Am going to do a little product plug here – for a product called Ashampoo HDD Control which I have installed on my main workstation and also my recording computer. It has saved my bacon more than once, so I’ll relate the story to you in the hope that you – the reader – might also find it useful.
As a location sound recording engineer, my ability to provide a service to my customers depends entirely on the ability of my hard disks to work correctly on site – every time. If I rock up to a job and I have a faulty computer, I might as well go home and look for another career as it will be unlikely I’ll get called out again.
Well, I nearly ran into that situation a few jobs ago. During the soundcheck and rehearsal, I noticed that the recorder software was throwing buffer errors intermittently. Further investigation revealed that the write speed of the drive I was using had dropped dramatically, although I was still able to access data on the disk. After some investigation using HDD Control, I was able to determine that the device in question was faulty and was furthermore able to transfer the project to a second disk drive that I had installed in the machine prior to the concert starting.
After returning home, I was able to retrieve all the data off the failing disk drive and replace it, but only because I had an early warning.
I have, in the past, not been so lucky and have lost data on complete drives because I wasn’t aware the drive was failing.
Additionally, HDD Control has a background service called Control Guard which constantly monitors your drives and flags any that are behaving strangely.
You can get Ashampoo HDD Control directly from the Ashampoo site.
