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Drives, She Said

Wednesday, March 21, 2007:

Technology ... ya gotta love it. The other morning when I started work, my external hard drive started making a funny whining noise. Probably the fan going bad. Now, because I review software for a living, I install a lot of programs. The C: drive on my Windows machine has been close to full for a long time, and Windows needs that last Gigabyte for swap files. So I routinely install new programs on the external drive. If it goes south, I don't just lose a few gigs of backup data -- I lose access to important programs until I reinstall them.

So I hopped in the car, trundled down to OfficeMax, and bought a spiffy new 250GB Seagate drive. The marketing hype on the box emphasizes how quiet it is. (They got that part right, at least.) So while the old F: drive is still working, I drag-copy just about everything on it over to the new Seagate, which is the G: drive. Then I figure out how to change the drive letters, so that the Seagate will be seen by the system as F:. God forbid Microsoft should let you do this by right-clicking on the drive and selecting Properties. That would be way too easy. But within half an hour or so, I had found what I needed and set it up.

I try launching Cubase from the new F: drive. It works -- no problem. For a while. But then I click on the rewind button on the Cubase transport and nothing happens for about five seconds. Belatedly I realize the same thing would happen when I started to drag-copy files onto the drive: Windows Explorer would freeze for about five seconds while the Seagate spun up from a little nap that it had been taking.

This is why the Seagate is so quiet. It has no fan. To extend the drive life and prevent heat build-up, it spins down and hibernates when no program has accessed it for a few minutes. For some reason, Cubase wants to access its .exe file before executing numerous common commands, such as rewind.

There's nothing on the Seagate box about this peculiar behavior, but even if there had been, I probably wouldn't have noticed, because I had no idea Cubase would need drive access in order to do basic stuff.

I look in the manual. No information there on how to make the silly thing run constantly. A little crawling around on the Internet confirms that this is not a user-configurable option. Seagate, in their infinite wisdom, has built hibernation into the chip that runs the drive. It's a swell drive for storing your photos and tunes, I'm sure. But for running programs, it's a dud.

Along the way, I discover that while the marketing copy on the box promises access to Seagate tech support, there's no phone number or email address in the manual -- nor any on the Seagate website. The copy on the box is a flat-out lie.

OfficeMax will take the drive back, no problem. But now I'll need to occupy more hours of computer time copying the same files (again) to another drive after I buy it. I'll also need to do a hard reformat of the Seagate, because I don't want anyone accessing my data. My mom comes up with a quick solution for that: Reformat it from my laptop, so as not to occupy the main computer. Brilliant!

No more fooling around with local retailers. I order a new Glyph drive from Sweetwater. Three days later it shows up. I plug it in. Whisper-quiet, and I've been promised by Sweetwater that this one never spins down and hibernates.

I plug it in. Windows' New Hardware Wizard finds it and installs the driver. But strangely, the drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer. Device Manager says it's functioning properly, but Windows Explorer can't see it. That's on FireWire, so I switch to USB. Same deal -- installs correctly but never shows up.

What's going on here? For starters, the Glyph ships with no manual whatever. Not that you'd expect a drive to need a manual ... unless it won't mount. And of course both Sweetwater's and Glyph's tech support has gone home for the night at 3 PM California time. Gee, that's a real service orientation, isn't it? I try hooking the drive up to the laptop. Same deal. But now I poke around some more and eventually figure out that the drive has been shipped unformatted.

This is not a bad thing in itself, as it allows me to create a couple of partitions before I do the formatting. But why on Earth would a major company like Glyph ship an unformatted drive with no documentation that tells you how to format it? I'm a power user, and it took me an hour to figure it out. How long do you think it would have taken my technically illiterate brother-in-law?

The Glyph is more expensive than the Seagate: about $1 per gig as opposed to 50 cents. But it comes in a padded carrying case so I can take it to another studio or a club if I ever need to. So I guess the story has a happy ending. And I've even learned a few things along the way. Now all I have to do is copy all the stuff from the old F: drive onto the new one again.