can changing a hard drive affect logic's sound?

R

rainguitar

Logician
Hi,

I just bought a Lacie d2 Quadra hard drive for my system that I intend to use as my time machine backup drive. As I write this it is backing up my whole system via firewire 800 diasy-chained to the G tech firewire 800 drive that I use for Logic. I decided to do some work in Logic while this was going on and I was greeted with serious sound distortion. I changed applications and discovered that the distortion is pretty much system wide. Changing the settings on my apogee control panel has no effect. Can an external hard drive cause this? I bought the Lacie d2 quadra drive because it was supposed to be extremely quiet.
 
A couple of things to look at:

How many devices are on the port?
How long are the total cable lengths between all devices.
What is the order of the devices
What is your Logic I/O buffer size
 
rainguitar said:
Hi,

I just bought a Lacie d2 Quadra hard drive for my system that I intend to use as my time machine backup drive. As I write this it is backing up my whole system via firewire 800 diasy-chained to the G tech firewire 800 drive that I use for Logic. I decided to do some work in Logic while this was going on and I was greeted with serious sound distortion. I changed applications and discovered that the distortion is pretty much system wide. Changing the settings on my apogee control panel has no effect. Can an external hard drive cause this? I bought the Lacie d2 quadra drive because it was supposed to be extremely quiet.
Click to expand...

Is your audio interface a Firewire device? Is it hooked up to the same FW interface as your hard drives? Your mileage may vary, but that can certainly introduce clicks'n'pops, especially if the drive's busy.
 
I have experienced something similar with my Apogee Duet. One major difference between our set-ups is that my Logic drive is an internal eSata so, my Firewire bus is not being taxed.
I noticed that system wide audio was distorting as if going thru a "bit-Crusher" plug-in.
Unplugging/re-connecting my Apogee Duet seemed to reset the it and cleared up the issue. Also, re-starting the computer reset it as well, (which doesn't help you as you are doing a Time-Machine back-up at the same time.)
I might suggest to not hook up the TM drive when you want to use Logic, if that works for you.
 
I solved the problem--after I did the massive TM backup via firewire 800--by simply using usb from then on. Everything is fine now but I wish I'd just bought a straight usb drive. Would have been cheaper. Live and learn I guess.
 
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