My Seagate SATA drive is dying and I need to get the data ba

[braincell]

Did you use 16 bit or 24 bit audio? I wonder if that makes a difference. I started using 24 bit recently.

[Nestor]

I used 16 bits at the beginning because the computer was smaller. Then I used 24 bits with great results and now I use 32 float with impressive good results, the sound is truly clear and perfect.

I think there is of course, a big difference, as you know that the amounts of megabytes to be read from a file at 16 bits are fewer than the same file at 24 bits, so the drive must read more megabytes in the same amount of time, indeed, you are being more exigent to it.

Perhaps one of the most important things to do is to defragment often when you are working with big projects like the ones I’m talking about. This will avoid for it to get too hot and make the effort of reading from several pieces of the platter almost at the same time.

I recommend to use PerfectDisk 7, the “intelligente defragmenter” to defragment your drives, it is very good, as it understands what you are doing after a few days of usage, and then defragments your drives in accordance with the way you use them. The program writes a few likes of basic code, similar to the strings you may find in the windows registry, and then with this information defragments your drive living spaced it knows you are going to use, fantastic! Conclusion, it does not defragment as a mass, but choosing intelligently what is best to be first, then second, then third, in accordance with the usage.

If your drives are new, you don’t have to worry about Brain, as they are much better today than what they used to be, this is my impression. Of course, unless you are talking about the high end old drives, which have been built like stone and still! Hard to brake!

Cheers

[Herr Voigt]

Dear Nestor, I'm not kidding, it was only an idea ...
When a very hot hd is near a cw card - the card gives also some heat and has no fan - I would become a bit anxious. But I think, you have built in good fans, so your cw card is protected.

Good luck, Thomas

[Nestor]

Ok, of course I undestand what you mean... Hit would damage the card. You know, the drive was so, so hot, that I did not put it into the box, but extended the cables to the ouside, so no problems. Of course, the drive is not out and far away... Cheers

[at0m]

Conclusion, it does not defragment as a mass, but choosing intelligently what is best to be first, then second, then third, in accordance with the usage.

Hoi Nestor,

If you record multiple tracks at the same time, they will be layed out on the drive interlaced. Interlaced is how they would be read on playback too, so in that scenario defragmenting will only slow it down. If you record only one at a time, there's not much you can do about it. On top of that, when parts are being cut and pasted, everything gets mixed up. So I gave up defragmenting my projects partition... But maybe that's had its own topic already?

at0m.

[Nestor]

This is not what I have experienced myself, perhaps because I use samples I create myself, constantly chop pieces of music into smaller pieces, and so on, then I ensemble them together and on top of it, I do lots of audio and MIDI programming, and record several stereo tracks to follow. This is a lot of information you have spread through the drive.

I understand your point very well, but your point stands only when you don’t process audio and MIDI but rather keep it as it was recorded, this is not my case.

I have to say that every time I defrayment my drive, it definitely goes faster and reads better than if I don’t.

Everybody gives a top rating for PerctDisk 7. Here you have one good read at it:

http://www.epinions.com/content_163139063428

[Nestor]

Here you have a thorough review:

http://barrys-rigs-n-reviews.com/review ... opd7_1.htm

[symbiote]

Actually, AnalogX made a nice little utility to interleave recordings:

http://www.analogx.com/contents/downloa ... nterlv.htm

[astroman]

On 2006-01-16 08:49, Nestor wrote:
...If your drives are new, you don’t have to worry about Brain, as they are much better today than what they used to be, this is my impression. Of course, unless you are talking about the high end old drives, which have been built like stone and still!

you probably refer to that IBM SCSI drive that serves our office database with a continuous run over 8 years with only a handful of interuptions (power loss in building, a dead cpu fan etc)
but it actually was a 'regular' desktop drive - they just were built more solid.

This is only partly due to increased density and higher speed.
The infamous click-click-click noise on startup means the head doesn't find it's track back and re-positions - often caused by a mechanically dislocated part.

On the other hand drives are really cheapo today, so it's no big deal to have a few spare ones for important backups.

I don't think that defragmenting an NTFS drive will have much of an effect - it's a tree organized system anyway which means files are never stored sequentially as in DOS times

cheers, Tom

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2006-01-17 02:04 ]</font>

[Nestor]

Hey, how did you know Astro? Yes, I am talking about two fantastic drives I have here, but unfortunately very small for today usage:

IBM
Model DJNA-371350 E182115 HG
Made by Storage Products KFT
Made in Hungary HG
13.5 GB
LBA: 26.520.480 Sectors

Since early 1999 they have been working at all speed and perfectly well… a bit noise if you don’t have a proper case anyway, but great in reliability. Despite they are 72000, they are much slower than the new 72000 ones, no doubt.

In regard to decrementing NTFS file format drives, this is not what Raxco experts says… and I definitely experience a better performance if I have chopped too much audio files into smaller pieces.