Finally figured out why my studio pc has been giving me so much grief.

Hey Everyone,

I've finally figured out why my studio pc has been giving me so much grief over the last couple of years, turns out that the Sata hard drive I was using for the system drive was getting a bit old and worn out, and about a fortnight ago it literally dropped it's bundle and the pc wouldn't boot up normally, so I went to work on it and managed to get it going again, thinking that the 1.5Tb Sata hard drive I was using was getting a bit flaky, I decided to try substituting a 2Tb Sata hard drive in the hope that things would improve, I backed up all my wanted data off the 2Tb Sata hard drive and then reformatted it, then did a complete clean install of Windows 10 64 Bit on it, all seemed to be fine and dandy....or so I thought.

Last week I had left the studio pc powered on to give it a soak-test while I was watching some youtube videos on my new Acer aspire 5 laptop, I went out into my loungeroom to get some water to drink, I noticed that the monitor screen was all black even though the pc was definitely on, so I tried doing a hard-reset, the pc tried to boot and I heard an abnormal noise coming from the 2Tb Sata hard drive I was using as the system drive, tried a few more times to get it to boot up with the same result every time, then I remembered that I had a spare 160Gb Sata hard drive so I used it to replace the 2Tb Sata hard drive, that got the pc booting-up normally again.

I decided there and then that I wasn't going to waste my time with Sata hard drives anymore, and finally make the switch to using some new SSD hard drives, which would definitely boost the performance of my studio pc (I had noticed that my studio pc had been running a bit sluggishly sometimes), so no more Sata hard drives for me, I've lost quite a bit of data, which I wished I had backed up, due to Sata hard drives failing one after another.

I found an online Australian company where I can order some 1Tb SSD hard drives which will cost me only Au$160.00 each, I'll post a link to the website soon for all those interested.

Incidentally my new Acer aspire 5 laptop has a 250Gb SSD hard drive installed in it and it has given me far less trouble than my studio pc,that's what clinched it for me.

I've read online somewhere that SSD hard drives have an estimated life before failure of about 350 years (barring any damage due to static electricity), assuming that I'm not wrong about that, whereas a typical Sata hard drive has an estimated life before failure of about 5 years due to mechanical wear, since SSD hard drives have no mechanical moving parts, they don't wear out like Sata hard drives do, the data read speeds of an SSD hard drive is much faster than a Sata hard drive too at about 580mb/sec as I have seen watching a youtube video by Carey Holtzman (do a search on youtube for him, very interesting and entertaining, he's a long time IT tech and definitely knows his stuff).

Don't put anything but your OS and not much more on the primiary HD and keep it small (ish)

My C drive is quite small with not much more than OS and AV stuff on it, apps are on another drive and data mirrored a couple of other much larger drives.

4 internal SATA drives and a couple of external USB IDE drives for portable data.

A big part of the problem is having a monster C drive that you shove everything on and running it out of paging space.

I also have all of my licences stored in a few different locations on HD & USB drive

Hope my reply didn't delete

Feck it did, can't bloody edit on a Samsung phone it just deleted the post

For those of you wondering what an SSD hard drive is, it's a hard drive that uses the latest technology for data storage, SSD is short for Solid State Device, conventional IDE and SATA store/record data magnetically onto the surface of some metal spinning discs with a magnetic surface much like the analog magnetic recording tape that used to be used in recording studios before digital audio recording was invented, although the data recorded on the discs is digital rather than analog, but the principle is the same.

Now in order for the metal discs to be able to spin smoothly at very high revolutions per minute, some conventional hard drive discs spin at about 5600, others as as fast as 10,000 revolutions per minute, there needs to be a low-friction ball bearing system, which over time wears out and the discs cant spin as freely as they used to, they heat up and eventually fail, the Sata hard drives I was using in my studio pc did feel pretty toasty to the touch.

