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General discussion

any Tips for using an external HD on an iBook?

Feb 4, 2007 12:34PM PST

So I was finally forced to get an external hard drive after talking about it for oh so long, these many months. I needed it for video editing to make up for the tiny 28 gig HD my iBook came with.

Did I say TINY in reference to 28 gigs? Well, me mums old powerbook c190 came with a 500 mg HD... but my, how times have changed!

Anyway, I'm trying to do an iMovie project on this drive (a western digital my book premium edition 250 gig model with firewire 400 which is the main connection, and USB 2) but rendering the movie transitions and such seems slower than usual. Are there tricks to best make use of an external hard drive that would make my life easier? Is the fact that I'm using an external 19 inch monitor drawing valuable computing resources away from my project?

Another question... can I / should I... use disc utilities on the drive? Do permissions need checked on the new drive periodically?

Another question... how can I move my hardly accessed iPhoto and iTunes collections over to the new HD? How can I leave my frequently accessed collections on my notebooks' HD? How will I access these folders in the future?

I will do my own research into these matters but other's advice is always welcome. Happy

thanks in advance.

grim

Discussion is locked

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I forgot to add iBook specs...
Feb 4, 2007 12:42PM PST

12 inch iBook
1.2 ghz G4
512 RAM (yeah, not very much I know)

OS 10.4.8

BTW... how much drain does dashboard widgets place on the ram and processor? Looking at iStat Pro as it reads out CPU processes, I notice widgets popping up all the time. Should I disable (all 10 of) them?

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iTunes and iPhoto
Feb 4, 2007 8:57PM PST

Grim,

COPY your itunes library over to the new drive. Launch iTunes while holding down the option key. This should cause iTunes to ask if you want to create a new library or use an existing one. Choose existing, and browse to your external and the library you copied.
This, apparently, only works in iTunes 7 and above.
A similar shortcut works for iPhoto as well.

I will leave it to others to discuss the merits, or otherwise, of using an external for movie editing

P

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(NT) Thank you!
Feb 5, 2007 8:43AM PST
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(NT) No Problems
Feb 5, 2007 9:27AM PST
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So... should it be this slow?
Feb 5, 2007 2:34PM PST

I loaded a back up disc of various files from a back up DVD I had burnt last summer on my external dvd burner. It was aprox 2.9 gigs of info. I stuck it into my internal drive (cd burner/dvd reader) opened it up and draged the files onto the open window for my new hard drive... it took about an hour for the files to transfer. Should it have taken this long? Seemed excessive to me.

Connection made via ieee 1394 (firewire 400).

Am I doing something wrong?

grim

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Does seem a little excessive
Feb 5, 2007 8:53PM PST

I doubt you are doing anything wrong, but.

The average DVD reader does not fly along at 52X like your trusty CD reader/burner. The average DVD device only reads around 8X, which will make for slow data transfer.

Maybe Bob knows the data transfer rate of an 8X DVD

P

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Upon further contemplation of the speed issue
Feb 6, 2007 3:31AM PST

... I do believe the playback speed of the optical drive is the raeson for the slow through put to the external HD. When I get time, I will need to look up all the numbers for the various devices. I will also have to investigate how long it takes to drag similar file sizes to the iBooks internal HD as well.

Thanks for the feed back!

grim

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DVD Speed is Different Than CD Speed
Feb 9, 2007 12:47AM PST

Your forgetting that 1x DVD speed equals about 9x CD speed.

1x DVD = 1353 KB/s

1x CD = 150 KB/s

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Quite right,
Feb 9, 2007 3:10AM PST

I forgot about that. thanks


P

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Sooo... my DVD reads at 8x speed
Feb 9, 2007 10:55AM PST

my 12 inch iBook - M9623LL/A - has a DVD read time of 8x (24x for CD)...

So how do I figure the actual through put?

What does the "8x" figure actually mean?

Sorry folks... I'm an artist not a hardware/mathmatician. Wink

grim

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8x
Feb 9, 2007 12:47PM PST

So, doing a little math:

8x = 1353 x 8 = 10,824 KB/s = roughly 10.8 MB/s

And the CD Speed:

24x = 150 x 24 = 3600 KB/s = 3.6 MB/s

Hope that clears it up.

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So let me get this straight ...
Feb 10, 2007 4:11AM PST
"1x DVD = 1353 KB/s "

breaks down to... a DVD drive, at 1x speed reads kilobytes at the rate of 1353 kilobits per second.

The denotation "8 x" indicates that the drive is capable of multiplying the normal rate of 1353 KB / s by a factor of 8 which would equal the "roughly 10.8 MB/s" you mentioned.

1353 Kb x 8 "speed" = 10824 Kb/s

1048576 Kb (total Kb in one Gb) / 10824 = 96.875092387288 seconds to read one Gigabyte of information.

My original backup disc had 2.9 Gigabytes of information on it so...

the DVD drive has the potential to read the whole disc in a time period of 96.875092387288 seconds x 2.9 Gigabytes = 280.937767923135 seconds.

Lets call it 281 seconds... divided by 60 would equal 4 minutes and 41 seconds.

If all my assumptions and my math is correct?... the bottleneck is not the DVD drive!

