weird hard drive timing adventure

My main audio drive, a G Technology raid 0 2TB drive (on a pair of Hitachi 1TB drives, esata), gave up the ghost, and because I had a lot of trouble with my backup system, it appeared I lost a year’s worth of music. Turns out the drives themselves were OK but the controller inside the external case failed, so I was able to use recovery software after temporarily installing the drives in a spare computer and get my data back!

I was so happy to get the data back, until I installed it on a new external USB3 Seagate 3TB drive. When I tried loading songs the timing was off on my audio tracks. The files looked good on the screen but Nuendo would stutter, oscillate, and eventually crash trying to play these resurrected files, and when they played, they were horribly out of sync. I could open the files individually in Sound Forge, and they looked fine and played normally!

I finally re-loaded the data on another raid 0 2TB esata drive, and you know what? It played perfectly again on Nuendo! So here’s my question- is it the new Seagate hard drive formatting? The USB3 interface? Or something else?

Has anyone else found their multi-track audio totally non-sync’d when moved to certain drives? Is the USB3 interface to blame? I’m using Windows 7 64.

I’ve done some more testing… I took the exact files that refused to play properly off the Seagate BackupPlus 3TB USB-3 drive, and put them on a 2TB Raid 0 drive. The EXACT same files played perfectly on the Raid 0 drive, connected via E-SATA.

Now you might say that perhaps it is the USB 3 interface, and it might be, but when I updated my Asus BIOS, and tested the USB 3 speed against my RAID 0 drive, I had better throughput (like, 150mbps vs 120 mbps) on the USB3 drive. Is this a timing issue? I understand that the Seagate Backup Plus drives use a non-standard low level formatting scheme.

I don’t know enough to lay blame on any one feature of this drive… I just know that while I can play audio files on Sound Forge fine off this drive, trying to play Nuendo files won’t work at all.

What mobo & USB3 controller?