assigning a mp3 visuals or jepg?

Well It appears as if anyone using the PB3 version with the 68 is gonna have problems, so I'm back to 2.0.1 for now 'cause i got a bunch of mp3s assigned to visuals and as soon as I load one on a deck I got a crash.

my particular problem is from associating the mp3 with a mp4 visual.

PB3.. Power book 3? Windows?

Public Beta 3.

oh. I think Beta stands for "Back-up External TB ASAP"

I lost of crates with a Beta version, never worth goin gthrough that. also lost 2000 genres..

I take back my previous "It works" statement. On 10.6.4. When I go in to Console to see if it loaded after reboot, it says wrong path or something along those lines with ended with -1. I don't have my mac in front of me right now. It's still in my gig bag. If I go into Terminal I can't just type in the command. I have to do "cd /applications/utiltities/...." After I do that I get the Success notice and it holds. Just for reference I Iooked last night at my load cycles and I was mid 172k when I first posted and now I'm over 173k. I haven't tried the "cd" in the daemon plst file yet. I'll have to try that later on this evening. If that doesn't work I'll just have to move it to root.

That all sounds pretty strange to me. At least you were able to verify that the thing works from Terminal.

Is your user account installed in some unusual way?

Got it sorted. It wouldn't let me add the disk0 max on the same line as hdapm. I had to add two additional strings to the plist file. So mine looks like
string Applications/Utilities/hdapm /string
string disk0 /string
string max /string

But I finally got it to say the magic word in Console..."Success."
Thanks. Hopefully I'll be firm at around 173k load cycles for a while.

Cool, glad you got it working.

Not to be alarmist here, but I would replace that drive ASAP. 173,000 load cycles is a very high number. At the very least, keep close tabs on the drive's health in SMARTUtility, and backup frequently.

Sad thing is...it's less than 6 months old. It's a Hitachi Travelstar and it's rated for 600k. But I have a 1 TB Time Capsule that I backup to. Guess I should check my external and see what the load cycles are on it. I've had it for a while.

Yup. I've been playing VSL on high quality with my Macbook since I got it 3 years ago. Best $500 I ever spent. lol

DJ Mark, I really appreciate your advice on this matter and its nice to know there are actually someone out there with concrete actual knowledge not only on music but also the tech part.

I´m currently running a unibody macbook (not a pro) with 2.0 ghz, 4gb RAM, GeForce9400M(256), and the 160GB hdd that came with it. I use the ttm57 with turntables and a Denon HC1000s Midi controller.


I have 4 questions;

1. With my laptop VSL works ok, but not well enough to beatjuggle, and sometimes i experience lag even in the sound bars. If i turn down the qualety of the video to lowest there is no problem though. I recently reformatted and installed only the DJ related software i have with no change.

so, when you say that you played in high quality in 2008 i get to wonder - what am i doing wrong? could it be the videos im using?

2. Im thinking of buying a new macbook, which one would you reccomend that (out of the box) will give me more than sufficent results?

3. what format do you reccommend the videos to be in? should i add them to the itunes library first for better speed? now i use mpeg4 all converted in iSquint..

4. what are your thoughts on using (live) external firewire disc vs. internal drive?

I'm just gonna chime in on the "high" quality part (1) and the format part (3).

All the good folks at Serato always say the "high" setting for video is overkill right now and that even with a MBP there's no need to set it to "high".
The high setting might be good for the new i15/17, but I'm sure there's no need for it on older MBPs (too much strain on the computer).

And as for (3) serato recommends MP4. and i really dont think itunes makes a difference speed wise. Matter a fact, I would rather not using itunes at all, which is what I do.

The only thing iTunes does is help you organize your library; there's no speed/performance difference.

Ok...checked again today and although I haven't shut down my Mac since posting that it showed "Success" in Console, I'm at 176k. So 3000 cycles since yesterday morning. Something is definitely not right! I'll keep on this for now, but I'll probably end up switching it out with a Seagate before long and using this Hitachi in an external somewhere. This is going to really bother me now.

Thanks DJMark for the solid info.

