Hard seek

I am concerned that the hard seek I can hear my drive doing when I load a project file is a oversight on behalf of Cakewalk. I have never heard this before with any program that I have used. In the disk drive industry, a hard seek is considered a no-no due to the fact that contact will surely (read surely) generate particals leading to a possible crash in the end. Do others experience a "knock" sound when loading a file with Sonar X1? Can Cakewalk comment please? 

The drive is fine. Do you hear an audible knock?

I don't experience that behavior and I've been using SONAR for a long time. Across multiple machines with different makes of hard disks.

I have a feeling something's breaking down on your drive.

Yup, silliest thing I've ever heard.  Here I was thinking that Sonar would ask the OS for disk access, but no, apparently Sonar has it's own low level drivers and is trying to crash the heads.

Thanks for your message BEATZ. That is good input.

The drive is solid btw. I have had it  for a number of years and remains very quite and can pass any test.

1st let me apologise for my outburst earlier in this thread.  After a few statements on this forum lately blaming Sonar for all kinds of crazy things, my fuse was short.  Sorry for being so rude to you John.

But here's the thing.  Sonar has no idea about your disk's geometry.  It doesn't know how to make the disk heads go to sector zero, or perform a seek, etc.  It just sees a disk as a bunch of storage.  It is aware of the logical disk, but not the physical disk.  The operating system and it's underlying drivers handle the rest.  Modern operating systems work like this.  Sonar is abstracted from the physical hardware by the drivers and the OS.

What might be going on is that now you have an audio application streaming data to a file system, your disk is getting a workout that it hasn't had to deal with before and is showing up a latent problem.

Hate to tell you, but my experience is that when modern disks start clicking, it's often a sign that they are on the verge of failure.  Occasionally, this is not picked up by Windows utilities such as Chkdsk.

Hard drive manufacturers often have tools to detect drive specific faults.  Seagate, for instance, has a tool called SeaTools.  I have used this to detect physical faults in drives that did not report a problem with CHKDSK.  Depending on the make of your hard drive, you may find a tool to do some more in-depth testing.

Good luck getting to the root of your problem.

Bill.

JPut

Thanks for your message BEATZ. That is good input.

The drive is solid btw. I have had it  for a number of years and remains very quite and can pass any test.

So, let me get this right:

1. Your drive is old
2. It sounds like you only have the one drive for projects, programs, operating system samples
3. IT also sounds like you've never performed any routine maintenance such as defragging, getting rid of old files, running chkdsk etc
4. It's Sonar's fault

Did I miss anything?

C'mon now, ease up on JPut. He's just misinterpreting clues. Not the first time that's happened around here! :)

JPut, what you're hearing is not normal, and probably is an indication of a real problem. When a disk drive gets confused about where it is, it does an RTZ (Return to Zero), retracting the heads to a known physical position. The clunk you hear is the armature hitting the stop. It's something the device was designed to do, and although it sounds scary it should not cause damage to the drive.

A drive can have a developing physical problem and still pass tests, because drives are designed to automatically recover from routine errors - errors that can occur even with a healthy drive. Hearing lots of RTZs can be an early warning that the drive's gonna die, though.

If you only experience the knocking sound when invoking a specific application (e.g. SONAR) then it's likely there is a recoverable badspot on the media where a SONAR component has been installed. Again, that can happen even on a healthy disk drive, but could also be an indication of a developing hardware problem. A deep scan should be able to identify the track and sector, and a disk repair utility will probably be able to move the affected file to another location. 

If it was me, I'd be backing up my projects and thinking seriously about replacing the drive.

  jput I'm one of those professional computer guys mentioned above, and to clarify for you, even the operating system can't make a hard drive slap (knock). If your drive is older the noise is a sure sign that it's about to fail. My advice would be back up immediately. You may only be hearing the noise now when you load a project because of the heavier demand, but in our IT department we considered that noise a death sentence and would tell our users not even to turn the machine off, until we had pulled an image across the network. If you Google "hard drive clicks" I think you'll get the general idea. Even if you don't believe the problem to be serious please consider at least an immediate backup of anything you have on that drive that isn't replaceable. Data recovery from a drive in this condition is both expensive and difficult. I hope this isn't all one block of text, if it is I apologize. Preview window isn't working for me. Good Luck EJ

Yup - if it's clicking repeatedly the downward spiral is well under way, seen it many times over the years going back to my days of yore providing field service for a large tech corporation.  Ah the good old days, fortunately hardware support is a thing of my past.