Today’s Tech Tip is actually a series of tips. These are hard drive tips and pointers provided by our friends at Glyph Technologies. Glyph, for those of you who may be unfamiliar, is a terrific company focused on hard drive solutions for demanding audio and video applications. Their products are reliable and they have BY FAR the best service and technical support of any drive company we’ve ever dealt with (and we’ve dealt with many). Glyph was also instrumental in developing (along with Digidesign) the chipset that dramatically improves the way Firewire drives work with DAW applications. The tips below range from common sense/common knowledge type of stuff to a few things that may burst some misconceptions. Enjoy.
+ TIP: Backup! While we manufacture our drives to the highest specifications and the vast majority of our drives will serve faithfully for years without a hitch, nothing can prevent occasional failures, either of a drive or of some other part of a system. Counting on data recovery software as a replacement for backing up is not a reliable method of safe data storage.
+ TIP: Don’t expose your drive to the elements. When bringing the drive in from the outdoors, allow a few minutes for the drive to readjust to the temperature inside.
+ TIP: Never move or handle a spinning drive. Always wait at least 30 to 45 seconds after powering down before handling a drive. This is especially critical with Hot Swap and tabletop models.
+ TIP: Many problems that appear to be hard drive problems are actually SCSI problems. 1 – Use short, high quality cables, proper termination, and proper addressing. 2 – When setting SCSI ID addresses remember that typically the SCSI card is pre-set at SCSI address 7. This leaves SCSI ID 0-6 and 8-15. If in doubt on how to set a SCSI address on a device consult the manual or contact the manufacturer for assistance. Incorrectly set switches can result in data loss.
+ TIP: If you’re having problems with a drive, disconnect any external SCSI devices (besides the suspect drive). Make sure that the remaining device is terminated and has a unique SCSI ID. You will then be able to test and diagnose the drive without interference that other devices may cause. Many apparent drive failures will be miraculously fixed by this step. Should you find your drive working again, try adding your other devices into the chain one at a time. If you’re getting error messages or system crashes, or your system won’t boot, try reinstalling your system (Windows 98/200/ME/NT, MacOS 9.1). System files often become corrupted and a fresh system installation will solve many an elusive problem. On Macintosh, be sure to install the system from CD-ROM and not to drag and drop your old system folder on to another volume. Reinstalling your system (Windows 98/200/ME/NT, MacOS 9.1). System files often become corrupted and a fresh system installation will solve many an elusive problem.
+ TIP: Viruses. This is quickly becoming one of the most common reasons for system crashes. It is a good idea to use an anti-virus program to eliminate the potential damage that can occur due to viruses. The best thing to do is to be very careful when copying programs from friends or the Internet.
+ TIP: Software corruption. This is caused when a program has crashed and taken with it some important information that the drive and file structures need to operate properly. The best solution here is to use a program like Norton Utilities’ (Mac or PC), or a similar product to detect if the file structure and the integrity of the files are still intact. Running a program like this can eliminate most software corruption problems.
+ TIP: Bad Blocks. Bad blocks are common and occur when either the drive has been dropped or shaken when running or simply when a small particle of dust has been trapped by the magnetic head and damaged a small spot on the surface of the hard drive platter. This is often called a crash and with it comes the realization that the file that was written on that small spot may no longer be valid. The best thing to do is to test the drive on a regular basis. Products such as Symantec’s ‘The Norton Utilities’ allow you to test the drive for bad blocks without destroying your data. You can also perform a low level format on the drive before a project begins. This will remove any data on the drive but will also recognize any bad blocks and assign them to the GDL (Grown Defect List). After a block is assigned to the GDL it will never have any data written to it again.
+ TIP: Fragmentation. This will not so much create a problem with drive reliability, as it will in performance. As you use a drive and copy, erase, and re-copy files to it, you create fragmentation. In other words the drive will copy files into whatever area is available on the drive, even if that area is not contiguous. This fragmentation causes the heads to have to move farther and take longer than they would if the file was contiguous. De-fragmentation programs are available and are part of most good drive maintenance programs like Norton Speed Disk (Mac or PC).