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Another Dead USB Stick


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I've had this happen a few times over the years, a USB flash drive becomes unreadable/unmountable and it's over. It happened to me again yesterday with a stick I use for plug-ins on my MBP, specifically Superior Drummer 3 sound content. I don't necessarily like to use a USB stick but just the basic sound install is 40gig so it has to go somewhere and I can't clog the hard drive with all that stuff. I've got to check and make sure I didn't have some Waves licenses on there also. I probably should have seen it coming, it's been a little flakey in disappearing recently however I was blaming the new USB extender thing I bought that has switches on it.

 

It's a pain to be sure but in the end I should be able to just install it on another flash drive, the Toontrack manager program is incredibly straight forward and easy to use. I'm also thinking about just installing it on the thunderbolt drive I use that contains my digital performer files, seems that should work ok and I could lose the extra USB stick dangling out.

 

Has this been a problem for you?

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Yes, but very rarely. Still, it's scary when you have licenses on one. I don't know if you can transfer licenses back to the cloud with Waves and then bring them on to a new USB stick.

 

I've also wondered if maybe iLoks are more durable, and if so, whether you could re-format an old one and use it as a USB drive.

 

But speaking of iLoks...they've really served me when changing to a new computer, or dealing with a dead system drive or installation corruption. The Zero Downtime thing rankles, though. It seems wrong to say "you've paid for your licenses, great, now pay in case there's an issue with our protection scheme." Doesn't Pace keep track online of the iLoks you own? Seems to me they could just deactivate a broken one permanently, so you could transfer your licenses from the cloud to a new one. The argument could be "well how do they know it's broken, maybe you'll just unplug it temporarily and keep using it." What would solve that is having to go to the cloud every three or four months to refresh your device. If the deactivated one showed up, and you had an activation on a different iLok, they'd know something was up.

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I don't know if you can transfer licenses back to the cloud with Waves and then bring them on to a new USB stick.

 

Indeed you can. I just had Waves Central up and discovered I had 5 licenses on that dead stick and I was able to transfer them back to the cloud, it says you can do that once a year. Fortunately the one I actually use live was installed on this computer, that one was my main concern. I'm not worried about the rest right now but with them back to the cloud I assume I'll be able to transfer them to a different device later. I have two installed on my older MBP that's packed away in the garage probably until we move, hope it will still be working then!

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iLoks and Steinberg keys are on every computer save the laptops. But I don't keep programs or libraries on USB keys - they are just for moving stuff around the studio and doing firmware upgrades in gear. Anymore I mostly use DropBox, even between computers that are in the room.

 

I've been on the drive upgrade treadmill for a while. First it was upgrading spinning rust drives. Then was the move to get rid of all moving drives and be all SSD. Then it was get to my first 1TB drive... 1TB drives seemed so big. Then I filled them and needed more room. Clone to 2TB drives and resume. The first 4TB is already in the main DAW, along with a 2TB boot image and a collection of 1-2TB drives... I'm looking at it saying, "Well, I guess it is time to upgrade all the ones and twos into a couple fours".... The first 8TB NVME drive is already available.... But I'm still on standard SSD's - I start to lose PCIe slots if I use NVME on the motherboard I have. The new Threadrippers are very interesting for the high PCIe lane count....

 

The biggest limitation on modern MacBook Pro's is the storage and the RAM. The CPU's are lovely. But the storage and RAM mean they cannot be a main device for me. Not even close. So laptops have gotten cheaper and simpler - loving the MSFT Surface. But the main production machine is a beefy tower laden with drives - the same as it ever was.

 

I have heard of people replacing USB drives on an every-couple-of-years basis. As flash, they have the same write cycle limitations as SSD drives, but I could see them being much lower in their ratings. They don't advertise them as SSD-like and most use them for temp storage not hard media write-cycles.

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I've never had that problem (hopefully I'm not jinxing myself).

 

I always buy major brand USB sticks, and always use the eject utility before removing them. I've read it's not always necessary, but it only takes a minute.

 

I also usually duplicate the data on the USB stick somewhere else, just in case.

