Seagate hard drives don't miss a beat for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Dave Rat is a music engineer and sound wizard whose company, Rat Sound, has developed some of the most widely used sound systems in the industry. His company uses Seagate hard drives to ensure it doesn’t lose a single note from one of the world’s top rock bands, the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Rat has spent nearly 30 years mixing live sound for legendary acts including Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and Foo Fighters. For the last 16 years, Rat has been managing the sound for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ world tours.

The Peppers like to use live songs for B-sides on their overseas singles, using archived recordings made during live shows. But archiving songs on tour is a far cry from doing it in the comfy confines of a music studio—it requires a reliable, durable data storage and backup solution that can withstand the rough treatment show equipment often receives while being shuttled from venue to venue.

“Our hard drives get thrown into the bottom of a road cage and bounce around in the back of our truck, traveling an average of 300-to-400 miles per day,” says Rat. “That’s about 5,000 to 8,000 miles of travel per tour leg in a truck without shock mounting. So the drives must be very durable.” 

Bad Vibrations

The storage solution must also withstand low-frequency mechanical vibration from nearby subwoofer speakers during live show recording. That’s not something Rat initially thought would matter much, until the Peppers’ tour for its Grammy Award-winning Stadium Arcadium album kicked off last spring.

Rat soon began to experience serious problems with the hard drives he was using from a different storage vendor.

The drives started skipping, producing recording errors and even shutting down. Rat lost several show recordings, which significantly limited the variety of live songs the band could select for release on the B-sides of overseas albums. He realized that low-frequency mechanical vibrations from nearby subwoofers could indeed affect drive performance.

Rat switched to Seagate Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drives and Maxtor OneTouch™ III Turbo Edition storage solutions to ensure that every live song from the band’s current tour was securely stored, backed up and safely transported.

Creating redundant backups of the shows is critical so that all live performances will be available for future use. Rat uses two Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition drives, one as a “road backup” that travels with the band and a second as a “master archive” for the studio. He records each live show on a 750-GB Seagate Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive and backs up the show on the “road backup” Maxtor drive. 

When the Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive is full (15 to 18 shows), it’s shipped to Rat’s Los Angeles studio, where an engineer creates a backup copy on the Maxtor master archive drive. Once that backup has been confirmed, Rat erases the road backup drive and uses it, along with a fresh Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive, to start recording the next tour leg. 

 

“At the end of the day, reliability is priority No. 1 for us.”
—Dave Rat, Sound Manager for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ world tours

Rat’s approach to storage and backup is to go with a product he can practically forget is even there. 

“You want something that never breaks, so you never have to think about it and can take it for granted,” says Rat. “It never dawned on me that there’d be a disparity between hard drives. I thought all drives are created equal, but they’re not.” 

Although Seagate external storage and backup drives come equipped with easy-to-use, award-winning software, Rat believes professional audio engineers care more about reliability than software features. 

“At the end of the day, reliability is priority No. 1 for us,” he says. “Seagate provided me with a very reliable, high-capacity storage and backup solution that allowed me to return to taking a hard drive for granted. That’s peace of mind for myself and our entire tour crew.”

And that’s music to the ears of Jim Druckrey, senior vice president and GM of Seagate Branded Solutions. “The Red Hot Chili Peppers are an incredible and enduring band with 60 million album sales worldwide,” Druckrey says. “It’s particularly satisfying that they entrust every note to our durable products.”