One good reason to upgrade to a newer Smartcaster
system, is the protection it affords to your data. Here’s how the story unfolds:
I don’t think people who are not involved daily in the computer industry can realize the big changes that have come about in computer hardware over the past decade. When we sold the first Smartcasters in the early 1990’s, the biggest hard drive we could purchase was about 30 megabytes, which using today’s professional audio standards would hold anywhere from 2 minutes to 15 minutes of audio. Back then we got a couple of hours recording time by limiting the bandwidth and using only mono audio.
Today, we build a standard unit with 120 gigbytes of storage. That’s 120,000 megabytes, or 4,000 times the capacity of equipment 10 years ago. Back then we simply recorded spots on the Smartcasters and got the music off satellite. Today, you can put multiple music libraries on one of the drives and have plenty of operating room. By the way, the cost of the 120,000 megabyte drive is about 20% of the cost of the original 30 mb device.
With massive storage at much lower cost, one of the primary changes in modern Smartcasters is the ability to have multiple copies of data on hand to avoid massive problems created by drive failures.
There are two problem situations created by data loss to drive failure and they require different solutions. The first, of course, is to have the data available for quick recovery into the system, and the second is to have that data stored in a location that other failures will not change it’s availability.
For example, our earlier practice of storing the data within the individual Smartcasters was necessary in its day. However, it meant that if a unit were to fail, and another unit sent to replace it, all the music, spots, and other air material was now in the wrong unit, and it would take a lot of time to move around. Likewise, if the failure were the hard drive in the unit itself, all the data were lost.
Today, our standard system includes a separate audio server. That server is as isolated as we can make it from station wiring to minimize lightning damage, and all audio files (even for multiple stations) are stored inside. It also has a Raid drive array that actually uses two physical drives to hold the data, and either drive alone can reproduce the data. That means if a single drive fails, you still have the data intact.
As an extra protection, Smarts now continuously transfers data from the raid server back to the hard drive in the Smartcaster unit. That means there is a third copy available and that one is in a second machine.
All this is a far cry from the days of the single 30 mb drive in a Smartcaster, and one of the advantages of owning an up to date unit. Audio data today is the lifeblood of a station and should not be left to the chance of a single hard drive failure.