So, there are lessons to be learned, apparently, from producing a high-quality independent shoestring-budget travel show… on a shoestring budget.  The equipment I use to edit the primary episodes of Jet Set Zero totals not more than $2000, which for anyone who has ever worked in a production studio will know is about how much half of one cheap tape deck should cost.  We don’t even have one of those.  The result is that equipment fails at an astronomical rate around here and delays pile up.

Here’s a preview of Episode 206, which should be airing shortly:

It’s not finished because of an alarming string of errors cropping up on my poor, abused little laptop from which I do all the editing for the show.  Hence the title: “ka-THUNK” is roughly the noise I hear every few minutes in rapid succession coming from the most overworked budget hard drive I’ve ever had the pleasure of employing.

It’s not OSX’s notoriously aggressive head-parking, either.  That noise I learned to accept as part of the package with my MacBook 18 months ago when I first acquired it.  I’m pretty sure the head is getting ready to give out, which will eventually result in a catastrophic crash and a happy grinding noise (which some have put to good use, actually.  Click that link.  Really.). The noises, combined with a slew of inexplicable new sleep/restore bugs and a now unpartitionable drive lead me to believe that the end is nigh and it’s time for a trip to Newegg.

What leads to a healthy drive’s total failure in under two years (well within warranty)?  Well, for starters, my working environment probably has something to do with it.  I’ve dropped my laptop onto concrete from about 4 feet and have only Apple’s fantastic polycarbonate case design to thank for saving me about a grand.  I’d tell you that was an uncommon occurrence, but I’d rather not lie on the blog.

I don’t limit my drive abuse to environmental factors, either: oh no, we like to punish our hardware every way we can.  The diagram at left will give you some idea of my regular file allocation.  Yes, that’s right, I operate with about 4% free space on my drive, which might account for enough problems on its own.  But why stop there?  That 110-ish Gb of video?  Oh, that moves around a lot.

Every week for the past 8 months I’ve been rotating about a hundred gigs of HD video from tapes to my local drive to my networked storage array.  That means about 3.2 Tb of data have been rotated through Malcolm OSX’s (yes, that’s still an awesome laptop pun-name) consumer class 5400 rpm drive since the start of this project without a reformat.  In most professional environments you’d have at the very least a RAID 5 array for storing media and with any luck a SAN disk or other rack-mounted solution.  My (current retail price of) $49.99 setup just doesn’t compete.

The short term consequences of this behavior are that the disk became fragmented beyond recognition pretty much immediately and will never be partitionable again.

Apparently the long term results are total drive failure.