hard drive hell

W

Waysid

New member
So I haven't had a chance to record in months.....I finally get some time, buy SONAR, write some music and wham I hit hard drive hell. Heres my problem, if anyone has some time and insight.

I'm running a PIII 733, 256MB, SB Live Plat. with a Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ mobo. A while back I had problems with my slow 5400 drive coupled with my slow mobo....so I bought a Fireball 7200 drive and then had to buy a Promise disk controller to use the drive at ATA 100. Ok so far so good.

Sonar is installed on C (the 5400) and my audio goes to D (the 7200). When I run dskbench on each drive the D drive is transferring at over 30 MB/s the 5400 at just over 10.

Well here's the kicker...any audio I record on the D drive ends up having pops and clicks mixed in with the source. If I record it to the C drive the audio works fine. So I though it was maybe a sonar thing..nope...sound forge does the same thing. I'm not clipping or anything like that. SO what could be going on? I've tried everything i could think of and every suggestion I could find.

From new drivers (sound card, promise adapter etc), to all the various optimization tweaks. An interesting not is that it seemed to improve when I turned write caching on in Sonar.... So what kind of problem can be improved when you slow down the actual writing to a drive??? Weird?

Anyway...if anyone can help I would really appreciate it. I thinks its a bit of a tricky one.

Chris
 
One more thing I forgot to mention. If I play back an existing song with over 16 tracks it plays back fine on the D drive. (On the C drive it has some problems - but that makes sense...its a slow drive trying to play back a lot of data).

Chris
 
Hmmm... It could be your DMA settings causing the problem. Chances aren't TOO great, but it's easy to try. Go to your control panel and into the device manager. Navigate to your D hard drive and make sure DMA is enabled.

It's worth a try.
 
Thanks for the reply.....yeah I checked that and here's the deal:

the 5400 (c drive) is attached to my mobo disk controllers, dma is definitely enabled on it. The 7200 (d drive) is attached to the promise controller (dma is on by default according to their website). I wonder if its something to do with have one drive on each controller rather than just having both hooked up to the promise one.

Chris
 
I would look at the controller as the culprit since that is the main difference between the 2 drives. Try getting rid of it or hooking both up to it and see what happens.

You can also try different process and drive buffer settings to see if it clears up.
 
Thanks for the response.

I tried hooking up both drives to the promise controller - the 5400 and my CD rom on one channel, the 7200 on another channel.

I now get improved read/write rates on the 5400 (~20 mb/s) and the 7200 remains the same (~33 mb/s). However...any wavs recorded to the 7200 still contain crackles, pops, and clicks. Anything to the 5400 sounds fine. It doesn't matter what software I use.

I'm not sure how to try different process or drive buffer settings? Is that a windows thing? Bios?

Chris
 
Just to finish of this thread, I figured I would give my final results.

I have basically concluded that I have a crappy motherboard....or (and I think its less likely) a slightly defective 7200 drive.

Here's a summary of my findings:

- 5400 on motherboard IDE1(master): read/write speed 10mb/s - clean recordings
- 7200 on motherboard IDE2(master): read/write speed 12mb/s - clean recordings

- 5400 on promise ATA100 IDE1 (master): read/write speed 20 mb/s - clean recordings
- 7200 on promise ATA100 IDE2 (master): read/write speed 35mb/s - crackling, popping recordings

- 5400 on promise ATA100 IDE1 (master): read/write speed 20 mb/s - clean recordings
- 7200 on motherboard IDE1(master): read/write speed 12mb/s - clean recordings

- 5400 on motherboard IDE1(master): read/write speed 10mb/s - clean recordings
- 7200 on promise ATA100 IDE1 (master): read/write speed 35mb/s - crackling, popping recordings


So I guess my best option is #3 can get 20mb/s transfer rate on my 5400 on the promise and I guess I'll use my 7200 for archiving.
Seems totally ass backwards....but it looks like the best I can get. It just seems like when the 7200 gets a transfer rate of over 30mb/s my system can't handle it.

Don't know if this will help anyone else...
 
The information I have got on this is that it is a windows problem. It have something to do with cache memory and "read ahead" or what it´s called. There is a windows version that are designed for audiorecording that don´t have these problems i´ve heard.
There is a setting change one can do that I have had done on my PC but its "at your own risk" and I dont dare try to explain to you how to do it and be responsible if something goes wrong. And my windows is in swedish so its possible I would have problems explaining not knowing exactly what your windows calls things.
Surf the web on the subject. Thats what I did.
(you can´t play games with these settings either)

Confused post I know but I hope it helps :)
 
Thanks for the cryptic reply ;-). but I think I know what you are talking about.

- virtual memory - I will set my virtual memory swap file to have the same min and max size
- write caching - I will turn off write behind caching
- read caching - I will set my MinFileCache and MaxFileCache to same number (power of 1024)
- read ahead optimatization - I will turn the silder to its lowest setting

I think these are the tweaks you are referring to. I'm pretty sure I've tried them before but I'll give them another shot.

Chris
 
Actually when I think about it more the question really boils down to:

- why do wavs on my fast drive have crackles and pops, when ones on the slow drive do not

I don't think the perfomance tweaks mentioned above are the answer....if both drives crackled and popped that would make sense.

What would cause a faster drive (and dsk bench verifies it is reading and writing faster) do write bad data? In fact I even think that the more I improve the read/write rate the worse the problem gets and vice versa. Proven by the fact when I put the fast drive on a slow controller it works much better.

Chris
 
Is that Promise controller a PCI card, or is it built in to your mobo? Have you tried contacting Promise tech support?
 
That is pretty weird. I have very similar specs and have 2 similar drives. I guess my MOBO is a little newer as it is ata100. I dont have any crackling on either drive. The only big difference between my setup and yours is that I have 512MB PC133Ram.

It seems like your system just cant process the data fast enough. I bet a newer MOBO would help. There may be too many bottlenecks trying to go through the Promise and the PCI slot. I wonder if the PCI controllers just aren't suited for streaming audio/video.

I noticed you are using a SB card. That could also be part of the problem.
 
Its a PCI card - no I haven't tried contacting Promise I guess I could but I don't know how much they would know about digital audio applications. Its not like the drive doesn't work...I can copy files to it, read from it etc. etc. its just in the digital recording application that it fails. Its a good idea though...I will give it a shot.

Thanks
Chris
 
Ok, you knew what I was talking about allready... I´ll go hide under a stone now...

The harddrive difference I know nothing about... oh well...
 
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