Stttutterring after second HD

mbuster

mbuster

New member
I've been cruising along quite nicely withe Sonar PE3.1.1 for quite awhile now. However, I just added a second HD for the sole purpose of audio data. Now, when I play a project, the stuttering is unbeleivable. I'm using an AP2496 card, which has always been swell. I'm using the ASIO drivers. I've tried changing the I/O buffer size. No matter what It's all wacked out. When the stutters occur, my CPU and Disk meters are going apeshit, too. I may need to post this in the Computer Recording Forum, but I thought I'd try here first, in case any of you have experienced this.
Thanks.
 
Is it a 7200 RPM drive? Do you have DMA enabled (although I thought that was automatic with new drives).

Have you tried switching to WDM drivers to see what happens?
 
Did you cable the 2nd drive into the secondary IDE channel along with a CDROM? If so, this will slow the drive down to the speed of the slowest on the channel (the CD).

Consider placing both drives on the same channel, and be sure to use an 80-pin ATA100 cable.

Set your swap file size to a fixed, rather than variable size. Use Norton Speed Disk, etc, to defrag afterwards so you will have a contiguous swap file.

Add RAM. If running XP, 256mb is sufficient to get the system off the ground with modest work. If doing something intense, consider 512mb to 1gb of RAM. XP requires 128mb just to load itself.

There are Windows tunings you can do to speed things up. Store a GHOST image of your optimized system on the 2nd hard disk for disaster recovery.
 
I guess I got it figured out. I went into the bios, and in the spot where you enable and disable drives, it said (off) for the device spot my second HD is on. I turned it on, and it said Undefined. after booting up, everything worked ok, and it now recognizes my HD in the BIOS. What I don't understand is why the HD worked at all if the BIOS said it was OFF. I had copied all my cakewalk projects to it,(come to think of it, that probably shouldn't have taken two hours should it?) and could explore it and all. Anyway, it works now. Thanks guys.
 
bgavin said:
Consider placing both drives on the same channel,
Click to expand...

This sort of defeats the purpose of having a second audio drive. The idea is to allow simultaneous access to both drives. Each drive should be on a separate controller.
 
Which defeats the purpose of having two high speed drives.

As for simultaneous access, no. Only one device has access to the bus at any instant in time. I haven't been down the PCI bus in a long while, but I doubt the two IDE channels are on separate busses.
 
mbuster said:
I guess I got it figured out. I went into the bios, and in the spot where you enable and disable drives, it said (off) for the device spot my second HD is on. I turned it on, and it said Undefined. after booting up, everything worked ok, and it now recognizes my HD in the BIOS. What I don't understand is why the HD worked at all if the BIOS said it was OFF. I had copied all my cakewalk projects to it,(come to think of it, that probably shouldn't have taken two hours should it?) and could explore it and all. Anyway, it works now. Thanks guys.
Click to expand...

Well, if you're using XP, it does some weird things about getting around the BIOS and recognizing devices itself with some pretty whacky results if it's turned off in the BIOS. One time I installed a hard drive with auto-detect and all that turned off in BIOS, and as soon as I booted up XP it started detecting the hard drive, then saying it was invalid, then detecting it again, then saying it was invalid again, then detecting it... etc. Anyway, so that's my guess as to why it still recognized it, though how XP does this I'm still not really sure.

Also, in response to having them on the same cable, some super-high-end computers will run separate devices on separate buses (they use special 80 pin connecters, designed so that it's like running two separate slots on the board). This is pretty rare though.
 
bgavin said:
Which defeats the purpose of having two high speed drives.

As for simultaneous access, no. Only one device has access to the bus at any instant in time. I haven't been down the PCI bus in a long while, but I doubt the two IDE channels are on separate busses.
Click to expand...

I did a little further checking and it seems - depending on how many IDE devices are employed - that we are both right.

With three devices (e.g., 2 hard drives and 1 DVD or CD burner), it is best to put the OS drive and the CD/DVD on controller 1 and the data hard drive on a separate controller.

With four devices (e.g., 2 hard drives, 1 DVD, 1 CD Burner) it is best to put the two hard drives on the same controller, and the CD/DVD's on the other controller.
 
I'm glad you wrote that. I was getting confused. Both my HD's are on the same cables, and my disk drives are on another. So I'm good, no?
 
XP can indeed ignore the bios for a lot of things and it can sometimes install HDs without DMA, though I don't know why and it's always used DMA for me.

CD and DVD drives don't slow down HDs unless they are being accessed. I have two hard drives each on their own controllers, one with a DVDrom slave and one with DVDr/w slave. No problem, although I do turn Autoplay off with TweakUI for the optical drives for 2 reasons. 1, I hate auto play, it's annoying when you pop a CD in to have a look at a file and a program installer kicks in - I can launch the Setup myself thanks. 2, It stops Windows polling the drives regularly to see if you've changed the disk, which causes interupts in the IDE system.

Everything I've seen about this tells me that with moderns chipsets and drives, there are no practical performance issues with either way of doing it, although it is easier to run the cables if both HDs are together on one controller, but mine are in silencing sleeves so are next to the CD/DVD drives anyway.
 
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