hard drive crapping out

[spindrummer82]

This past weekend I was doing some mixing on my bands new record. Friday, everything was going great, 20-25 tracks with a few plugins and 3 submixes, cpu peaking at 45%, usually around 30%, disk hovering between 5%-10%. Saturday I open up a project, hit play, and it takes 45 seconds to preload (normally maybe 3 seconds to preload) and then the cpu and disk jump to 300% usage and the audio pops in and out like crazy. Open and close the program, same thing, load a different project, same thing. Load a different project with 5 tracks and no plugins, plays fine but cpu and disk are at 70% usage. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for my soundcard and my recording software but neither worked and iTunes still played so I figured the soundcard was just fine. Last test was the hard drive.

I copied a project from my recording drive to my system drive and opened it from there and it plays perfectly, cpu and disk at the usual loads. So I'm thinking its the hard drive. I put a movie onto the recording drive and played to see just how messed up the drive was and that played fine.

I guess I'm just wondering if my drive is completely screwed and in need of replacement or if there might be a way to remedy the situation. Any insight is much appreciated.

system-SATA Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM
recording-SATA Seagate 400GB 7200RPM

 

[superspit]

This past weekend I was doing some mixing on my bands new record. Friday, everything was going great, 20-25 tracks with a few plugins and 3 submixes, cpu peaking at 45%, usually around 30%, disk hovering between 5%-10%. Saturday I open up a project, hit play, and it takes 45 seconds to preload (normally maybe 3 seconds to preload) and then the cpu and disk jump to 300% usage and the audio pops in and out like crazy. Open and close the program, same thing, load a different project, same thing. Load a different project with 5 tracks and no plugins, plays fine but cpu and disk are at 70% usage. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for my soundcard and my recording software but neither worked and iTunes still played so I figured the soundcard was just fine. Last test was the hard drive.

I copied a project from my recording drive to my system drive and opened it from there and it plays perfectly, cpu and disk at the usual loads. So I'm thinking its the hard drive. I put a movie onto the recording drive and played to see just how messed up the drive was and that played fine.

I guess I'm just wondering if my drive is completely screwed and in need of replacement or if there might be a way to remedy the situation. Any insight is much appreciated.

system-SATA Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM
recording-SATA Seagate 400GB 7200RPM

Hi SD82...
is this computer plugged into the net ?
Man, that must've been pretty frustrating!!!..did you chuck anything, or smash anything?
I have many broken things in my studio.

 

[BushmasterM4]

How full is the drive in question? Afull drive or one that needs defragged will act very strange. Seagate should offer a download to test the drive. If it is bad, use their site to get a replacement. They usually carry a 3 to 5 year warranty. And if you plug in the serial number of the drive their site will give you warranty info. The do a cross shipment type transaction. You give them credit card info and the ship you a new drive and you ship bad one back. If you dont ship it back they charge your card. I would get a external drive and back up files, then replace the drive.

 

[dgatwood]

This past weekend I was doing some mixing on my bands new record. Friday, everything was going great, 20-25 tracks with a few plugins and 3 submixes, cpu peaking at 45%, usually around 30%, disk hovering between 5%-10%. Saturday I open up a project, hit play, and it takes 45 seconds to preload (normally maybe 3 seconds to preload) and then the cpu and disk jump to 300% usage and the audio pops in and out like crazy. Open and close the program, same thing, load a different project, same thing. Load a different project with 5 tracks and no plugins, plays fine but cpu and disk are at 70% usage. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for my soundcard and my recording software but neither worked and iTunes still played so I figured the soundcard was just fine. Last test was the hard drive.

I copied a project from my recording drive to my system drive and opened it from there and it plays perfectly, cpu and disk at the usual loads. So I'm thinking its the hard drive. I put a movie onto the recording drive and played to see just how messed up the drive was and that played fine.

I guess I'm just wondering if my drive is completely screwed and in need of replacement or if there might be a way to remedy the situation. Any insight is much appreciated.

system-SATA Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM
recording-SATA Seagate 400GB 7200RPM

The WD drive works and the Seagate doesn't? That's a little backwards from what I'd have expected.

But seriously... it could be a failing drive. Check the S.M.A.R.T. status and see if the drive is reporting any problems, then see if your OS has logged any I/O errors wherever it logs such things. You should also be able to get a soft read retry count from the drive with S.M.A.R.T. (You didn't say what OS you're using, so I can't suggest a tool to check the S.M.A.R.T. status info. In Mac OS X, you can get detailed stats from System Profiler, and the overall S.M.A.R.T. status from Disk Utility. In Linux, I'm not sure, but I'd imagine similar data probably lives somewhere in /proc. No idea in Windows.)

If you can't find any problems with the drive but you get sporadic performance glitches, it could also be a DMA problem, an electrically noisy cable, or an under-voltage power supply 12V rail causing the spindle motor to run too slowly.

As for the movie, that's pretty easy compared with multitrack audio. A decent movie player ought to be able to keep way ahead of playing back a single track of audio/video data even under fairly bad conditions.