Should my hard drive light be blinking?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Whoopysnorp
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Whoopysnorp

Whoopysnorp

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Pardon me if this is a foolish question, but I'm having difficulty with my recording setup. I have 352 MB of PC100 RAM and two hard drives. The C: drive (the one that's connected to the light on the PC's case) is a 17GB 5400 rpm Quantum Fireball (came in the computer), and I use it for the OS and apps. The D: drive is a 40GB 7200 rpm Maxtor, and I use it for audio. If I run a stripped-down hardware configuration and user profile (no Ethernet card, no programs besides Explorer & Systray), should the computer be accessing the C: drive when I play back audio? Somebody told me the apps should be loaded into RAM and such access should not be ocurring. The reason I ask is that I'm getting a series of nasty pops and clicks that seem synchronized with the hard drive light. It doesn't matter how many tracks I play; two or four will do it. I thought maybe it was virtual memory, so I tried moving it to the D: drive and finally disabling it entirely, and that didn't help. I set it back to 256MB min and max.

System:
-Anigma S30 w/AMD Irongate chipset & Athlon 700 Mhz
-352 MB PC100 RAM
-5400 rpm 17 GB Quantum Fireball (OS & Apps) (primary master)
-7200 rpm 40 GB Maxtor (audio) (secondary master)
-12x Aopen DVD-ROM (secondary slave)
-8x4x32 Philips CD-RW (primary slave)
-TNT2 M64 (16 16MB)
-Linksys Ethernet card
-SBLive
-Delta 66
-Win98SE
 
You didn't mention your software dude! Consider a few tracks of 24bit audio, each track being about 80MB in size. Just how many tracks do you think your mulitrack software is going to load into your 256MB of memory? :)

All multitracking and most recording/mastering/etc audio software reads data directly from the disk into reasonably small buffers. No matter how much memory you add to your system, you will certainly notice consistant disk activity during playback.

If the pops and clicks really do seem to line up with that hard drive light, consider upgrading the drivers for your motherboard and ATA controller (which will probably be the VIA 4in1 drivers from the viatech website, assuming you've got a VIA chipset). You might also want to make sure that your audio drive (at least) is using DMA and not PIO. Finally, disable auto insert notification on the drive that is sharing a channel with your audio HD.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Also- if you try slacks advice and that doesn't work, the older version of soundblaster live (not 5.1) is notorious for the popping and clicking. Try and download the latest drivers for that card. Visit this website for some great advice on setting your computer up for recording! www.tascam.com Good luck!
 
Slackmaster--I meant that it looked like the NON-audio drive was being accessed during playback. However, I've since heard that that light will illuminate for the D: drive as well, so maybe it's not accessing C: after all. I've already made sure DMA was enabled for all drives, and disabled auto-insert notification for both CD drives. My chipset is not a VIA, it's the old AMD Irongate. I'll see if I can find some updates for it, but the old funky motherboard could be the culprit.

Oh yeah, I'm using n-Track 3.0.1.

thehorseshoe--I'm not using the SBLive for recording. Could it still cause the popping? I'll try updating the drivers.
 
Absolutely- the older version, I don't know about this newer 5.1, is really bad about the popping. Even the newer drivers didn't help much. I know because I just got rid of mine. But to answer your question, YES, on playback is where the popping and crackling occurs. It is hideous. Good luck!
 
Whoopy, to answer your original question, on most PCs the "hard drive light" as you call it is connected to the motherboard. It shows activity on the IDE bus. So it is not tied to a particular drive - in fact it can be lit up by non-hard drive IDE devices as well.
 
RWhite - Interesting. I'm learning. I've determined the problem is probably elsewhere, anyway.

thehorseshoe - I misexplained myself--I don't use the SBLive for playback either. If I'm doing recording, the only thing that I use is my Delta 66. The Soundbastard is just for fun.
 
On another note, being that you are using 320MB (256+64)of RAM and a Windows OS, you are most certainly PAGING memory.

Think of memory as a stack of paper, each page having information on it, and each being capable of holding 1MB worth of that information (hypothetically). The pages with information that is used most frequently, by current running processes is kept toward the top of the stack.

Using the example above, one track uses 80 plates. So, you have room in physical memory for a maximum of 4 tracks, but yet your trying to mix 8. Where is all of this extra memory going to come from?

Windows9x and ME both use Virtual memory areas on the hard disk (swap files), which does exactly as it suggests, it swaps the lower plates to this special area on the disk, and back to RAM as it's needed. You may ask why it would not just drop it out of memory, and then reload it when it's needed. While not much more efficient, it is a bit more efficient to swap it, because the OS maintains a database, of where this swap space is located on the disk, so it does have to access seek this information out again.

WindowsNT, 2K, and XP all use page files, which work essentially the same way, but they are always located in the same place physically on the disk, and are always contiguous, and therefore MUCH more efficient than the way a 9x OS does it, but yet still limited to quite a few bandwidth limitations that physical RAM wouldn't be limited by, like waiting for an interrupt (IRQ), or even the small bandwidth of the PCI bus (33MHz).

So I guess this dissertation is to point out that 320MB of RAM is a rather small amount, when dealing with the HUGE files that we deal with in recording, uncompressed audio tracks. RAM is dirt cheap, I would recommend that everyone serious about recording add as much as their machine will handle.

My main mixdown and effect box has 4GB of memory, and offloads some of it's load to another cluster of machines, each with 1GB in them.
 
what size is your power supply? that could be it. i reccomend 300 at least. also i had issues with pops and clicks (although really quiet and really had to listen to find them) i solved them by upping the voltage on my processor (be careful and do it in increments check the temp and do it it in increments until the pops are gone)... also with the cheap prices of hard drives ditch the 5400 and get a 7200.. just suggestions..
 
Now there's an idea. I've only got 200 watts. I'll look into replacing that, if nothing else works.
 
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