 

Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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100 GB writable Blu-Ray discs are $5 - $10 each, and far more durable/reliable than DVDs. You know how people have storage units for things they don't want to keep in the house, but they might need them someday so they don't want to throw them out? That's what Blu-Ray does for me. 10 discs, and I've freed up a terabyte of SSD storage for things that actually matter. Even the 25 GB and 50 GB discs have their place in keeping "data clutter" down. I've yet to have one go bad, a lot of thought went into the engineering to avoid the mistakes of CDs and DVDs as an archival medium.

 

The drawback is it does take a while to write 100 GB of data on a 4X disc...so do it while you sleeping or exercising or whatever.

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always use the eject utility before removing them. I've read it's not always necessary, but it only takes a minute.

 

It is indeed good practice. You can set up Windows so it lets you remove them no matter what, but I haven't done that. If you're writing to the flash drive or even accessing it, that can screw up the file system. Macs are not exempt from this, either so you do need to eject it before removing it.

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I don't like using USB drives but they're small, quick and handy so it's a matter of keeping things slim and trim for live performances. Although it took some time, it wasn't a problem to download the sound file and I didn't lose anything that couldn't be replaced although I'll probably avoid putting the Waves licenses on a stick again. At first I went ahead and installed to another flash drive I had here but decided I should just put it on the thunderbolt SSD that already has my performance file. It appeared that I was allowed to install in two places so the stick can serve as a backup although if the thunderbolt SSD goes down we're back to being a plain 'ole duo show anyway.
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For live performances, I make my own backing tracks from scratch. That way they are in our key, and our arrangement, with room for the solo hog (that would be me) to improvise a solo if appropriate. I'm lucky to be able to play drums, bass, guitar, wind instruments and keyboards. I also save the most fun parts for Leilani and I to play live over the tracks.

 

I mix our tracks to 192kbps MP3 files, and I've been doing this since 2002. If I had to start all over, I'd keep them in WAV format, but back then storage was very limited. Before mixing to mp3 I used to bring a sequence player on stage, but one day I had a problem with a piece of hardware and decided I needed a 'fail-safe' system.

 

To play the backing tracks I use Windows Media Player, to select them I use Windows File Explorer, and to display words and/or music I use WordPad. That way any off-the shelf Windows computer can work for me.

 

We use Windows ThinkPad computers on stage. ThinkPads because they are almost bulletproof, and Windows because in case of an emergency I can get another Windows computer in a hurry.

 

I also bring a backup computer, it's on stage with us, booted up, and ready to go. If something happens, I just switch the USB-to-Audio interface into the standby computer. Since 2002 I've done this twice. First one as a precaution as a HD started making a mechanical noise, second one the CMOS battery died, and I didn't know I could boot the computer without it.

 

I keep a duplicate of all the data on a USB stick. In the extremely unlikely event that both the main and the spare computers die on the same day, I can zip over to any mall and get a Windows computer and the show goes on. It 'lives' in a small padded, water resistant bag.

 

The USB stick is a nice backup device because it is small and light. Since we do one-nighters, every ounce saved is an ounce we don't have to schlep. I only buy 'name brands' like PNY, Kanguru, Sandisk, Samsung, and so on. The first USB stick I bought was an IBM brand and had a whopping 64k of storage space. It still works.

 

Craig your Blu-ray storage solution sounds good. Can you recommend a brand of Blu-ray writable disks that you found reliable? I have an external USB-DVD reader/writer so I imagine I could find one that does Blu-ray as well. Only my older computers have optical drives.

 

Thanks,

Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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I've never had a USB drive go bad but I don't depend on them for licenses. I had Waves Platinum and a large Sounds Online collection but they have faded from use as they have been replaced by UA and NI offerings. Universal Audio does require a dongle of sorts in the form of a card or external audio interface but that has not been a problem for me. When I bought a new Apollo Twin quad I kept my older, weaker version as backup. A power surge knocked out the Apollo and I had to send it off to Sweetwater. Just pugged in the old one and kept going. UA allows both of my Apollo's and my internal card for the desktop DAW to all be active. I appreciate this so they get my business.

This post edited for speling.

