external hard drive slow to start capture, what's wrong?

H

half man half centau

Member
OK, so I bought the LaCie 250G external because it was cheap. got it home, and it would take about 20 minutes to start capturing a clip. I took it back and told Best Buy it was a piece of garbage. I then got this WD 250G Book hard drive. 7200 rpm 8mb cache(same specs as the other WD and Seagate external drives I've been using for a long time). I start to try to capture and the same thing happens. If I log a 40 second clip, it only takes a few seconds to start the capture, but if I put in something longer, it takes about 5 minutes to start.
Am I not doing something right when I change my scratch disks? I can't think of anything else that I usually do. I frequently go back and forth between my other externals, but they are older. Do I need a new driver or something for this hard drive?
thanks in advance
 
First of all...I would go back and get the Lacie back....MUCH BETTER than the WD Crapola....

This thing used to happen to me all the time when I got a new drive. The solution is quite simple. In theory you can grab any external drive and start to capture in FCP but it doesn't always work. The best thing to do with a new external drive is to open the Disk Utility folder found in the Applications folder. Once you open it...erase the driveand create a new volume. This should fix your problem from the get go.
 
Super8 said:
First of all...I would go back and get the Lacie back....MUCH BETTER than the WD Crapola....

This thing used to happen to me all the time when I got a new drive. The solution is quite simple. In theory you can grab any external drive and start to capture in FCP but it doesn't always work. The best thing to do with a new external drive is to open the Disk Utility folder found in the Applications folder. Once you open it...erase the driveand create a new volume. This should fix your problem from the get go.
Click to expand...

thank you i will try that.
 
same thing has happened to me - sometimes FCP attempts to calculate the full scope of the capture and gets a little weird if it's a big chunk (allocating disc space, I think - sometimes you can see it in the disc info while the capture is preparing). Super 8 had a good suggestion, I just thought I'd commiserate with you. Heh.
 
Just curious, is your computer set to 'Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible' in the Energy Preferences? Try unchecking that and see what happens.
 
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