MAC Freezes After An Hour - Crucial SSD Problem

I've had to tackle some nasty nasty computer issues in the past. Some have been simply a matter of reading logs and researching solutions, others have been the result of bad hardware. NEVER have had the frustration and loss of personal time of dealing with the problem I've encountered in the past 2 weeks.. on a mac nonetheless.

I'm no Apple fanboy, but I have to hold Apple blameless in this one (outside of the fact that they refuse to formally support the majority of quality 3rd party hardware.)

Problem: Boot Mac Pro with Crucial SSD as OS drive, run for an hour, machine crashes with spinning wheel of death :(

Cause: Turns out there's this weird firmware bug on my Crucial M4256GBSSD2 drive that makes the drive go unresponsive after 5000+ hours of use. So I bought the drive over the summer and my machine is a 24/7 environment for a number of reasons I won't go into here and VOILA! a time drain appears in your life. Find the problem and the solution here: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/M4-firmware-0309-is-now-available/td-p/80286

Solution: Download and install the firmware upgrade on the drive as the link indicates. One gotcha, if you use an external usb optical drive, you'll be in for a sore surprise as the disc won't boot off of a non ide optical device... :) Gotta love this kind of crap. I swapped drives with a laptop and did the firmware upgrade there to resolve.

My main complaint, couldn't somebody at Crucial send out an freakin email about this? Did I REALLY neeed to sink 2 weeks of relentless R&D, log research, open tickets with various software vendors, etc... to find out the drive has a freakin software bug? REALLY? I've always talked Crucial up, because aside from this incident, they make really solid hardware.... but Seriously...? This really put a dent in my confidence and I'll certainly refrain from preaching Crucial as a the end-all SSD solution... What a pain in the Arse...

Oblique

• Oblique

Roses

• Roses

Data Backup Scare

Yesterday, I did some "creative" de duping of my music resources. These resources are pretty much my sample library. At 21 GB its not the most vast library out there, but it DOES have some stuff in it thats irreplaceable. So I attempted to use a little used command called fdupes to sniff out and delete all of the duplicate samples in the directory. It went a little something like this.

#yes 1 | fdupes -dr /Volumes/Production/Resources

I'm pretty sure it did a far more thorough job than I had hoped. Evidence of this came when I launched Nuendo to work on a track and samples for my battery kit couldn't be found. I quickly decided, hmmm, I need to undo that de dup I just did :)

Enter my backup regime. It consists of a 2TB LaCie Firewire 800 External for local "oops" restores and a Back Blaze Account @ $5.00/month that holds around 900GB (and took 3+ months to initiate I might add.)

My first stop was Time Machine. I went in, browsed to the directory in question and hit Restore. This always just works right? Well it started to... It popped out of Time Machine and started the copy process and enumerated the 80k + files to restore... Then it asked me if I wanted to replace the existing directory I was restoring to.. I DID want to do that and responded accordingly... Then... Poof! the copy dialogue disappears and nothing. Okay.... I tried it again.. Same thing. Worse yet I looked to see if perhaps it was being stealthy and copying in the background, but nay... it had actually DELETED my entire /Resources directory.. *GASP*

After minor panic, I did my due diligence and visited Disk Utility to see if perhaps there were errors on the Time Machine or destination volumes... Hmmm... Nope everything came back Green (hours later.) A slow panic was creeping in.. I decided I had better initiate by fail-safe option with Back-Blaze, even if it takes days.. No Problem, they'll email me when their poor filesystem has zipped up 21GB of uncompressed wav files... Not holding my breath...

So at this point i'm dead in the water on a rare occurring Studio Sunday... Okay enough of this dumb GUI user crap, I popped open the shell.. Time to figure out how Time Machine works....

#cd /Volumes/TimeMachine///Production/Resources
#ls -lha


VOILA! My data IS there and just being stubborn... I fixed that promptly with:

#rsync -av . /Volumes/Production/Resources/


Away it went...... Minutes later everything was back to pre dup status.. Nuendo opened up, Battery loaded samples... and I'm back in action.... I'm soooo glad Apple used some common sense in building Time Machine.. While I still don't know why Time Machine isn't restoring from the GUI (and don't care now that I know I can substitute the CLI for all the stars and what not in TM,) I'm still quite happy with it overall.

M.E.T.A - Live Practice

A shot at broadcasting live practices. I hope to resume this later in 2012.

A.T.E.M - EVITOMA

This is the slowdub A.T.E.M remix of A Motive.

• evitoMA

Door To The Sky - Scratch Concept

Another Sappy Piano Song not recorded particularly well... Still looking for a better way to arrange this one.

• Door To The Sky