In my 15" Macbook Pro I have a 80gb SSD IBM and a 500gb Hitachi. I was not having any performance problems but I checked my cycles anyway. Half a mill or whatever on both drives. I had to set up two hbamp.plist files set one to 'disk0' and the other for 'disk1'. I probably could have done both with one file but... I had trouble getting it to start on start up so I just put it in the start up items and it works fine.

kinda sucks not to know about this when the drives were new.

I believe what was actually meant (as overkill) is the "Best" setting.

Even on small screens at some distance, playing 640x480 videos, I can see a pretty noticeable difference between "medium" and "high" quality. Between "high" and "best" is where the change is a lot less noticeable (except of course for a massive drop in frame rate).

As to "strain on the computer", I wouldn't really worry too much unless temperatures are staying insanely high. Monitoring temperature and adjusting the fan(s) with SMCFanControl should be standard procedure for anyone DJ-ing with video anyway.

When I used the 2008 white MacBook for VSL, temperatures would average 68-73c with the fan cranked up. Definitely warm, but safely under the 105c maximum spec temperature for a Core2Duo CPU. My current i7 MBP stays in the low-mid 50's (c) under the same use.

thanks allot Mark!

I wondering about the hdamp, is this only relevant for those who have replaced their harddrives? Can I gain from it?

Im experiencing that even after formating vids to mpeg4 some will not play in VSL, what format and what software do you reccomend for this?

also, Im curious what the optimal way to have all your videos formatted in the optimal size and format (for best performance and quality).

Is there a optimal file size? and does the filesize it self matter much compared to what format you use?

thanks!

My bad for the best setting issue.
I think what you call "formating" is converting.
As for optimum vid settings a good place to start looking would be a search in the forum regarding handbrake presets. Even if you dont use handbrake those settings work in any other app.

yeh pretty much. hdapm is a utility for preventing a laptop hard drive from spinning up and spinning down to save energy. The 'pm' means power management. IF you hear the spin-up "click" a lot, you might want to try it.

Apple attempts to correct for this with custom firmware they put in their stock laptops to play better with Mac OS X so if you replace your hard drive with a faster/bigger 3rd party drive, you can run into all sorts of weird performance/sleeping issues since Mac OS X constantly swaps memory to the drive when you switch applications.

Although it's less convenient, if you use a full size firewire/usb drive instead of the internal drive, you generally won't have these kinds of problems.

I believe what SpinThis said is correct...but it's easy enough to confirm for yourself with SMARTUtility. If your drive is showing an enormous load-cycle count in relation to the start/stop count, you might want to see if using hdapm cuts down on load-cycle accumulation regardless of whether the drive is "stock" or not.

I also don't understand why Apple is screwing around with drive firmware at all, rather than just making their SATA interface and OS behave correctly with "normal" hard drives....but that's getting into a whole "other" area of discussion...

AKIEM brought up an interesting wrinkle relating to solid-state drives...I really have no idea whether load-cycles is relevant to them or not. My understanding is that, on a mechanical hard drive, load-cycles exact a toll in mechanical wear over time, but of course that might make no difference on a drive with no moving parts. Hmm...

What I figured was, it should not matter since SSD should be able to take more load cycles then you could ever hit them with in your lifetime. But just to be safe, might as well have my system running 'more correctly'.

Ether way I havnt seen any performance difference in ether drive - but now I get only one cycle per session, per drive.

Not to venture too far off tangent, I would guess it might be as simple as a vendor agreement or just Apple being Apple here (more likely).

They do the same thing to DVD/CD-ROM drives in an effort to make movies play quieter but screwing with the read speed of the drive. If you've ever tried to backup your dvd collection, you'd be surprised at how slow the default firmware read speed is... but I digress.

Ok I'm having a problem and I'm not sure its related to the hdpm fix. Need some help. Last three live gigs I have played my audiohas cut out completely and video frozen in the middle of a song. All three times I was not touching keyboard or anything and they involved different videos.

The wave form dissapears but the track still plays and shows its advancing on the side waveform but no audio and frozen video. Pushing a cue point button brings everything back to life.

Any ideas? Hdpm installed properly, maybe its a ssl issue?

DJCheLu: I reread this entire thread and you're saying your new drive worked for awhile but now it's locking up occasionally?

