Interesting info for BR1600 Users with a "disappearing disk space problem"

[AndyR]

I had some fun last night. I hit "HDD Full" when recording a take.

Usually I'm pretty careful on the Remaining Time/Space, but I hadn't been concentrating and this caught me unawares.

With the disk full, I didn't fancy doing any song optimising, so I had to make some space first.

Now, I had been aware that, even with optimising songs, disk space seemed to be disappearing, and it was vaguely worrying me.

My BR1600 has an 80Gb disk, divided into two 40Gb partitions (the second is slightly smaller). I've only ever used partition 1. I tend to optimise songs, and when they are finished I back them up individually to CD and delete them.

None-the-less, I was at HDD Full with only five "in progress" songs!!

I backed up one I didn't care so much about losing and then deleted it (it's a demo, and I have a stereo mix of it off onto the PC anyway).

That gave me 1hr 10mins back... That seems roughly the amount of audio that project might contain.

I then optimised the two "biggies", each went from approx 1Gb down to 250Mb. This is no surprise - retakes, overdubs, deletions, etc are all kept until you optimise the song.

But... this gave me a MAHOOSIVE amount of time back... a whole 2 minutes!!! (for approx a gig and half freed)

So I'm sat looking at 1h12m remaining (in mono, half that in stereo) thinking "Oh f*ck..."


I went online and started reading the horror stories. And this all seemed to be telling me my hard disk was dying, all disks fail eventually (duh!), the BR1600 is hard on its disk, HDD Full is followed by missing space you can't get back, HDD Read errors, nightmare, etc, etc...

Now, I'd already been reading the manual and eyeing up "hard disk initialise", thinking why doesn't anyone do this? From the discussions around the web, the first thing most people seem to do is open the box up and get a new IDE drive.

I'll do that if I have to (or maybe switch to Reaper!!), but I really don't want to dick about with it like that if it's not necessary.

So, while I was backing the songs up and muttering, I carried on searching. I found some VERY interesting information. Can't find the link I saw last night, but this roland KB article has the same info:

http://www.rolandus.com/support/knowledge_base/view/22635608

Notice how often it says you should do it!!! (Over three years usage here, huge projects with large amounts of tracks, overdubs, sub-mixes, etc, never even wiped the sweat off the top of the thing before )

This gave me hope, but I didn't fancy "Surface Scan". The manual says a surface scan will take 6-8 hours on an 80Gb disk and I want to use the bugger when I've finished working at home today...

I already knew that there's another option in Step 4 - Current Partition Only. This does the equivalent of "Normal", but only to the current partition.

Putting two and two together, I came up with four. This disk gets fragmented, just like any disk would. The operating system somehow loses track of what bits of disk it can use - it's probably erring on the side of caution. So eventually, the list of what it can use is somewhat restricted!

Now, if there are "bad sectors", then the surface scan option will probably rule those out before formatting. But I don't think there are a huge number of them (and it's coping with them in everyday use), so I decided to go with "Current Partition Only" as a first step.

This morning, while working, I've been testing my backup CDs by restoring them all to partition 2. With them all on board, there's 112h21m remaining on that little beauty, and it works like a dream (oh, if you go song-by-song, remember to back-up/restore your User settings as well, if you use any of the "U*" codes for effects and arrangements/patterns).

Then I went back to Partition 1 and set it formatting. I went off to make a coffee and, when I came back, it had already finished!

And guess what? I have my original 133 hours remaining back!! Woohoo!  

Obviously, there might be underlying disk problems, and I'll find them later when I start using partition 1 again. But I really don't think there are, I've just got this gut feeling that it's like the old "lost clusters" you used to get with DOS, and chkdsk (I think it was) would get them back for you.

I did notice in my travels a post from 64G on here about Ver 2.02 software for the BR1600 and an amusing set of translations to try and figure out what the fix was. Those do seem to imply that losing clusters like this might be fixed in 2.02. But I thought I had that version... I'll check at the weekend when I've finished the project I'm on (it's a collab, and she's telling me I only have 3 days left to finish it, otherwise... ).


SO, BR1600 users, with the same "where's my disk space going" uneasiness that I was experiencing... I think there's hope that doesn't involve screw-drivers, and scary hard disk transplant surgery. Obviously, if the disk does physically deteriorate too far, then that is the solution, but in the meantime...

Oh, the software version discussion is in this thread:

https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=6101.0

And finally, has anyone else found rumours of "discontinued" on the BR1600???  

[SteveB]

Sh*t! It looks as though they're ALL discontinued: 1200, 900, 600, the whole dang caboodle. They've just unloaded Cakewalk...wonder what's going on?? 

[AndyR]

Perhaps that bit's another thread, I knew it the minute pressed Save on the OP! - I'll start one up before we start discussing that side of it in here!!...

Here's the "discontinued" thread:

https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=19673.0

As you were, folks, this thread's more for possibly comforting info on "omigod my BR1600 is dying!!!"