In an SSD hard drive, the data is stored electrically in very small transistors etched onto slivers of silicon wafers, you could think of an SSD hard drive as being very similar to a usb thumb drive memory stick, since there is no longer the need for a set of magnetically coated spinning metal discs, or the ball bearing system to allow the discs to spin freely, SSD hard drives do not suffer from the same failure mechanisms that conventional IED and Sata hard drives do, the data throughput is also much faster in an SSD hard drive too, in order to achieve high data throughput speeds in a conventional IED, or Sata hard drive, the discs need to spin at very high revolutions per minute, usually IED hard drives can manage a maximum of about 133mb/sec data throughput, I read somewhere that a Sata (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard drive is capable of about 150mb/sec, I may be wrong though, since there's no need for spinning discs in an SSD, the data throughput is limited only by how fast the transistors can switch on and off, and the speed of electrons, usually, as I have read somewhere, an SSD hard drive is capable of about 580mb/sec data throughput, data throughput refers to the maximum data read/write speeds that can be achieved.

SSD Hard drives have two big advantages over conventional IDE and Sata hard drives, firstly an SSD hard drive is virtually silent when operating (perfect for recording studio applications), and secondly, they don't overheat because there are no mechanical moving parts that can generate heat from friction, they also do tend to be smaller in size too.


Check out this interesting article about the lifespan before failure of SSD hard drives that I found:

https://www.howtogeek.com/322856/how...s-really-last/


Considering that conventional IED and Sata hard drives are estimated to last about 5 years before they fail.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dave.king1

Feck it did, can't bloody edit on a Samsung phone it just deleted the post

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Sorted it out for you Dave! We've got your back!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Brendan

Sorted it out for you Dave! We've got your back!

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Good onya Brendan, cheers!

Have used staticice.com.au before to find best prices for IT gear locally.

Here's a link to the website I found that sells the 1Tb SSD hard drive I'm interested in:

www.mwave.com.au


This is the SSD hard drive I'm interested in:

https://www.mwave.com.au/product/sam...AdZE2767W4jfjQ


Ideally I'd like to buy four of them because my studio pc has four Sata hard drives installed in it and there's no telling when they'll fail, I have had Sata hard drives fail with literally no warning whatsoever, one was a 4 Tb Sata hard drive which was originally in an external hard drive case so it had quite a lot of wanted data on it, a very painful lesson indeed.

With $20 cash back - not a bad deal... Check out msy.com.au as well. Good for a parts shop.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Brendan

With $20 cash back - not a bad deal... Check out msy.com.au as well. Good for a parts shop.

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Will do mate, cheers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Brendan

Sorted it out for you Dave! We've got your back!

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Thanks Brendan the phone is a PITA to edit with as it only gives me a delete option once I hit edit and then it's not optional

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DrNomis_44

Here's a link to the website I found that sells the 1Tb SSD hard drive I'm interested in:

www.mwave.com.au


This is the SSD hard drive I'm interested in:

https://www.mwave.com.au/product/sam...AdZE2767W4jfjQ


Ideally I'd like to buy four of them because my studio pc has four Sata hard drives installed in it and there's no telling when they'll fail, I have had Sata hard drives fail with literally no warning whatsoever, one was a 4 Tb Sata hard drive which was originally in an external hard drive case so it had quite a lot of wanted data on it, a very painful lesson indeed.

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The main fails I've had with SATA drives is the cable & MB sockets not the drives themselves, having grown up with IDE drives I find the SATA connectors very flimsy considering what they are required to do

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Originally Posted by dave.king1

The main fails I've had with SATA drives is the cable & MB sockets not the drives themselves, having grown up with IDE drives I find the SATA connectors very flimsy considering what they are required to do

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I'll have to agree with you on that, I've had at least one Sata cable with a piece of the plastic near the connector pins break off so that there's no pressure on the contacts, I replaced the cable and all was well, I've also experienced flaky behavior of the cables too.

May I suggest that if you are using Solid-State Drives (SSD) then you make sure your back up and recovery practices are thorough and well managed?

Magnetic platter drives (SATA, IDE etc) tend to give hints that they are about to fail - lost sectors, bad blocks, general flakiness and the like. This gives you a prompt to get everything backed up and secure.

SSD's don't.

They simply stop working all of a sudden. Stone-motherless dead. Dead as a dodo.

SSD's are quick and reliable but when they decide it is time to go, don't expect any warning or any chance of recovery.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rabbitz

May I suggest that if you are using Solid-State Drives (SSD) then you make sure your back up and recovery practices are thorough and well managed?

Magnetic platter drives (SATA, IDE etc) tend to give hints that they are about to fail - lost sectors, bad blocks, general flakiness and the like. This gives you a prompt to get everything backed up and secure.

