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Topic: Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear? (Read 4853 times) previous topic - next topic
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Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

I am curious to learn if the harddrive with the audio files are exposed to significantly more wear and tear for some technical reason, album art files included ofc.

Really the only thing that comes to my mind in particular as a potential problem (I am no expert), is what I imagine to be the scrubbing of files when browsing the music with the album art associated with each file.

Not sure what to think of this.

How much data is cached into the memory and is album art ever cached into memory. Does anybody know how or just if cache'ing works in Foobar?

Edit: I guess I am speculating that since I am faced with a harddrive failure (according to SMART), I can only suspect it to be "bad luck" or possibly something due to it being the harddrive that I have my music stored.

If it mattered, I guess I could keep the music on its own harddrive and keep other files for storage on some separate harddrive. Luckily I have been able to copy the all stuff on my failing harddrive so that the files are safe.

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #1 –
Hard drive failure is random, and it can be emotionally catastrophic when you have no backup (or no money to replace a failed drive).

Because of both of those factors, we often want try to find reasons, but sometimes there simply is none. Music file access is no different than any other type of file access.

Sorry about your lost.
elevatorladylevitateme

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #2 –
You might want to take a look at this paper.
"I hear it when I see it."

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #3 –

Backup and use raid configuration in a multi hdd environment. I have about 2000 cds stored on the internal hardrive, an external drive with single disc and a raid 5 configured 4 disc external drive.

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: SASN on
I am curious to learn if the harddrive with the audio files are exposed to significantly more wear and tear for some technical reason, album art files included ofc.


Well, if you update tags often with ever larger album art, on an almost full drive (and music hard drives tend to be almost full, don't they?  )  then in principle you would fragment every file, and moving back and forth a lot does in principle increase wear. But then on the other hand, compared to movies -- viewing one hour of video content reads more data off your hard drive than one hour of music. So even if this were to be a major issue -- something I doubt -- it would depend on what you are comparing to, and it is not at all given that audio content is very stressful.

Usually, the most worn harddrive sectors would be on your OS disk. But if that one solely holds OS and applications -- and no user data -- then (1) it will often be replaced every time user buys a new computer, and if OS crashes to the point of reinstallation before that (for example due to bad sector), then (2) upon reinstalling, you would usually format it, and although you might not read the messages, the formatting can detect bad sectors (and disable them!), and besides (3) the loss of a music collection hurts more than reinstalling the g'damn Windows.


I wonder how many have their music collections on their oldest hard drives, though ...

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #5 –
Ah well, I offlined the offending harddrive and will plan to buy a new one. The warranty is afaik void on the harddrive I have, due to me using a low hardware level format some time ago, not supported by the manufacturer.

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: SASN on
Ah well, I offlined the offending harddrive and will plan to buy a new one. The warranty is afaik void on the harddrive I have, due to me using a low hardware level format some time ago, not supported by the manufacturer.


It's impossible to low level format a modern hard drive.  Any software that said it did so is lying.  Unless you have done something to physically damage the drive (drop it etc) the warranty should still apply.

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #7 –
I guess what I meant by "low hardware level format" is this erase tool called 'secure erase'. It allegedly overwrites all of the regular harddrive space and then some more in the areas between the untouched sectors of writable space, possibly on the outer edge as well I no longer remember the details.

I could swear that wikipedia had an article about ATA secure erase, but now it seem only mentioned indirectly. Maybe I remember it wrong.

Careful, ATA secure erase did seem to kill off one of my other harddrives when I wiped all my harddrives at some point (that particular harddrive just became inoperable).

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #8 –
I would suppose that the colloquial use of «low-level» nowadays, means what people do when they uncheck the «Quick format» option in MS-Windows. Seems to me that this is essentially quick format + chkdsk.

Quote from: SASN on
ATA secure erase did seem to kill off one of my other harddrives when I wiped all my harddrives at some point (that particular harddrive just became inoperable).


