WD frewire drive not performing.

[Sidhu]

So i went and got myself a WD '250GB 'My Book' external drive, with a USB2 and FW400 interface, and a Texas instruments based PCMCIA FW cardbus.

This is for my Pro Tools M-powered setup, with the M-audio 1814 interface. Daisychaining of the External drive with the 1814 is not recommended.

Im in hell.

Problem 01

The WD does not show up if connected via the cardbus. However, it does show up, and work, when hooked to the laptops internal 4 pin FW port.

And the M-audio 1814 does register and work when hooked to the cardbus, so i swapped the connections.

Problem 02

The performance is no go. At 12 tracks of recording, 256-512 buffers, the drive cant keep up. On ramdom runs i got 'There is not enough CPU power....' errors.

There is a large interval when i press spacebar to start recording, and after say bout 10 minutes of recording, when i stop, another 15-30 seconds are taken for PT to come to an idle state.

If i were to try to playback the recorded material (12-16) tracks, I often just stall PT, with it not being able to enable playback. This is all off the WD external.

ironically, with an AB comparison at 8 tracks, the internal drive when written to, works very well, also considering it is a 5400 rpm disk. The external just barely keeps up.

Solutions ?

I an running all of this off the HP business nx6115 laptop. Turion64, with a gig of ram. Now while Turions are not supported at digidesign, I am facing no issues running a slightly lower trackcount, upto 8, off the internal drive (tested performance of writing 8 tracks to the FW drive is much lower vis-a-vis the internal). So i am inclined to think the laptop really isnt an issue.

My second problem could lie with the cardbus, but since i am not running the WD of it either, i fail to see any problems, barring a HD compatibility issue, and the 1814 is running just fine off it when im recording to the internal drive.

Could it jut be the Western Digital My Book ? I also read on a post, about some issue with SP2 rendering the FW400 driver useless ? But this thought was then negated.

I would really appreciate the help!


Cheers!
Sidhu