SSD's don't.

They simply stop working all of a sudden. Stone-motherless dead. Dead as a dodo.

SSD's are quick and reliable but when they decide it is time to go, don't expect any warning or any chance of recovery.

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Good point, I'm going to be investing in a couple of new 3Tb external hard drives for backing up purposes.


Funny thing is, the two Sata HDs that failed gave me no warning at all, the S.M.A.R.T. was enabled for both, but no problems were reported up until they failed, fortunately I didn't lose much data since I had done my backing up.

Jump online and have a look at Qnap products, I used a 4 bay one as a NAS in my lab prior to retirement and I believe that five years on it's still chugging away.

Mine was fibre connected but they have other options available

Going to be ordering my new 1Tb SSD hard drives next week so it'll be the dawn of a new era for me, no more traditional mechanical hard drives, had quite a few go bad without any warning, and I think the 60Gb IDE hard drive I'm using in my Windows 98SE gaming pc build is on the way out too, seriously thinking of buying an IDE to SD card adaptor on eBay for it so I can use 32Gb SD cards instead, Windows 98SE is a bit picky abut the size of the hard drive it's being installed on, although you can enable large hard drive support during the installation process, yes I know Windows 98SE is an outdated, archaic, operating system that Microsoft no longer supports, but it runs Dos based games better than Dosbox, which can sometimes have issues.

Of course I will be buying some new external hard drives for backing up purposes, just in case, it's always better to be safe than sorry.

Update:


Finally got the new 1Tb SSD hard drives ordered for my studio pc, now it's just a case of sitting back and waiting till they arrive in the post, I bought four of them, three will be installed in the studio pc and the fourth one will be installed in my laptop since they are all 2.5" types, the drive bays in my studio pc have plastic inserts with mounting holes for 2.5" hard drives so installing them won't be a problem, they also come with Sata power and data connection ports.....a new era is just beginning for me.


Might post a series of pics of me installing the SSD drives in my studio PC when they arrive so you can see the process, I'm doing some online googling to learn how to do the installation properly.

Update:


Just got an email notification saying that the four 1Tb 2.5" SSD drives I ordered have been sent in the post, it's just a case of waiting till they are delivered.

Update:

Just got a parcel card in my mailbox, the four new 1Tb SSD drives I ordered have arrived in the post, going to pick them up from the post office later on this afternoon.....Woohoo!!!!


So this afternoon's plans will be as follows:

1, Install one of the 1Tb SSD drives in my studio pc as the system drive.

2, Do a complete clean install of the latest version of Windows 10 on it.

3, Wait till Windows 10 has finished downloading/installing all it's latest updates, and then do a complete install of all my DAW software.

4, Install and activate all my plugins.

5, Get cracking with producing some new music.


Oh yeah, last night I bought a new vst Synth plugin called Serum from Xfer Records, it is a wavetable synth that is really good at producing the bassline sounds commonly found in PsyTrance music, and is used a lot by professional PsyTrance music producers, so I'll be installing it on my studio pc.


And then I'll be performing the same installation on my new Acer Aspire 5 laptop, using one of the remaining 1Tb SSD hard drives tomorrow.

Update:

So far everything has gone smoothly with the installation of one of the new 1Tb SSD drives in my studio pc, my pc's Bios detected it right away so that's a very good sign, it means my studio pc's motherboard is compatible with SSD drives, it's a Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3, I'm now in the process of doing a complete clean install of the latest version of Windows 10 on the new SSD drive, so far it is liking it.

The motherboard actually does have an onboard mSata socket that can accept smaller SSD drives.

Update:

All four of the new 1Tb SSD drives are now installed in my studio pc, so far it has been running really well, like a brand new pc, no more spontaneous shut-downs, or refusals to boot up at random times, it boots up much faster and isn't running sluggishly like it was before, it was definitely worth doing the upgrade.

Okay so the next upgrade I will be doing to my studio pc will be installing three more 8Gb DDR3 1600Mhz Ram sticks on the motherboard to max it out to 32Gb, there are three spare Ram slots on the mother board and currently one 8Gb DDR3 1600Mhz Ram stick installed, I may upgrade the graphics card at a later stage, since I also use my studio pc for gaming as well.