USB-2, NTFS, Audio, Reliability


As time goes by, and the terabytes mount up, I'm getting
rather suspicious of USB-2 and NTFS (windows) file systems.

Spread over three computers, dozens of drives (SATA for use
with the DAW; IDE for use with the recorder), a couple of
external USB-2 housings, I keep getting annoying, random
errors at random intervals... Things such as a very short
burst of white noise in a wav file that was clean
originally; another few corrupted wav or fade files that
cause Protools to choke upon load (but all was well six
months ago); the occasional CD Architech file that now
claims it's not a CD arch file when it used to work just
fine; etc.

This only happens with something probably less than 0.001%
of the total byte count of data that's stored here, and I
can normally recover from a backup somewhere, but this
seems ridiculous and annoying. I sure as hell don't
remember UNIX or VAX/VMS systems doing this kind of thing,
but maybe the data sets just weren't large enough.

The common denominator seems to be USB, as the corruptions
tend to show up in files that have been moved via USB from,
say, an active drive to an archive drive. But I've also
seen NTFS misbehave and entire sets of files disappear then
reappear, sometimes on a refresh, sometimes only on a
reboot, and sometimes simply by moving through the folder
trees with explorer, even after multiple refreshes failed.

To copy files I generally use drag and drop via two XP
explorer windows; this supposedly automatically turns on
read-after-write verification, but perhaps I should only
use xcopy in the CMD window after having manually set
verify to ON. Perhaps verify-after-write is disabled across
USB connections (Windows trying to be "helpful" by
"speeding up" operations across a slower disk connection.)

I occasionally do other things with the system during such
transfers, perhaps foolishly believing that a quad-core
machine running XP SP3 can walk and chew gum at the same
time.

These are on fairly new, tweaked XP machines ("tweaked"
meaning they're not running a bunch of extraneous junk and
are favoring audio production).

I probably don't need to hear about Linux or the Mac; I'd run one of
the real UNIX machines running real UNIX if I could (and
did, once upon a time, in another life), but commodity
machines have put us where we are; that's the reality. I'm
looking for work-arounds.

Mostly curious about any patterns you've seen, assuming
you've had similar problems.

Thanks in advance,

Frank Stearns
Mobile Audio
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