Dateline: Brooklyn. Yeah, you’ve heard all sorts of stories about hard drive failure rates and why you should back up. But here’s a new one: someone might steal your hard drive, while it’s plugged into your laptop, in the middle of a set, as happened to Matthew Dear earlier this month.. Given that hard drives are worth about ten bucks each at this point, we can only assume this is some twisted fan crime. I’d like to respond:

Yo! Earth to useless hipster: this is New York. We used to have real crime here, not you jacking someone’s external FireWire box. Jeez.

I’m a little late on this — the crime took place April 4 at Galapagos’ Bunker party (formerly at Tonic).

Matthew Dear’s harddrive was stolen @ Galapagos [Brooklyn Vegan, via Dance Tracks Digital]

Some jerk in comments on DTD says, "Who cares hwo mucgh creativity is therein blippy tracks that lst 45 minutes." [sic] Aside from Pete’s complete inability to spell the easiest words in the English language, he’s risking some major bad karma by writing that — well, unless he plays with theft-proof wax cylinders, that is.

For reasons that escape me, this whole incident sends the Brooklyn Vegan rock-loving crowd into a frenzy of anti-computer, pro-guitar rhetoric. Yes, that must be it — God Himself took Matthew’s hard drive, because playing music out of computers is the Devil’s work. The classic “FireWire Smite” move.

“The storage device that you just removed was not properly put away before being stolen from this computer. Your set may have been damaged or lost. In the future, please play a banjo, or risk eternal damnation. Greetings, Professor Falken. Shall we play a game?”

Not really a whole lot I can say about this one — and I’m sure you could just fashion your own if you wanted, which I will say would be a great way for me to stop forgetting where I put my 2 gig flash drive. But this does suggest that, somewhere deep inside, people still like music represented as material objects, whatever Last.fm may say. (That’s why I’m glad Last.fm can snoop while I listen to CDs, posting my listening habits for the universe.)

Suck UK USB Mixtape @ Turntable Lab

Now if I could just use it as an iLok dongle… hmm… (iLok, you listening? Packaging matters.)

Side note: when we see CDs as retro nostalgia items, we’re all officially OLD.

Bizarre but adorable, Gibson has turned their iconic 1959 Les Paul guitar into a miniaturized replica, a functioning USB 2.0 1 GB Flash Drive. It will store data. It will not make any sound. But it does have specs that you, erm, don’t normally get out of a guitar: 14Mbps read / 6MBps write, 9 year data retention, LED indicator, and USB extension cable.

Gibson Signature Series Les Paul Flash Drive

No one told me, but Gibson has introduced an entire line of consumer electronics, including HDMI cables, hard drives, speakers, surge protectors (really), and DVD recorders. Odd, but … okay. I’m sure it has something to do with distribution or other business voodoo I don’t understand. Gibson’s a really, really big company with lots of brands, so someone with more knowledge of the company might be able to explain this.

Apparently even this flash drive is just the first of a series of “Signature Series” flash drives miniaturizing classic Gibson guitars. No word on price, but you can sign up to win one free.

I’m not sure what made Gibson decide to get into the flash drive game, but I wish they’d gone with bigger storage. Now I want a (functioning) Theremin flash drive with 16 GB storage. Any takers?

Previous miniature things:

DIY Papercraft Synthesizers: Make Your Own
Tiny Instruments: Strange Pocket Soundmaker Toys from MiJam
Exquisite Miniature Synthesizers, Modular Marimba, Made from Paper
Bob Moog as action figure
Mobile Guitar Studios, complete with Fender keychains
Miniature Studios: Gear Lust Meets Toys ‘R Us

Flash drives: ultra-fast. Zero noise. Absurdly awesome reliability. Now, replacing your hard drive.

That’s the vision, anyway. Flash memory, once limited to very tiny chunks, is slowly creeping towards storage big enough to use for audio. You’ve already got flash storage around, most likely, because of devices like Apple’s iPod nano and iPhone. But 4GB or 8GB is a little cramped for most audio and music work. You need numbers like 32GB.

That’s exactly the size of the drive Dell is putting in its new Latitude D420. But it doesn’t come cheap: the SanDisk 1.8″ drive, while extremely fast and reliable, will have a street price around US$500. So if flash storage is so expensive, what’s the point? Well, for starters, the failure rate on hard drives is very high. Even ignoring the (significant) performance gains in flash memory, it’s worth having a more robust medium, with no moving parts. Second, the sense is that flash costs will continue to fall. After all, there was a time not so long ago when a 20 MB(!) hard drive was a luxury.

Dell Lattitude D420 [UberGizmo]
Solid State, baby: SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 1.8″ [SanDisk.com]

Of course, the big push on the PC side — and some of the functionality supported in Intel’s Santa Rosa and not used by Apple’s new MacBook Pros — is using flash to store Windows bloat– I mean, uh, cached data and applications. (Okay, let’s face it: all three OSes have become pretty bloated if we’re talking about needing hundreds of dollars of high-performance flash memory just to cut down on endless load times. See Vista’s ReadyBoot and such.) But I think for the music market, the bigger draw could be storing media files. We can wait for the OS and app to load; it’s media file performance that matters.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to become a flash memory convert for other reasons. I’m really happy with my Corsair FlashVoyager GT, the USB key I carry around. It’s limited by USB2 speeds, but I’ve even run audio and video off it live. And it’s comforting just knowing my data is backed up on a reliable medium, and mobile between the various machines I own. (Yes, no matter how great networking gets, nothing beats a little SneakerNet.) Imagine if this thing were large enough to keep all your projects on. And for all the complaints about the small storage size of the iPhone, there’s nothing worse than dropping your iPod and killing the hard drive.

So the big question now is, when will prices fall enough that a little musical flash drive is a no-brainer?

Thanks to Moldover for the links.

Defragmentation is still critical for peak disk performance
for digital audio, even under new versions of OS X — even the Apple
Logic documentation suggests it. Only problem is: there's not much on
the Mac that's any good. Some utilities even require you to boot into
OS 9. Which is why today's announcement of Drive Genius from Prosoft is such good news:

• Full drive optimization / defragmentation
• Directory analysis, repair, and rebuilding
• On-the-fly partitioning (no reboot needed)
• Testing capabilities, media surface scanning, data integrity
• Department-of-Defense File Deleting (for the audio mix you REALLY didn't like)

This is the kind of robust utility we've got access to on Windows but
that's been lacking on the Mac, and there's reason to trust Prosoft:
they've done some of the innards for Apple's own utilities. Once the
NAMM news dies down, I'll have full reviews of this and other drive
products for Windows and Mac. Trust me, your audio mix needs it.