Safely remove hard drive

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  • #87711
    Profile photo of JeroenAudioJeroenAudio
    Participant

    When making a multitrack recording via SQ drive today I wondered what would be the best moment to safely remove the external hard drive once finished. In Windows there is an option to savely remove a hard drive, on the SQ not.
    Is it for instance after finishing the recording or after the desk is shut down?
    Can anyone from A&H advice?

    #87715
    Profile photo of peterlanderspeterlanders
    Participant

    The reason for safe eject on Windows (and the requirement to eject all external media on Macs) is write-behind buffering, which will hold back disk writes until the disk (or CPU) is idle, which means there’s the potential of data loss if you pull the disk during the (usually short) period after the data has been buffered but before it actually gets written to disk.

    Windows uses this feature for drives that appear as spinning hard disks (including SSDs), but not for thumb drives. Macs use it for all drives.

    My suspicion is that the SQ doesn’t use this feature at all, streaming data directly to the USB drive in real time. This seems typical for most non-computer recording devices. So as long as you’ve stopped the record and any activity indicators are not blinking, you should be safe. That’s how I’ve operated this far without issue, at any rate!

    #87741
    Profile photo of JeroenAudioJeroenAudio
    Participant

    Hi Peter,

    I agree with you. My fear however is that the HSA is still in the reading of writing position and may thus damage the platters inside the HDD when transported. I want to make sure that is not the case.


    @Alex
    A&H or @Keith: what is your view?

    #87749
    Profile photo of peterlanderspeterlanders
    Participant

    Modern drives don’t have that particular issue; no need to park the heads these days, no matter what they’re connected to. Not like the early days when it was up to the controller to move the heads to a safe landing zone.

    #87752
    Profile photo of Alex A&HAlex A&H
    Keymaster

    Hi Jeroen,

    As Peter said, as long as the SQ-Drive LED shows no activity then the drive is safe to eject. It will only show activity when you are using the drive for a specific task, like recording or show recall.

    Thanks!
    Alex

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