What other thing could you try but replace the HDD? That's the only replacable thing in the machine.
Totally agree with you Mark that the HD seems to be the easiest part to replace (aside from the work Chris and Doug do).
My point as I have conveyed it to Chris via PM is that personally I find it irresponsible of anyone to just say to replace a hard drive without any reason other that it sounds like a good idea.
I know you had a bad experience with your unit of which i'm sure there are bound to be others. It just seems to me that the replace hard drive answer is just alot of us guessing and not really knowing what the true problem is or where the problem is happening. That is all i'm trying to get to the bottom of. What is the true problem and where is the true part or section of the units that are causing or contributing to the problem. Up until this point we still don't have an answer just alot of guesses.
dave, i don't get why you're waving this flag so fervently today? edirol themselves don't have the definitive answer. you've spoken with ted rosen recently, and you correctly assessed that he knows what he's doing. he's as stumped as any of us as to why this is happening, but brainstorming with him one night about potential solutions to the issue, he said something along the lines of "of course a larger disk cache might help the problem -- the unit has more wiggle room!" but he stopped short of recommending that i hack the unit myself, as i'm sure he can't advise customers to do such things.
my r4 had the HDD SLOW issue a few times, but only in situations where it was directly attributable to excessive vibration caused by louder-than-bombs bass notes. have you seen the verbage in the literature about padding the unit, wrapping it in a towel and so-forth? that came directly out of my first conversation with ted back in 2005 when we were grasping at straws about the issue. i'm surprised it stuck, because it doesn't seem the most professional suggestion in the handbook of a $2000 device, but whatever...
now granted, a lot of user anecdotes can't be explained away by vibrations. (most notably, skalinder's 4x1 24/48 condition reproducible on his unit.) but mine was, and this also seems the case with many others. when the disc is clearly not writing data due to vibration, how can you question those of us suggesting that enlarging the cache might solve the problem? the cache is volatile storage where data goes before physically committed to the hd platters. i'm thinking you aren't understanding the issue entirely because you quickly mentioned the pre-roll buffer vis a vis the HD cache in this thread. the pre-roll buffer is not the same thing as HD cache at all. further, it is also user-selectable on the original r4.
i'm also questioning your adamant supposition that a 2MB cache is *PLENTY* for 24/96 x 4. have you done the math? not that i i have either, but how many seconds exactly does that buy you at 24/96 x4? not a whole lot. if it were indeed *PLENTY*, the HDD SLOW issue wouldn't happen. it's really as simple as that.
(again, there do seem to be cases where HDD SLOW isn't vibration-rooted. i don't know how to address those ... but again, neither does edirol.)
regarding "
What facts led you to that conclusion?" -- please realize we're still dealing with the bleeding edge here. none of us, again including edirol, have a lot of facts about the issue. it's not wrong to make a suggestion, even based on a hunch. after all, i can't remember anyone stating fact-like, that the HDD SLOW issue would definitively disappear if the HDD were upgraded. no, we're all just amateur scientists here probing around in the dark for the truth.
for me, it was pretty self-apparent that increasing the cache might help the issue. the stock drive was obviously chosen by the manufacturer to keep the unit at a certain price point -- you can't really deny that logic. a couple of years into the life of the unit, 8mb cache drives come down in price considerably, so tech-savvy end-users are doing the right thing and rolling the dice on a component that coulda/woulda/shoulda been in there from the get-go.
so far, my dice-rolling has paid off perfectly. but i'd also never assume one person's anecdotal evidence makes for a hardened scientific truth.... so take my 100% happy-thus-far experiences with a grain of salt if you must.
and finally, +t to you because i'm remembering your wide-eyed joy when you saw my r4 for the first time last fall!
Topic: Problems with R4 (Read 13237 times)