Karaoke Forums

I am new to using my computer for my karaoke shows and was wondering if anyone has had problems using external HD's. Today while doing a show the system just started hissing like a bad connection or a snake for that matter. When I unplugged the HD and plugged it back in the hissing stopped...Then it happened again about an hour later...Did the same thing again...So is it best to just us a 250 gig internal instead of an external HD or does it matter? Thanks

Is it a laptop?

I am of the belief that it is better to use the internal drive from a reliability standpoint, and a noise standpoint. Anytime you add another power supply and cable into the equation, with their requisite cables and wire runs, you introduce the possibility of failure. You have to run your internal hard drive anyway -- adding a few revolutions that are well within the normal usage parameters of the drive adds much less potential for trouble than all that external stuff.

In short, the fewer moving parts and connections, the better.

If you are using a desktop/rackmount and adding another internal drive instead of using the existing one, that is still better than the external.

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I've used both without any problems. For my desktop I prefer internals but use externals on my laptop without any issues. Might be a bad cord?

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That is a new one on me. my software unzips and puts the cdg and mp3 file on the hard drive in microseconds. In fact I can access tracks form the main frame via wireless lan with no glitches.

There are some simple rules with external hard drives. Never unplug the usb before shutting down the computer. The shut down sequence parks the heads. Booting up with a USB drive hooked up mounts the drive normally. It is better to plug the USB directly into the computer and not a USB bus esp with a USB powered 2 1/2 inch lappie HD. BTW the 2 1/2 inch drives are quieter and more efficient than than 3 1/2 inch. When using wireless keyboards etc plug the HD in first when hot plugging.

Win 98 and 2k Pro had trouble with big external hard drives. XP has no problems and with Linux there are no problems whatsoever. I have made a lot of money with external hard drives.

BTW never bootup with a flash drive plugged in.

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I use both internal and external equally for awhile and there was no difference for me. Biggest problem with laptop internal drives is space. Is 320gb enough for your needs? If so go internal.

If it's a desktop get one of those big 1.5TB drives and call it even

Sorry I forgot tp list its a laptop...The external drive is a 750 gig and its pretty used only 38 gig left its a bt fragmented so I will clea it up...I ordered a 1 TB drive so I will move some stuff off and see if it makes a difference...

I don't know if it's true or not but have heard that for fastest performance you should have 25% minimum free space on the hard drive. Can anyone confirm or deny? Not sure if this would affect the hissing sound or not though.

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No, not true. Especially if you have a 750G drive and it is an external. Once you have created the files and defragment the drive, they are about as fast as they can be. If you were constantly creating new ones with a very small amount of space, over time it might get a bit slow as fragmentation increased.

On the internal you would want to have some gigabytes free 1) for swap or 2) so that the system doesn't need to fragment files when creating and accessing them, but you don't need a percentage just a minimal amount.


Shouldn't. Hissing would be something leaking through the sound interface. Jumping would happen if there were performance problems preventing transfer of data to the sound interface.

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Hard disk head park are ancient history, all drives auto park head these days when they spin down...you can safely pull external hard drive in and out at will without worry about damage..the only thing is if you are using older windows and it cache data and dont write them out to the drive then you may have corrupt data and half written stuff to the HDD ...just click on the windows icons and click on safely remove mass storage device and that way you force windows to write whatever it has in memory to the external drive so you wont get corrupted data....

Having said that since windows xp and using FAT32 File system as soon as the light stop flashing you can pretty much pull the device out and everything is cool...

and nothing wrong with booting computer with external HDD plug in the only thing it may cause you issues is some computer configure the bios to boot from USB device and since your external HDD doesnt have a boot sector on it the computer will complains about cant find OS but if you configure your computer never boot from USB I cant see anything wrong by having the external hdd plug in.

No that just crab...no need for 25% free.....you get faster performance if your computer is not too badly fragmented..

just degrag your drive here and there if it badly defragted and you get slight improvement in performance..

computer read data by spinning the pin in and out of the circles....if your HDD stores files close together then it takes it less times go in and out of the circles to read data

and hence faster performance... imagine a scenario where you have 4 Gig data and it store all over the place on the HDD, to get that 4 Gig it has to seek the file all over the place and hence slow performance and that what they called all your HDD is fragmented...what defrag does it find files that you access often and group them together and put all the free space in one place and all the data in once place so when you next write stuff to HDD, it has plenty of space in one place where it can store say 10G of data without going all over the hdd to store it...hence faster performance..

I prefer internal vs external for my laptop, mainly because it's faster...

I just changed my internal HD with a Seagate 320gig, 7200, 16 meg cache, that's way better than any USB drive. But I understand that some would need more than 320g. Any laptop working on eSata??? If yes, that's the real solution

The hiss is probably comming from the sound card's preamp caused by a built up static charge. I suggest that the OP make sure all his equipment is properly grounded and try again.

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Okay, who took my pants?

For me, when I first switched to PC based karaoke, I used a tower with an extra 250GB internal drive to store my music on. Then I got a laptop, and now use external hard drives hooked up via firewire.

I don't think it really matters which you use, but for me I would not store my music on the computer drive with the OS on it.

Many people have problems using external hard drives the main causes are
the usb 2 transfer rate is only 480 mb/s compaired with upto 3 to 6 gb/s on a SATA internal. Also consider the usb controller on the laptop is using some of your system resource to transfer the data before it goes through the input side of southbridge chip and northbridge before hitting the sound card, the route is much quicker with internal. Plus data access times on the drives do make a difference, I have been building karaoke computers for many years now having repaired many karaoke laptops where the USB serial controller had blown, due to excessive plugging in of external drives (see here www.karaokepc.co.uk)
And reference to the booting and plugging in Hard drices while booting, this does depend on the configuration of the BIOS and where it is searching for the first device, Most new motherboards have the facility to boot from usb sticks to create a virual drive in the memory for repair.

Nick