My Sweetwater Gear Exchange Page

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I was using a 128GB USB stick for my monthly data backup of all data, which is then removed from the computer and stored away. If I ever get hit by ransomware, at least I'll have my data from the first of the month. It got close to full (because of videos that I make), so I now use a 1TB NVME M.2 "stick" inside a USB holder for backup. Also have room to backup all of my "patch" and program executables. Best thing is that, although both are USB3, the NVME still works about 10 times as fast on writing the data. Admittedly, the NVME would be capable of higher speeds if directly mounted to a PCI connection on a mother board, but this is portable.

 

I also have a 1TB Crucial X8 USB SSD, which travels in my computer bag on service calls. I used to use a 1TB 3.5" HD, but the SSD can handle being dropped without crashing.

 

Both were worth the $$.

Howard Grand|Hamm SK1-73|Kurz PC2|PC2X|PC3|PC3X|PC361; QSC K10's

HP DAW|Epi Les Paul & LP 5-str bass|iPad mini2

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Jim

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I use one of these for backups:

 

http://www.nortonmusic.com/pix/toaster.jpg

 

Regular SATA desktop hard drives plug in and out of this device like a toaster. I make full disk clones once a month on one HD and when done, take it out and put it in a desk drawer. I have multiple previous months of disk clones that I can use in case of malware.

 

On another HD I do my daily data backups using Microsoft's SyncToy. It only takes a few minutes. Plus, every few days or less I do a complete backup on the same disk.

 

Other HDs out of the toaster in the drawer are for archiving things I don't want on my computer's HD. If I load the toaster with 2 HDs I can save to both and have redundancy.

 

Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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Just speaking generally, I've had considerably better luck if I use a USB stick that has an outer casing made of metal. The plastic ones seem to split more often and cause mounting issues.
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I use one of these for backups:

 

http://www.nortonmusic.com/pix/toaster.jpg

 

Regular SATA desktop hard drives plug in and out of this device like a toaster. I make full disk clones once a month on one HD and when done, take it out and put it in a desk drawer.

 

I use this very external drive system for backup and sometimes, continuing to edit photos. I make a mirror of one of them and store it elsewhere, and then I have another one that I store off-site along wtih some older drives that also serve as backup (and of course, on top of that, I have cloud-based storage).

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Craig your Blu-ray storage solution sounds good. Can you recommend a brand of Blu-ray writable disks that you found reliable? I have an external USB-DVD reader/writer so I imagine I could find one that does Blu-ray as well. Only my older computers have optical drives.

 

I assume you want an external drive, I don't have much experience with those but this one should work: OWC Mercury Pro 16X Blu-ray, 16X DVD, 48X CD Read/Write. OWN claims it works with 100 GB M-Discs, which isn't surprising because it just adds an extra layer to existing discs. So it shouldn't be different than a DVD burner being able to do double-sided DVDs, just in this case, it's triple-sided Blu-Rays.

 

What you decide on (I'm using an LG), contact support and verify the device can read and write 100 GB discs. Aside from answering that question, you'll find out if support picks up the phone :)

 

As to reliability of different brands, I have no idea...they all work fine, all have worked, and they all estimate a 30-year shelf life. Unless I can come back from the grave, there's no way I'll be able to know if they were right or not :)

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If anyone's interested, I wrote an article on adding 1TB of SSD to my system for $125.

 

https://photofocus.com/photography/i-just-added-1tb-of-blazing-fast-ssd-storage-to-my-computer-for-125-part-two/

 

That's a very useful article. I wonder why the photographs accompanying it are so good? :) The prices I'm seeing add up to $155, but still, that ain't bad.

 

I've been doing the same thing for years with mechanical hard drives and enclosures, because I was always running out of space in the computer. But this was also back in the days of USB 2.0, and doing any transfers took FOREVER compared to now. And they sure weren't 1 TB of SSD.

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If anyone's interested, I wrote an article on adding 1TB of SSD to my system for $125.

 

https://photofocus.com/photography/i-just-added-1tb-of-blazing-fast-ssd-storage-to-my-computer-for-125-part-two/

 

That's a very useful article. I wonder why the photographs accompanying it are so good? :) The prices I'm seeing add up to $155, but still, that ain't bad.