Definitely sounds like SSL is running out of buffer which might be hardware related. It could also be system related. It almost sounds like the drive is spooling up when that happens or it's waiting on data. I would triple check your hdpam for sure or simply reinstall it. It's a bit like "I know it's plugged in so I can rule that out." I can't tell you the number of times I've thought that way only to figure out "oh, it really wasn't plugged in/installed properly" so at least do that first.

You might also want to try creating a new user and run SSL under that name to see if it continues to happen. Bad user data like fonts or corrupt preferences can be tricky to pin down which is why when I install new hardware or every year or so I always backup and install Mac OS X fresh on a drive.

I know it's a pain the ass to reinstall everything but when you clone a drive, you also bring over settings and other crap that may not be working properly to begin with especially if you've installed a lot of updates since. Starting fresh you can rule out a lot of problems especially if your clone is the system your Mac originally came with. But I wouldn't do that yet... try creating a new user and see if that doesn't solve the problem.

Yea all three times the audio dropped I pushed a cue or switched to the other deck and played the rest of my two hours with no problems at all. I will check and see if the hdpm is still working and try the new user too. Hopefully I don't have to make a time machine backup and reinstall that's takes hourssssssss lol.

Thanks for the quick help.

Is this spin down only causing issues with scorpio 7200rpm or 400 rpm ad well? what about the seagate momentus with the g technology which I believe is the same thing as wesyern digitals shock guard. Is this the isue addressed by apples hard drive firmware update 2.0 or the performance update 1.0?

Simple, easy way to see if your hard drive is affected by adverse "advanced power management" behavior: download and run SMARTUtility, click on the "Attributes" button, and see if "Load Cycle Count" exceeds "Power Cycle Count" by a huge proportion.

As far as I know, the APM issues (those causing drive slowdowns and fast accumulation of high load-cycle counts) only affect hard drives other than those shipped in Apple's laptops.

There have been other issues affecting use of "off-the-shelf" hard drives in Apple laptops:

- the built-in "anti-shock" in some hard drives can interact negatively with Apple's Sudden Motion Sensor. Solution there is either to shut off the Apple Sudden Motion Sensor or (better) use a hard drive that does not incorporate its own anti-shock technology

- the internal SATA bus in some of the 15-inch MacBook Pros is flaky, and doesn't work properly at 3gb/sec interface speed. I've personally seen this problem in a friend's mid-2009 15-inch MBP. Symptoms (after installing a new hard drive) were very slow, hesitant operation of anything drive-related (not just in Scratch Live), with frequent "beachballs" seen when doing anything involving drive reading. The only solution that fixed the problems was downgrading the computer's firmware...it's worked fine ever since, with two different Western Digital drives installed in the past 8 months.

Two simple system settings that will help prevent drive-access-related problems:

-in System Preferences/Energy Saver, make sure the checkbox for "put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is unchecked.

-in System Preferences/CDs & DVDs, set all five "when you insert..." options to "Ignore".

Thanks Dj mark. I have the mid 2009 regular macbook with an apple factory installed hitachi 320gb 5400rpm 8mb cache and it works great except for im outta room. Does the internal SATA bus problem of the mid 2009 mac pros affect the mid 2009 mac book as well? Also I am having trouble finding a replacement internal 640gb 8mb cache 5400 rpm that does not have its own shock guard technology. Do you know of any? Are the segate momentus ones any good? I have read about the apple sudden motion sensor and the hard drives shock guard not working together properly. But from my research it seems that the hitchi drive shipped in my macbook has this technology built in yet it works fine. Why would this work fine and not say a wd scorpio with shock guard?

Also Dj mark just downloaded the smartutility and my power cycle count raw value is 265 and the load cycle count raw value is 32,118. The value shown for power cycle count is100 and for load cycle it is 97. This is the first value in the columns. The worst values are also 100/97. Which number should I be paying attention to. Is this a problem because I've never heard any of the clicking or drive spin downs I;ve heard of yet there is a huge difference between my power cycle count and load cycle count raw values. This is a Hitachi drive that came with this macbook. Hitachi HTA543232L9SA02. Thanks.

It sounds like you may have the aforementioned Energy Saver preference set to "put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible". (?) The "raw" value is the relevant one for this purpose.

