Sonar with multiple hard drives

[rvriccardi]

I'm currently using Sonar 4 Producer and have run into a problem when playing projects from my second hard drive.

Sonar is stored on my C: drive. I have a another hard drive installed D:, that I wanted to use just for my Sonar project files. The problem I'm having is when I play back any of my larger projects from my D: drive, the drive has a lot of activity during playback. During the activity, Sonar stops playback for about 1/4 second every 4 seconds or so. During this "pause", my D: drive is very active. As soon as the drive is inactive, Sonar continues to play for about 4 seconds and then the cycle repeats.

I moved my larger projects to my C: drive and they run normally. My C: drive also has activity about every 4 seconds during playback, although not as intense my D: drive, and the project doesn't pause, it runs normally.

Equipment:
-Intel 3ghz processor
-1GB of ram
-C:-80GB (7200rpm)
-D:-120GB (7200rpm)

I'd appreciate any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks

[dachay2tnr]

Weird. Can I assume you have your OS installed on the C: drive as well?

How full is the d:\ drive compared to c:\?

Have you tried defragging d:\?

Is DMA enabled on both drives?

Are there a lot of edits/punch ins on these tracks?

What plug-ins are you running? What's the latency settings?

I assume you have no background programs running (virus scan, etc.).

[rvriccardi]

Thanks for the quick response and the many suggestions...

1) I'm using Windows 2000 and it is installed on C: drive.
2) My C: drive has about 40GB free and my D: drive has about 80GB free.
3) I defrag both drives on a regular basis. I just checked and the fragmentation on both drives is less that 1 percent.
4) I did check and DMA is enabled on both drives and so is disk caching.
5) There aren't any edits or punches at this time, the only plug in I'm using is reverb for the vocal track.
6) My latency setting is 2ms. The project was recorded @ 48kHz 24bit.
7) I disabled all background apps including firewall, viruscan

I may be pushing the envelope here...The projects I'm referring too were live recordings of my band. I recorded 12 tracks for about two hours during our practice session. The only edit's I tried were to isolate the good songs and dump everything else.

I guess the problem could be my D: drive. My D: drive has a lot more activity then the C: drive when reading the same data.

Thanks

[dachay2tnr]

I guess it could be a bum drive. Bottom line is that the performance should be better streaming the audio from the d: drive, since c: also has to handle OS chores.

Do you have any disk testing utilities to check the disk's performance? Perhaps it's not really a 7200 rpm. Or maybe it's not performing to spec.

Anyway, I'm all out of ideas.

[rvriccardi]

I'm going to try another drive tonight (80GB) and see what the results are. I also think the drive may not be performing to specs.

Thanks for your help dachay2tnr

[TravisK]

You might also want to make sure your D:/ drive isn't on the same cable as the CDROMs...and ensure that your IDE cable (assuming IDE) is the UDMA133 cables and not the old style (check the gauge of wire, if it's thick and not thin on the ribbon then you have the old style).

Another thing to make sure your buffer is set correctly in Sonar. Up it to 256 or so and see what happens.

One last thing is to check and see if the cache is significantly different on your C:/ and D:/

A 2 meg and an 8 meg cache difference can be huge.

[rvriccardi]

Thanks Travisk for the suggestions, I 'll try them out!!

[rvriccardi]

And the winner is????????? THE HARD DRIVE!!

I installed a relatively new 80GB hard drive and everything works great. Thanks for the help.