Just wondering if anyone out there has used or is using a bus powered extrnl hd to run all your music from. I'm looking to purchase one so I can move my crates there and have them nice and portable. What I'm concerned about is whether or not the USB bus is going to get overloaded with the music coming from the ext hd, powering the ext hd and running serato on it as well resulting in USB dropouts. I realize that getting an ac powered ext hd would prevent that, but I would ideally like to be able to just carry around a small hd with no extra cables if possible.

Hello Thread,

Although some bus powered drives work well on some machines running SSL there is no way to know it its going to be a problem without trying it out.

I can say that, generally, using a bus powered external will cause issues.

I'm running an external bus powered HD without any problems. The main thing you have to be sure of is that your laptop is capable of powering the HD properly. I know it doesn't power up on my PPC PowerBook but works flawlessly on my MacBook Pro. The other thing to be aware of is that there are issues if you're running a Mac with Leopard v10.5.3 and above if the external is formatted FAT32. There is considerable lag in reading files which could have adverse performance when reading tracks. Until this is fixed I'm running 10.5.2 and haven't had any issues. Hope this helps some...

I currently use a 5 year old macbook pro and it is more than sufficient for the time being.... as my mobile DJ business grows I have employees that ask what computers to get and what specs should be getting within their computer. Having the experience i have had with my macbook i steer them to the macs...... Mac has just released a new line of laptop computers but only the pro versions have the FIREWIRE inputs now which we use for the external music drive....they used to come on the Macbooks also and now they don't. What I am asking... Is there any difference, or will there be a delay when using a computer that is receiving music from an external drive via USB... I feel the macbook pros are a steep price for some of my newer DJ's. I don't want to compromise performance what-so-ever. Would someone who has experience with this situation help me....
Thank You
Anthony

Hey Anthony,

There are many users that have usb drives and they run fine.

If given the option I would go with the firewire port but I'm sure the usb port on the new Macbooks would work fine.

In the future.. please post your issue or questions in your own thread so we can keep the current discussion on track. Thanks!

I have used an external hd before but ive found it takes ages to load each track so its best just to keep all your music on the laptop its self maybe par the hard drive off

Thanx for the advice all, i've run a few sessions on both a Mac pro and an Acer laptop with the usb bus powering the drive and so far no problems. I ended up getting a vantec nexstar sx usb 2.0 case with a Seagate 7200 rpm 2.5' drive which ended up being around $140 can, just in case anyone is wondering. One word to mention though is that the drive came with GPT partitioning on it, which is a nightmare to deal with in XP. If you google GPT in xp there's many links to show u how to delete it using the command prompt which is the only way. Also another note is that in xp you can't format an HD to fat32 anymore, unless you use command prompt as well. If anyone needs, I can post a link with a good site to help with that.

I do have another question though in regards to managing crates on an external drive.

I have copied all my music along with my crates on to the external, relinked the two of them so everything is groovy. Currently am running Serato off of my internal laptops HD and was planning on using the external just to use on other peoples laptop's. However, I'm finding (and maybe someone can help with this) is that any changes I make to the local crates on my laptop, will mean I have to copy them to the external along with the new music. But will that mean I will have to relink the entire crate to its music again as opposed to serato seeing that the crate only has a few new tracks???

Is there a better way to run both local and external crates without having to relink every time I update the external?

Please help. Thnx.

Not really. The crate files on the internal drive store information that tells SSL that the tracks have been imported from location A on your internal drive.
If you move the crate files from your internal to the external you will need to use the 'relocate lost files' feature to have SSL locate the files on your external.

I think the easiest thing for you to do would be to store all of your music on your external and always plug in that external when using SSL.

That way you won't need to move files from your internal to external ever.
Any changes you make to the files in SSL will be stored on the external and will show up when you plug it into any computer.

why can't I drag the folder which all of my music is contained in (which itself contains folders ie. genres)on to the relocate button and have my music re-linked that way. It says no missing files when I do that, unless i drag the individual genre folders to the relocate button then it will link them. ?

I'm pretty sure this is just a bug in the 1.8.1 and 1.8.2 versions.

If your using version 1.8.2 then just click the relocate lost files tab for it to search all the drives connected. It should pick the files up then.