I am no math whiz so please tell me if I messed up the calculations somewhere please.

1 gigabyte = 1 048 576 kilobytes
or
1 gigabyte = 1 024 megabytes

next specs to look at the external hard drive...

Western Digital
My Book? Premium Edition?
model WDG1C2500 External Hard Drives 250 GB, Dual Interface


Performance Specifications
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)

Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)

Serial Transfer Rate
FireWire 400
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394a) 400 Mbits/s (Max)

USB 2.0
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mbits/s (Max)



Anyone want to do the honors? My math skill are only matched by my understanding of the hardware...
In other words, MY BRAIN HURTS Grin

grim
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Is it the computer or the drive that slows you down...?
Feb 11, 2007 6:36AM PST

If the problem is that you are doing work in iMovie and transitions/effects are slow, that's because youriBook has a slow CPU and a weak video card. If you are unhappy that it takes forever to copy work files from the DVD to your hard drive, well a faster external drive can speed up transfers by up to 20% (from 4800/5400 rpm drives to 7200 rpm drives with bigger buffers). A fast external drive via Firewire is a good idea for editing video anyway, if only because you need a lot of scratch room for the work files and video is a space-hog.

On the other hand, rendering times depend on the CPU, video card and RAM, in that order, not the hard disk. The real bottleneck in your iBook is the 128MB ATI built-in video, which isn't strong enough to do fast renders, and you can do nothing about that but buy a newer Mac. However, you should get at least another GB of RAM to help it along, and that will do a little for you.

I gave up on video editing on my 1.4GHz iBook and bought a Mac Pro. The Mac Pro's video processing is at least 10X the speed of the laptop (which, by the way, is little more than a year old). But that's how Apple was building iBooks, not for video but for less difficult tasks. Video technology has always been the weakest aspect of Mac consumer laptops.

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hey Grim
Feb 19, 2007 2:53AM PST

Long time no type, hows the bears?

Your math is correct, but represents a perfect world, and I think they've stopped making those.

Use the Firewire, not the usb2. Firewire is faster for sustained transfers (big files) than usb2. The 480 is a peak figure, and usb2 chokes on the big stuff. Firewire does not.

Some burners work better with some disks. Disks get dirty. Try a commercial DVD. They are made differently than burned DVDs and are easier for your drive to read. You should get a number closer to your perfect world figure, if the DVD itself is the culprit.

If your computer is sharing it's memory with the video card, a large screen might slow things down as you run out of ram. If you have dedicated video ram, it should make no difference.

Gabba Gabba Hey!

Lampie

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Hey Bro
Feb 19, 2007 8:43AM PST

still living in a three ring circus kind of world? Doing the light shows and other stuff still?

I'm finishing up another degree (that the state paid for after getting hurt 3 years ago). Doing an internship for a guy named Bob Tinnell. He is doing online comics now but back in the day was responsible for that all time classic SURF NAZIS MUST DIE

Interesting gig and he is an alright guy.

Hope things are still good deep in the heart of Texas!

Hey Ho, Let's Go!

grim and bearing it!

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Hi Doctor Photo... to answer your questions...
Feb 23, 2007 2:14AM PST

Western digital hard drives (at least the one I recently bought) came with 2 mac disc images... WD Backup.dmg and WD Button Manager Software.dmg. I have yet to actually use either of them and do not know how useful they are.

"Now do I format the disk mac extended and journaled?"... I would hesitate to reformat the external drive. It comes formatted as FAT 32 by default and I have had no problems using it with my G4 iBook so far... nor received any advice to reformat the drive to increase efficiency. Some tech whiz may have different advice but no one has spoke up yet to me.

Hooking up your drive via firewire should suffice. I have seen repeated posts where expert mac users have said the mac os system performs better with external HDs connected with firewire than via USB. I don't know why this is the case, but I tend to take their advice... especially Peter's advice (MrMacFixit). I have connected my WD drive to my PC as well and had no problems in transferring files both to and from either operating systems onto the external HD so far.

As of this afternoon, this is the current link to the Western Digital FAQ database for apple / mac users I hope this can help.

If you hesitate to use the backup utilities provided by WD (as I have done) then you might look into several synch utilities for backing up and deleting duplicate files and folders. I go nuts trying to keep track of the same/different folders that travel with me from work to school... back to work... and then home... on my USB thumb drives. If I forget to synch them manually, then I invariably end up with several copies of the same thumb drive disc image on my desktop. One recent search for solutions had me find this little utility called...

SyncTwoFolders

It is free to use and looks fairly powerful... of course any utility that says it will delete anything automatically should be experimented with first using copies... until you are comfortable with it. Don't understand the french instructions? Use Alta Vista Babel Fish to translate the page (expect some inaccuracies).

Thanks for the email and a bit of friendly advice... turn your email this member link on in your cnet member profile. Your actual email address will remain anonymous but with the link turned on, it will allow members to respond back to you when you contact one of us or someone has input or an inquiry for you. Happy I would not hesitate to email you back from my own personal email addy except for the fact that you are a new member and could just as easily be phishing. I hope you understand. Happy
Welcome to cnet forums and hope you find the site useful and fun!

Go Steelers!
Go Mountaineers!

grim