There’s a massive misconception of digital formats, that somehow if something’s digital it’ll last forever in a pristine state. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth: because digital formats are so intolerant of any error, they’re actually more susceptible to physical harm than analog formats. (If you don’t believe me, compare a vinyl LP with some scratches on it to a CD with a single scratch.)

Now, the question is, how dedicated are you to proper care and feeding of your discs? Enough to care whether you’re handling your CDs and Blu-ray discs according to an internationally-recognized standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (better known as ISO … not IOS)? Got 108 Swiss francs burning a hole in your pocket and want some unusually dry bedside reading?

ISO 18938:2008 addresses the issues of physical integrity of the medium necessary to preserve access to the recorded data. These include:

• use and handling environments, including pollutants, temperature and humidity and light exposure
• contamination concerns
• inspection
• cleaning and maintenance, including cleaning methods and frequency
• transportation
• disasters, including water, fire, construction and post-disaster procedures
• staff training

I kid, of course – I imagine there could be some utility to this document for people who depend on optical storage and want this sort of official document. I will say, though, ISO – any thought of releasing a free executive summary for everyone else?

New ISO standard gives recommendations for care of optical discs [iso.org]

Proper care and handling isn’t the only challenge facing optically-stored digital information. The materials from which discs are made don’t last forever. (They don’t bio-degrade, either, but what they will do is fatigue and age to the point that you can’t read the information on them or return them to the Earth, ashes to ashes style.)

So, I’m curious, optical experts out there? What do you recommend for care of optical discs? And for long-term archiving, what sort of options do people have?

We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help.

Lifehacker today points to a free Windows utility for the job called CrystalDiskInfo:

CrystalDiskInfo Monitors Hard Drive Health and Uptime [via gHacks]

But that got me thinking about other tools. There’s quite a range of choices for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even some obscure operating systems. The only bad news: generally you’ll only be able to monitor internal drives, unless your external drive is eSATA rather than USB or FireWire. (eSATA is where I’d like to go generally – it’s quite a lot faster, and frees up your USB and FireWire buses for other things — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Cross-platform / Linux

The smartmontools package is a powerful ATA/ATAPI/SATA monitoring tool that runs on – well, pretty much everything. There’s a Windows package, plus a *nix version for Mac, Linux, BSD, Cygwin on Windows, Solaris, OS/2, QNX, and so on. This looks like your best choice on Linux.

Mac OS X

SMARTReporter (pictured at top) is probably the friendliest way to get at SMART data for SATA, ATA, and eSATA drives on the Mac. It even includes a handy menu bar item so you can monitor how your drive is doing at a glance. It’s free via Open Source “MIT License.”

You can also use the command line, via something like this:

diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART

Windows

In addition to CrystalDiskInfo, you have a number of options:

SpeedFan is a general-purpose monitoring and management tool for just about everything, including (as the name implies) fans.

HDD Health is a hard disk-only monitoring tool, like the others here. One thing it has going for it: friendly feedback and tidy tabs to view it.

More Information

The good folks at SpeedFan have an article on what SMART is and how to interpret data you get – well worth reading whether or not you’re a SpeedFan user.

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?”

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

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.