Geek Talk: Death of a Hard Drive

Death of a Drive

Kurt here.....So today was like any other Monday morning. I came into the studio to start my day of work, looking forward to working on a new downtempo track, and turned on my drives. I have a project drive that all my recent and current projects are on, and I have a dedicated drive that houses my entire sample library. It’s somewhere around 350 gigs of sounds. Well it didn’t spin up! I checked all the cabels etc. Nothing...pure silence. So I took the drive out of the case and used a contraption made by Weibetech that allows you to power bare drives up and mount them on your desktop via USB. I thought perhaps the power supply for the hard drive case had gone bad. However, the drive still did not spin up.

So that was it, my 750 gig Seagate drive that was only a bit over a year old was officially deceased. I went to Seagate’s website to enter the serial and model number and the drive is covered under a warranty so I will get a replacement.....but.....how will I work until then? There are no places in town to go drive and pick up an internal 750 gig ATA drive.

Well here’s the really cool part. I had made a “clone” of the drive earlier this month. There is a program called Carbon Copy Cloner that creates an exact clone of the drive, as a disk image. When the disk image is double clicked, it mounts on the desktop as any physical hard drive would. The name of the disk image is the same as the drive it cloned. So...I booted up Logic not quite sure if my EXS library would be there, or if Stylus RMX and Omnisphere’s libraries would show up in the plugs. To my delight, everything is working exactly as if my real drive were still mounted.

We all know it’s important to backup, and in my case, having a dedicated sample drive cloned as it’s own disk image saved my butt. So I would encourage anyone who HASN’T cloned your sample library, or other important data, to go download Carbon Copy Cloner. Did I mention it’s shareware?!! That’s right, they encourage donations, but you can use it for free! I also use a program called Super Duper for an automatic nightly scheduled backup of my project drive, which is backed up to it’s own disk image. Then of course TimeMachine backs up my Mac Pro's internal hard drive all the time, so between those three, I’m covered. Are you?