music on external hard drive skips

  On 4/18/2010 at 4:02 PM, oscillik said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 3:59 PM, chaosmachine said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 3:38 PM, oscillik said:

it must've been saving the files to a memory buffer or something and then writing the data afterwards - it is physically impossible to write data at the end of the drive if you're reading data from the beginning of the drive. i'm just quoting the laws of physics here

 

Drives can read and write "at once" without any problem. In reality, they're just bouncing back and forth between different sectors fast enough to keep up with multiple operations.

 

The average hard drive can jump between two sections of the disk in under 10ms (this is called seek time). It's no problem for a disk to read a few kb of the track you're listening to into the audio player's buffer and decompress a huge zip file at the same time.

so you're just confirming what i said - it is physically impossible for one drive head to be in two places at once

But thats what computers do anyway

Only 1 operation can take place per core at any one time.

someone explian the RAID stuff, it might help, no??? probably not necessary just to play mp3...

  On 4/18/2010 at 5:14 PM, THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON said:

someone explian the RAID stuff, it might help, no??? probably not necessary just to play mp3...

seriously, you don't wanna go do that road

  On 4/18/2010 at 4:19 PM, oscillik said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 4:07 PM, chaosmachine said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 4:02 PM, oscillik said:

so you're just confirming what i said - it is physically impossible for one drive head to be in two places at once

 

It's true, but that has no bearing on the ability of the drive to read and write to multiple files at the same time.

 

Here's a cool demonstration of just how fast hard drives really are.

 

[youtubehd]jbqPBcMVARE[/youtubehd]

 

The movement is so fast the arm literally appears to be in multiple places at once.

 

  Quote

i know that it's pretty impossible for a hard drive to read data from the beginning of the drive while simultaneously writing data to the middle of the drive.

 

I guess it really depends on what your definition of simultaneous is. It's definitely simultaneous from the user's perspective. From a physical perspective, obviously the arm is only in one place at once. Again, this has no bearing on how many files a hard drive can read and write to at once. Drives are sufficiently fast enough to read and write many files simultaneously, it should, for the most part, cause no problems for the user.

flawless victory!

reminds me that stuff that's hanging out at the end of some galaxy...

  On 4/18/2010 at 5:17 PM, oscillik said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 5:14 PM, THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON said:

someone explian the RAID stuff, it might help, no??? probably not necessary just to play mp3...

seriously, you don't wanna go do that road

so now i can't use planes and not even roads??? fuck you

what am i gonna do, swim???

I have an external MyBook RAID drive that I have connected through firewire. (Does yours have firewire or just USB? Because firewire might give you a better burst speed, which would solve your problem) I do think it's a buffering issue. I've had it happen before. Are you listening to flacs or just straight up normal bitrate mp3s? I don't really get much skipping with my music... the only thing it'll do is take a while to spin up and start playing a track, but that's normal. I do however get skipping when I try to stream HD video files from my external, which is probably the same problem you are having except just with music.

  On 4/20/2010 at 5:09 AM, serendipity said:

I have an external MyBook RAID drive that I have connected through firewire. (Does yours have firewire or just USB? Because firewire might give you a better burst speed, which would solve your problem) I do think it's a buffering issue. I've had it happen before. Are you listening to flacs or just straight up normal bitrate mp3s? I don't really get much skipping with my music... the only thing it'll do is take a while to spin up and start playing a track, but that's normal. I do however get skipping when I try to stream HD video files from my external, which is probably the same problem you are having except just with music.

i'm not sure if it is firewire-ready; i'll look in the box it came in... listening to normal-bitrate mp3s... it also takes a while to add a folder to foobar2000

i updated my audio driver which was apparently "urgent..." yet to discover whether the skipping will continue

Hey tht tne...

I recently bought an 80 gig TEAC external hard drive for the sole purpose of storing music...it uses one USB port, hooks up to the laptop I use, etc., etc...

Anyway, I started noticing that I would be playing an album from iTunes and the tracks would skip to the next track seconds into playing the one I was on...the whole file was there and everything, it would just jump from track to track, at the same points, no matter what I did. It's extremely distressing and I know the hard drive is the culprit.

For right now, I'm downloading and opening .zip and .rar files onto the laptop first, and then transferring them to the external hard drive afterward. I can't say for sure if this is solving the problem as I haven't been able to test it much yet, but I hope it is...

It seems like whenever the hard drive has to perform functions beyond storing it starts messing things up. I'm sure it's evident how little I know about computers from what I'm saying here, but for some reason it seems like if the file is placed in its entirety on the computer's hard drive first, and then is copied to the external hard drive within which it hopefully won't have to go through any future operations/modifications beyond playing and retrieving music, it will be ok. I hope. No matter what I feel for you man.

I think I'm going to begin the arduous process of copying all that music to CDs. The only problem would be if the albums I'm copying are already "skipping"...

Luv the new avatar, chaos.

Interesting to see some people in this thread weighing in with their opinions that are wrong and formed with limited knowledge. Kudos to chaosmachine for bringing things back to reality.

As for tht tne's problem, firewire is not going to make a differance. There's more than enough throughput on usb1 let alone 2, to play music off.

Does this happen using other media players? Are the skips always in the same place? If so, if you copy the music onto your pc's main harddrive/s and then play it are the skips still there?

As Awepittance said, if you can't stand the thought of losing or ruining your music, I would back it up now. If you don't have another drive with ~800gb of free space then at least generate a text list of the files so you can redownload them easier.

i think i finally figured out what was wrong which is that i had the hd plugged into a usb hub and now that i've put it straight into a port w/o hub it's fine

  On 5/17/2010 at 9:47 PM, chaosmachine said:

i didn't realize that was contraindicated

  On 4/18/2010 at 5:04 PM, chassis said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 4:02 PM, oscillik said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 3:59 PM, chaosmachine said:

  On 4/18/2010 at 3:38 PM, oscillik said:

it must've been saving the files to a memory buffer or something and then writing the data afterwards - it is physically impossible to write data at the end of the drive if you're reading data from the beginning of the drive. i'm just quoting the laws of physics here

 

Drives can read and write "at once" without any problem. In reality, they're just bouncing back and forth between different sectors fast enough to keep up with multiple operations.

 

The average hard drive can jump between two sections of the disk in under 10ms (this is called seek time). It's no problem for a disk to read a few kb of the track you're listening to into the audio player's buffer and decompress a huge zip file at the same time.

so you're just confirming what i said - it is physically impossible for one drive head to be in two places at once

But thats what computers do anyway

Only 1 operation can take place per core at any one time.

This has nothing to do with the cpu though. Say you created a new type of hard drive that could read and write from two different places literally at the same time(in parallel). You would still be able to write drivers for a single core cpu to manipulate it. Also your statement is misleading. Each piece of hardware can be simulatneously doing something, like the audio chip can be playing back something from a buffer, while the cd drive reads a track into memory. Modern Operating Systems.

btw backup your files. If you don't have a backup of your music on a different physical place, you deserve to lose everything