Avoid The Crash

What is your most prized possession in your studio? If you don't think your hard drive is please focus on what your doing. Its cool to keep your documents and files on your cpu but when dealing with music files it is just caution to have your hard drive close by. I've seen too many producers lose work due to not backing up files or just being without.

First and foremost Back it Up!!! Nothing in life is certain except death and hard-drive failure!! Hard drives can fail due to either physical problems or logic problems. Most failures are inevitable but if you catch it in time, you may be able to salvage your data. A broken read/write arm, scratched platters, and bad drive bearings are deadly. Baby your drives-don't bounce them around and pad it well if you move around much and of course don't drop them.

Logic problems such as bad drive sectors and disk fragmentation can wear on the drive. Understand when you delete a file, it isn't erased. It is deleted from the directory, allowing the computer to gradually overwrite those blocks. This creates fragments. Since large audio and video files require big blocks of free space, they become fragmented far more quickly than smaller files. More fragments mean more work for the drive to find scattered pieces. This creates heat and stresses fragile, precision parts. This will lead to drive failure. De-fragmenting is your friend. Check out the signs:

Warning Signs

• CPU taking a long time to boot
• A disk utility reveals bad disk sectors
• The drive is hot to the touch
• The"click of death"-this indicates a read/write error during a seek. Meaning your drive is about to crash!
• Cyclic redundancy errors-indicates the computer cannot make an accurate copy.

Preventive Medicine

• Save often and do backups faithfully
• Leave free space
• Keep cool
• Give it a rest
• Perform regular maintenance
• Don't record audio projects to your boot disk

If you can detect something strange going on with the hard drive once again back it up and have it checked it out. Nobody wants to hear your session magically disappeared. Handle it!



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