Denon 2500 freezing

[Vectis]

Even if one track is cued up on the other side it still freezes after playing for a while.

The only cure I've found is to leave another track playing with volume down.

I do have 4 back ups of my hard drive.

Would you suggest a different drive that may be more suitable?

Cheers for advice so far.

I'm not really in a position to recommend a suitable drive, having never used Denon and understood its foibles. But it does seem clear that you may be suffering as a result of the spindown and power saving processes this drive brings.

I have successfully used the Freecom range of Toughdrive Pro's with the Numark d2/DDS/iDJ kit for the best part of 3 years without these issues. The one time I attached a WD MyBook directly to the d2 (a backup drive) I experienced 10-15 second startup stutters after a drive spindown. On this occasion there was a utility freely available on the web to switch off the spindown, which I applied, and the problem went away.

So in my mind, in order to eliminate this possibility, you need to either

a) find a utility for your drive that makes it spin continually;
b) swap out the drive for one that spins continually (or is SSD / Flash)

A quick and cheap test is to use a flash thumb drive in the same USB port. Load it up with the same set of tracks that have proved problematic and try to reproduce.


HTH.

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

I have successfully used the Freecom range of Toughdrive Pro's with the Numark d2/DDS/iDJ kit for the best part of 3 years without these issues.

I couldn't get mine working with my Denon when I used it.

[Corabar Steve]

Might be a long shot, but have you thought of defragging the drive?

[Fullforceeventsltd]

I haven't defragged the drive - might be worth a try as there is a lot of music on there.

[Corabar Steve]

It solved the issues I was having with My HD2500

[Fullforceeventsltd]

Defo worth a go

[Excalibur]

I couldn't get mine working with my Denon when I used it.

My Cortex wouldn't accept one, until: I applied Excalibur's Three Golden Rules. The Freecom is one of the few USB powered drives with a power socket. The power supply from a Belkin hub was a compatible connector, and correct voltage. Result: Compliance with the rules, and the Cortex loved it.

Might be a long shot, but have you thought of defragging the drive?

It solved the issues I was having with My HD2500

Not something I've ever tried. My oldest drive currently in use has probably been going for over three years, never been defragged, and doesn't suffer sleep or playback problems.

Steve, I wonder if your drives being FAT 32 has a bearing? Mine are all NTFS.

[Corabar Steve]

Steve, I wonder if your drives being FAT 32 has a bearing? Mine are all NTFS.

It's possible I suppose

[WWDJ]

It's possible I suppose

Denon HD2500 doesnt support NTFS so it isn't that.

[Vectis]

I wonder if your drives being FAT 32 has a bearing? Mine are all NTFS.

NTFS drives which are essentially written once and then appended gradually are unlikely to frag as much as a FAT32 drive when used with this type of hardware. Reason? The device can't write back to the drive, so no clutter from cuepoint and similar data, which to be fair tend to be numerous tiny files.

Files must occupy at least one block on a HDD irrespective of size. So a 1K file on a drive with 4K blocks will occupy 4K. As will a 4K file. A 5K file will occupy two blocks. And so on.

When you have a device splurging and deleting lots of small files across a drive, this can quickly cause fragmentation issues.

But to be honest, unless you're continually writing and rewriting the BIG files (ie the media files (mp3s/whatever)) then they themselves oughtn't become fragmented as such.

So it all comes down to drive husbandry.

Another good reason to use NTFS or HFS if you're in the mac/numark world.