I just discovered an interesting problem with my Motif XF6.  The other day I spent a few hours tweaking songs in my set list.  I was sure to keep saving my work as I progressed.  I was saving my work to an existing file name on a memory stick.

Everything seemed fine until I turned my XF off and then returned the next day.  All my work was lost.  I took the memory stick out of the XF and put it into my Mac.  I received the following message;

OS X can’t repair the disk “MOTIF STICK” {that’s the name of the memory stick}
You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can’t save changes to files on the disk.  Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can.

Apparently something has happened to the stick causing it to enter read-only mode, however, the Motif does not indicate there is a write error.  This can really be a nightmare.

It would be helpful if the Motif would report that the disk wasn’t actually written to in this case.

Incidentally, the brand of memory stick I’m using is the Yamaha Motif XF stick that comes with the Motif Premium Collection.

Fast Follow Up;

Looks like the memory stick is fried.  I received the following error from Mac’s disk utility;

Disk Erase failed
Disk Erase failed with the error:
Unable to write to the last block of the device.

Ouch!  Darn, I liked the cool Motif memory stick.

Still, the Motif should have mentioned that the stick couldn’t be written to instead of making me think it was saving my work.

RichS - 19 April 2014 12:49 AM

[...]Still, the Motif should have mentioned that the stick couldn’t be written to instead of making me think it was saving my work.

Thanks for reporting the problem you experienced.

After a Save operation, the XF normally shows the name and size of the saved file on its display, highlighted. Did it do that? If it did when the file wasn’t actually written, that makes the situation more troubling.

On the other hand, if the XF display didn’t show the supposedly saved file highlighted, that might be a way of determining that the write didn’t actually occur.

I have some other ideas and comments, but they’re dependent on your reply.

The XF did in fact display the file name and size.  I never thought anything was suspicious as I was only tweaking setting on the songs I was working on so I never expected the size (2.5 MB) to change.

RichS - 19 April 2014 12:30 PM

The XF did in fact display the file name and size.  I never thought anything was suspicious as I was only tweaking setting on the songs I was working on so I never expected the size (2.5 MB) to change.

Thanks for the additional information. I wonder if the same would be true for a new file with a different name. That is, would a file that didn’t actually get written show up as having been saved to the flash drive? If that doesn’t happen, then there’s a simple way to protect against the problem - don’t save with the same file name. You could append a number to the name, and increment it each time you save it. For example, save “YourFile1” the first time, then “YourFile2” the second, etc. You could go back later and delete the earlier lower-numbered files, or leave some as backups to minimize any possible loss.

Another thing you could do to verify that a file was updated would be to load one of the edited Songs back into an empty location in the XF. If the edits didn’t appear in the just-loaded Song, then the file wasn’t updated.

If the above seems like too much work, some insurance could be provided by just having two flash drives, and saving anything of importance to both drives. The likelihood of both drives failing at the same time is pretty remote.

There are things that Yamaha could (and probably should) do to warn of a write error, but in the meantime you can minimize the chances of losing important data.