I recently had a similar issue. The HDD was indeed defective (I already knew from chkdsk), and trying to apply some clever formatting tool in order to possibly isolate a bad sector, killed it totally. If your case was similar, then you should not really blame the erase utility. Forcing a write through a bad sector is not that much of a no-no for a disc where there is no data to be protected. (The paranoid ones who wish to erase the data beyond the point of forensic retrieval, will of course worry that the drive might have crashed with data still intact on the platter.)


(So why did I attempt to extend the life of a dying hard drive, and risk data loss? Since my old Windows XP takes literally days to cycle through all the updates from fresh install to current update, I usually clone the OS disk once this is done -- and for this purpose, I am happy to use a doubtful drive if such one is available now ... and since the doubtful ones are consistently the only ones possibly empty ... )

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #9 –
ATA secure erase is a normal thing to do on a hard drive and is not in any way a "low hardware level format".  It just writes zeros to every sector, including those that are reserved as spares and/or have been remapped as bad.  It would not void your warranty. 

ATA secure erase can "kill" a hard drive because it is required to set a password on the drive first. If everything goes right then the password is removed after the erase is done.  If something goes wrong then the password can be left in place and you now have a "dead" drive.  The drive isn't broken (unless it was before), it's just inaccessible.  Often ATA erase programs use the same password every time, so if you can find it out you can unlock the drive.

If you don't care about overwriting the tiny amount of data that is in the spare sector area then just use something like DBAN which will erase the drive without the password risk.

The only thing that can "isolate" (ie, remap) a bad sector properly is the tool provided by the drive manufacturer.  Drives will sometimes do this on their own if they realize the sector is bad, but it's not 100%.  This of course assumes there are still spare sectors left to remap to.  In any case, a drive with bad/remapped sectors should be treated as suspect and replaced if at all possible.

There are a fair number of hard drive "utilities" out there that claim to be able to low level format, repair bad sectors, improve drive health and other impossible things.  They are all snake oil.


As to the original question, no, music playback will not increase wear and tear on a hard drive. 

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: xnor on
You might want to take a look at this paper.



A classic, highly regarded paper.

Relevant quote:

"In our study, we did not find much correlation between failure rate and either elevated temperature or utilization."
 

Are HDs playing audio files (incl. art) exposed to more wear and tear?

Reply #11 –
Quote from: SASN on
I am curious to learn if the harddrive with the audio files are exposed to significantly more wear and tear for some technical reason, album art files included ofc.

Really the only thing that comes to my mind in particular as a potential problem (I am no expert), is what I imagine to be the scrubbing of files when browsing the music with the album art associated with each file.

Not sure what to think of this.

How much data is cached into the memory and is album art ever cached into memory. Does anybody know how or just if cache'ing works in Foobar?

Edit: I guess I am speculating that since I am faced with a harddrive failure (according to SMART), I can only suspect it to be "bad luck" or possibly something due to it being the harddrive that I have my music stored.

If it mattered, I guess I could keep the music on its own harddrive and keep other files for storage on some separate harddrive. Luckily I have been able to copy the all stuff on my failing harddrive so that the files are safe.


I've had 3 hard drive failures in the last 5 years between 3 machines and 2 Solid State Drive failures. Two of the hard drives tripped SMART. In all cases I lost a minimal amount of data- a few small .DOC files. Partition table got damaged on the first one (IDE , no SMART) I used GetDataBack fro NTFS to recover the data on all the drives. Best $80 I spent. The SSDs in the two general purpose PCs are used only for the OS (Win XP Pro SP3) and apps. In both those failures I had images of the drives and simply installed a replacement and restored the image - less than an hour. As long as the disc spins and the heads move there is hope. The latest version of GetDataBack mapped the dead 1.5T disk in 4 minutes and then took about 90 minutes to copy over 1.1 Tbytes.

As far as audio putting 'strain' on the disk drive, the data rate is so pitifully slow I can't see how it matters. I was moving files across the LAN last night at over 500 Mbits/second. WAV files are <1.5 Mbits/second. I routinely record HD video while playing 2 more streams with no issues at all. Each stream is around 15 Mbits/second.

G²