 

I find that if I use my green permanent marker and encircle my NVMe drive with a green line, my photos look more visceral, deep, and textural. ;)

 

Thanks. The title is from the first part of the article in which I purchased $125 drive and enclosure, only to have it stop mounting. This is part two, where I spent a little more. I posted to part two because I figured people here would just want to cut to the chase instead of hearing the whole experience.

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I mix our tracks to 192kbps MP3 files, and I've been doing this since 2002. If I had to start all over, I'd keep them in WAV format,

 

This would probably be the best backup plan for my live tracks, mix them to stereo audio files with one channel click and put them on a player device. It's certainly not practical for me to put together the system Craig mentions at the Shania Twain show. That way if my little MOTU setup were to go down I could still just plug the player in and keep our full sound albeit without the little bit of automation and midi control I'm using.

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This would probably be the best backup plan for my live tracks, mix them to stereo audio files with one channel click and put them on a player device. It's certainly not practical for me to put together the system Craig mentions at the Shania Twain show. That way if my little MOTU setup were to go down I could still just plug the player in and keep our full sound albeit without the little bit of automation and midi control I'm using.

 

The dual MOTU systems were running all the program changes for all the instrumentalists - there was a lot of Line 6 gear on stage being controlled by the MOTU systems, so the players only had to play, not do any footswitch tap dances. It was probably 95% about control, and 5% about playback. So if anything happened to the sequencers, they would have been hosed.

 

When I was doing a lot of fader-slamming, hardware-based EDM gigs, the logistics of staying on top of two Ensoniq ARX groove boxes (one played while the other loaded from floppy), keyboard, guitar, mic, mixer, vocoder, etc. was a nightmare due to the split-second timing. My trap door was a minidisc player with recorded excerpts of crazy/funny stuff, like part of the "How to Speak Hip" album or a theme from some ancient TV sitcom. When everything imploded into itself, I'd just play back from the minidisc until I was able to get everything under control again. It was the only way not to have dead air!

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That reminds me of the biggest fail I've seen in a major rock concert (not that I've seen that many, because I'm usually working on the same nights the stars come to town).

 

Many years ago, I went to a big rock festival. Back in the days when $5 or $10 would get you in to see/hear a half dozen acts. I mainly wanted to see Dr. John, who didn't show up. But that's another story.

 

Alice Cooper was one of the acts. The musicians were parading poor Alice to the gallows when everything went silent except for the snare drum. The audio was probably on tape and either the tape broke or something else failed. Being true professionals, they continued to march him to the gallows and perform the fake lynching to the sound of a lone snare drum. That's show-biz.

 

The next song started and everything sounded OK.

 

Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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My biggest fail was not a drive, it was a RAID. I had an HP raid with 6 750GB drives and used it for years. RAID 10 with hot spares. Disaster proof. Except that one day the RAID board went out and there were no replacements to be found. It was too far out of production. Now I take a much simpler approach. Two external drives and back up to both. I implemented the same system at work. Every month an assistant would go around to everyone's computer with an external drive and back up the my documents folder. We used two drives and rotate each month. It was a very good system that came in very handy multiple times.

This post edited for speling.

My Sweetwater Gear Exchange Page

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Just a related reminder here - Keep plenty of backups. You probably don't need to buy a fireproof safe (but it's a good idea) but make a few copies and scatter them around the house, maybe give one to a friend, or keep a couple of USB flash drive backups in the glove compartment of your car.

 

I haven't seen any statistics about failure in the car environment, but I've had a couple in my car for a few years now, just in case I'm somewhere where I wished I had something to copy a file on to. What was on them when I put them in (nothing important) is still there and readable three or so years later. I just checked.

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My biggest fail was not a drive, it was a RAID. I had an HP raid with 6 750GB drives and used it for years. RAID 10 with hot spares. Disaster proof. Except that one day the RAID board went out and there were no replacements to be found. It was too far out of production. Now I take a much simpler approach. Two external drives and back up to both. I implemented the same system at work. Every month an assistant would go around to everyone's computer with an external drive and back up the my documents folder. We used two drives and rotate each month. It was a very good system that came in very handy multiple times.

 

Okay, so it's not just me. Every single time I talk about backup, someone always says, "Hey, make sure it's a RAID! One goes down, the other keeps going!"

