imjackarbor Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 Hello, I have had insanely debilitating performance issues with Logic that has nearly made it impossible to make music. After almost two months of constant playback issues, popping, cracking, system overloads, and insane HDD spikes (even with barebone stems), I think I'm coming to the conclusion that my external drive is just extremely slow for audio production and is (at least) partly responsible for why my Logic Pro sessions have AWFUL performance issues. I have a WD 5TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive HDD that runs at 5,400 RPM and advertises up to a 5GB/s speed, but I ran a speed test with it being connected to USB 3.0 and it averaged around 58MB/s for read and write. Terrible, right? Although, I am not exactly sure why, because it is more or less brand new, and consulting the CNET actual review with read and write speeds around 95MB/s read and 102MB/s write. It's formatted as an exFAT, and has 4.8TB free of the 5TB. I own a 2020 MacBook Pro 13 inch 8GB (M1 chip) running on macOS Monterey with a 256GB SSD with 150GB available. My questions are: 1. Do my playback issues sound in line with a slow hard drive? 2. Is my hard drive too slow for audio production as it is? Is it too slow even at 95-102MB/s? 3. If so, do you know any way I can make it run quicker? 4. If I can't and have to ditch the hard drive, any suggestions for the kind of specs I'd need to look for? Any recommendations for particular units? Thank you all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 Firstly, don't use ExFAT formatted drives with Macs - properly format them with the Mac filesystem. How is the drive connected? Is it on something like USB2? How many audio tracks are you trying to use in your projects? A SSD will work way better than spinning rust drives, for the most part, so either record/playback from your internal SSD, or try to get an external SSD connected via USB3 or similar, for best performance... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imjackarbor Posted February 13, 2022 Author Share Posted February 13, 2022 Firstly, don't use ExFAT formatted drives with Macs - properly format them with the Mac filesystem. How is the drive connected? Is it on something like USB2? How many audio tracks are you trying to use in your projects? A SSD will work way better than spinning rust drives, for the most part, so either record/playback from your internal SSD, or try to get an external SSD connected via USB3 or similar, for best performance... It is connected through a ZMUIPNG hub USB-C connector on my MacBook which was pretty cheap off Amazon. It is running through USB 3.0. The number of tracks I am running is no less than 30. Perfect example I can give you is throwing 30 stem files into Logic and trying to run them and getting an immediate HDD usage of 100% and back to back overloads. For dry, untainted stems! With a current project I'm working on, it has 6 tracks, and 3 audio recorded ones. As a little test, I first opened the project on my MacBook hard drive and it ran perfectly fine. Okay HDD usage. Yet, when opening the same exact project but from my external drive, I get a bunch of system overloads, and pressing play or skipping around the track sends the usage to 100%. So I'm deducing that part of my performance issues are coming from my crappy external hard drive. Now, I notice you say that my external hard drive is formatted wrong, do you think that could be the issue? My buddy is gonna come home from work soon and run the external drive on his MacBook, and if speeds are normal/it doesn't overrun, I can deduce it's just my dock. However, if it still runs terribly, I can assume it's the drive itself, correct? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fisherking Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 get a new drive, format it correctly (APFS for your modern mac OS), then copy your files to it. plug it directly into your mac (no hub). obviously, an SSD, or a 7200rpm hard drive will be faster. but i work on older projects sometimes off of a seagate external (5400rpm) and have never had any speed issues... EDIT: as a test, copy a project to your internal drive, run it from that copy. any difference? this could help you pinpoint where the issue is. and, are you running logic native, or in rosetta2? ie are you using 3rd-party plugins that need rosetta?... EDIT2: you could move EVERYTHING off of the external to the internal, reformat the external correctly, then copy everything back... before buying a new external drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imjackarbor Posted February 13, 2022 Author Share Posted February 13, 2022 (edited) EDIT: as a test, copy a project to your internal drive, run it from that copy. any difference? this could help you pinpoint where the issue is. and, are you running logic native, or in rosetta2? ie are you using 3rd-party plugins that need rosetta?... EDIT2: you could move EVERYTHING off of the external to the internal, reformat the external correctly, then copy everything back... before buying a new external drive. Yes, I have tried running a copy from the external to the internal and the result is fairly conclusive. The internal MacBook drive has a much more stable HDD usage that doesn't automatically smack the ceiling and stays consistent with its usage. The same cannot be said for my external drive, which is so inconsistent with usage it's borderline unusable. I'm running Logic native. So it seems I have formatted the drive incorrectly, which would make sense as to why a native Apple product would have so much trouble constantly reading, writing, and storing data successfully. Perhaps it could be to blame for crashes, corruptions with recorded audio files, and the like? I'm going to test my external drive on my buddy's computer, and if it still runs terribly, then I can deduce it is in fact the drive and will reformat it before I give up and buy a new drive. If it runs smoothly on his computer, then perhaps it could be the way it is connected to my Mac? I definitely agree with you though, reformatting the external drive should be first priority. Do you have any guide on how to reformat it properly? EDIT: There was one time about a month ago where the drive got pulled out accidentally and wouldn't remount and I had to completely wipe the drive. Perhaps that could've filled the drive with bad sectors? Edited February 13, 2022 by imjackarbor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fisherking Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 it doesn't matter how it runs on another mac, it's the wrong format... and should be corrected. https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-and-reformat-a-storage-device-dskutl14079/mac you want APFS: https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/file-system-formats-dsku19ed921c/21.0/mac/12.0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
triplets Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 So I'm deducing that part of my performance issues are coming from my crappy external hard drive. Not only is the drive too slow for audio purposes, the fact that you're using a Windows format with Logic can lead to project corruption. You wanna reformat that drive as soon as possible before you lose your Logic projects because of data corruption. This is no joke. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imjackarbor Posted February 13, 2022 Author Share Posted February 13, 2022 it doesn't matter how it runs on another mac, it's the wrong format... and should be corrected. https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-and-reformat-a-storage-device-dskutl14079/mac you want APFS: https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/file-system-formats-dsku19ed921c/21.0/mac/12.0 Right on. Ok. I will reformat it sometime today or tomorrow and return back with results. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fisherking Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 don't forget to copy the data elsewhere first... so you can copy it back after re-formatting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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