As I mentioned (and linked to) in the other thread, I recommend the 750-gig WD drive instead of the 640gb version due to faster overall speed.

i've had put hard drives to sleep set to never sice i got it last year. i did just change all the cd drive settings to never though.

Not sure what to think about your high load-cycle count then. Maybe even on some drives with Apple's custom firmware the problem with apm exists. Given Apple's history of occasionally letting fairly serious hardware goofs slip through, I wouldn't be especially surprised.

The WD 750-gig drive in my main laptop (17-inch i7 MBP, purchased on day of release in mid-April and immediately fitted with the 750-gig drive and "hdamp hacked") has 388 power-cycles and 1037 load-cycles as of this writing. I attribute the discrepancy to the times I've slept the computer...I assume sleeping would accumulate a load-cycle, but not a power-cycle. (?)

Ideally, load-cycle count should not increment at all with the machine running. Without the hdapm hack, you'll probably see the drive add a load-cycle every minute or two.

Here I see that a load cycle every minute or two is ok. In the past 45 minutes i've had 22 load cycles. Which would be ok right?

But is my load count too high for a year of light to med. use?

would using an external for music/serato help instead of my internal?

I don't know where you saw "that a load cycle every minute or two is ok"...it looks like you may have been quoting and misinterpreting part of a post I wrote some time ago.

I would personally *not* consider that okay, and as I said earlier I would try the hdapm thing and see if it changes the drive's behavior.

As far as I can see, placing drives in external enclosures and connecting via USB or Firewire seems to prevent load-cycle accumulation on those drives. This may vary depending on the exact technicalities of various enclosures, but I've seen that pretty consistently among a few different types I have. Whether or not to use an external drive for SSL is largely a matter of personal preference, but keep in mind that won't change the behavior (and possible effect on long-term reliability) of the internal drive without installing hdapm and creating its LaunchDaemon.

Hey mark what do you use to test your sata drive speed? I'm curious iif mine is not running what itts supposed to be at. Any links to a firmware downgrade tutorial if its needed?

Thanks for your help Dj Mark,

Dj mark I'm at a loss. My vsl has run out of buffer once every gig for the last 5. I tried 1.9:2 and 2.0. I tried using a different profile to check if my clone was corrupt but I can't figure out how to get access to my music from the other profile.

I turned off the hdapm in lingon and I'm going to try doing a 4 hour set and see if it runs out of buffer. I may have to reinstall osx with time machine and see if that helps.

Do you have one of the 2009 Unibody 15-inch MBP's?

I ask because your symptoms sound exactly like what I saw on a friend's machine after changing out the drive, and the fix was "downgrading" the computer's firmware.

That issue is entirely separate from the hdapm thing. Some MacBook Pros (I believe the problem is mainly with the mid-2009 15-inch model, though there may be others involved) misbehave when the internal SATA bus tries to run at 3.0gb/sec. The firmware "downgrade" I mentioned reduces the SATA bus speed to 1.5gb/sec (still more than fast enough for any mechanical hard drive) and stops the drive misbehavior.

Yea I have 09 mbp. How do I go about downgrading the firmware? I wonder how much the apple store charges to do this.

The safest advice is: have it done in the Apple Store. From all the postings I read about this issue on Apple's tech forums, it seems that the Genius Bar people are pretty aware of this particular issue. I believe the downgrade you want is EFI version 1.6.

There's patches findable online, but unless you're VERY sure of both your source and technical abilities, I'd recommend having the Apple Store people do it. If anything were to go wrong (or if someone were to post a malicious version of the patch), messing with the firmware could potentially "brick" the computer.

As to the charge... being that this is nothing more than a (rather lame) workaround for an otherwise unresolved hardware issue, it had better be $0.00! Seriously, if it was me and they tried charging for that, I'd raise a huge stink. Besides that, if you have a mid-09 MBP it might still be under the 1-year warranty anyway.

UPDATE: Spent an hour and a half at the genius bar tonight. The only tech who had even heard of this problem with needing to downgrade firmware helped me. He searched personal files and all of apples files and apparently came up with nothing.........

He said the last time he performed this fix or even heard of this problem was a few years ago. Well EFI 1.6 doesnt exist anymore.

So he said he will continue to look and email me if he finds something but he basically said im screwed and i should go back to the stock drive or my other 500gb that worked, and use an external firewire hd.