 

No. I just want two drives that are the same. That's conceptually easy. And really, I have more than that because I keep getting larger drives and putting the old stuff on there anyway, so I actually have numerous drives with backup, and these are kept off-site.

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My photography mentor made a living photographing weddings.

One day he said to me "One is none and two is one."

 

The next time I shot a wedding I learned that two is one. Except my one was not much of a one, more like about 30%.

I haven't shot a wedding in decades, you could not pay me enough.

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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Okay, so it's not just me. Every single time I talk about backup, someone always says, "Hey, make sure it's a RAID! One goes down, the other keeps going!"

 

The ONLY time I was ever screwed with a backup was RAID.

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Okay, so it's not just me. Every single time I talk about backup, someone always says, "Hey, make sure it's a RAID! One goes down, the other keeps going!"

 

The ONLY time I was ever screwed with a backup was RAID.

 

 

NEVER create a RAID array on a Mac. There may be a way to un-RAID it but I never found one and I am pretty persistent. I had a 2008 Mac Pro that was getting long in the tooth and for whatever reason I decided to try and un-RAID 2 of the hard drives. The other two drives were separate duplicate bootable drives, until one of them died. Since they were redundant RAID rather than "half here, half there for speed" RAID, I thought I might get better service by splitting the two into separate drives again.

 

I could not figure out how to do it. I tried a variety of evil plans, including working from an external boot drive and/or an installation disc. They had become one disc and that was that. In the end I backed everything up to externals and got a different computer. I got 8+ years out of it anyway and I don't miss being stuck with Firewire 400 and fan noise. I don't know about Windows and RAID but RAID seems to be forever on a Mac. Luckily I got my data before disk death.

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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My photography mentor made a living photographing weddings.

<...snip...>

I haven't shot a wedding in decades, you could not pay me enough.

 

I haven't played a wedding reception in decades. The wedding industry has convinced the bride that this should be the happiest day of her life, but if she doesn't out-do all of her friends weddings she will be an utter failure and the unhappiest day of her life will brand her a loser. The result is too many Bridzillas micromanaging the wedding and not really knowing how to do that. Plus she is going to want us to learn some obscure album cut song that I'll spend a week learning and sequencing the backing track, and nobody will ever want to hear it again.

 

One of the worst weddings was for a wedding planner. She got to the reception and started yelling at the help, "These flowers are in the wrong place, move them over there" and barked at almost every other department. The mood of the guests went pffffft and never woke up.

 

Another was one where the mother of the bride didn't approve and didn't attend. All the guests on the brides side of the room sat there with their arms folded looking glum.

 

Of course not every wedding is like that. Just most of them. ;)

 

The best wedding I ever played, the father of the bride danced with every female from the youngest to the grannies. The cake didn't arrive, so they bought a sheet-cake at a close by grocery store. On the contract the father wrote 'overtime until we drop' and we went 6 hours without even taking a break. BTW they are still married..

 

The most unusual was a white minister's daughter marrying a black Jamaican gentleman. When we got there to set up the Jamaicans were cooking a goat they slaughtered the night before (a custom). They were dressed up in outrageous fashions that made them look like a gang of thugs. But looks were deceiving, the party was a lot of fun. Both crowds socialized and enjoyed each other. We played rock music and the dance floor was white, we played soca music and the dance floor was black. They only time we had a B&W dance floor was when we played "Hot Hot Hot" and "Old Time Rock And Roll".

 

We ran out of soca that we knew, but had some cassettes we collected when we gigged on cruise ships and went to Jamaica in the late 1980s. So we popped them in a player, ran them through the PA set, and since we knew them, sang along with the tapes, while I put the keyboard on MIDI channel 10 and played percussion. After the gig one Jamaican gentleman told us that we sounded just like the records, and could get a lot of work playing for the Jamaican ex-pats.

 

OK I've drifted off-topic (sorry) so to get back...

 

Sorry Craig, I don't do twitter, but I back my data up every day, and do an HD clone weekly. Thanks anyway.

 

The old Internet proverb.

 

There are two kinds of computer users:

1) Those who have had a hard disk crash

2) Those who have not had a hard disk crash, YET.

 

Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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