Well if i go to external its going to be a huge pain in the ass since i use itunes to organize.

Suggestions to try tomorrow on my day off? Fresh install and time machine restore (tech said my clone was sufficient)? Switching to ME to take advantage of the Mix launch feature??

This thread from the Apple Tech forums should get you started...

discussions.apple.com

More:

discussions.apple.com

I personally did the downgrade on my friend's machine myself. He has had no trouble with it since, with two different replacement drives (the second one was just because he needed more space).

Recent versions of iTunes are a lot better in this respect. If you point iTunes to use your library on an external drive, make sure you enable the "copy files over" preference so when you add more files, your library congregates together. Previously, if you didn't have your external drive plugged in and you ran iTunes, it would conveniently forget about the external and revert back. Seems newer versions use the library on the internal drive until the external drive is plugged in again. That complicates things a little if you don't remember to plug in your drive when adding new files.

I personally like external drives and never store anything on an internal laptop drive if I can help it (in general keeping things off the boot drive is a good idea, even on a desktop). They're more of a pain in the ass to carry around and find external power, but it's peanuts compared to carrying crates of vinyl.

External drives also have the advantage of being faster and if you go with the bigger 3.5" drive, have more capacity and are usually built a little better. They'll be subjected to less heat since they're not so close to the laptops internals and it won't work as hard because it won't be constantly seeking back and forth competing with random system files, such as the system's virtual memory (which is where SSD has a nice speed advantage). And if you need to rebuild your system, a crash doesn't take out your library too.

hrmm.. is the HDAPM utility needed on the new 2010 i5/i7 Macbook's?

also some fuel for the fire from another thread:

"ome of that report is the result of a misunderstanding:

my Load_Cycle_Count is now at 718,694. this is very bad because the
average Load_Cycle_count before failure for most hard disks is 600,000.

This is simply not true. Most laptop drives have a specification that
says that it should survive approximately half a million
spin-up/spin-down. But Load_Cycle_Count is not spin-up/spin-down (which
is tracked by Start_Stop_Count instead). Most drives specs don't say
anything about the expected number of "load_cycle" that the drive is
expected to survive. This high number of load_cycle is because the
drive aggressively moves (unloads) the head away from the disk after
a very short time of idleness. It does this not so much to save power
as to avoid crashing the head against the disk in case of a shock.
I.e. this number is high so as to avoid data loss.

Other drives only unload the heads when the disk spins up/down, so on
some drives Start_Stop_Count=Load_Cycle_Count. Yet others don't even
bother to report Load_Cycle_Count.
"

Well after reading all these pages, i attempted to revert to 1.6 firmware a few times without success. After researching i found that my unibody mbp is on EFI 1.8 and is a late 2008 model as shown in this pic.
i735.photobucket.com

I tried using Snow Leopard Cache cleaner deep cleaning option and repairing disk with snow install cd.

Well i recorded exactly what is happening to me through this video. This happens every gig at random times, usually the waveform will disappear and the record position indicator will still be moving, in this video it occurred when i loaded a new track but it happens when im not even touching the keyboard at all with a track playing as well.

www.vimeo.com view

BEFORE YOU SAY its the videos im using. This happens with any random video including if i just mixed with all smashvidz videos. I also tried using the ME demo and before time ran out on it it still happened. I spent all day today trying different things.

Im going to make a new post and see if i can get any help on this issue, i need it fixed before this weekend......

whoa... my early 2009 unibody has 482216 raw value! this is the OEM drive..... guess I should install the hack? Load cyccle value/worst is only 52/52

yup... up to 482227 in only a few minutes... fack!

anyone else have this problem with their OEM drive??? Not many options at this point other than to replace the drive...

load cycle is meaningless.. you should be looking at start-stop count

I though this whole thread was about load cycles? The start/stop count is around 4000

it is.. but everyone failed to read my post that explained why load cycles is a bunch of BS :)

yea, I actually did re-read your post, thanks, some good info! I have noticed a few beachballs here and there when accessing finder and so on. But no problems in Scratchlive or VSL - maybe the odd hang up when searching for a track.

I've been looking at hybrid SSD drives lately....hmmmmm. Maybe that's a new thread