HDD bottleneck, any ideas?

Heya. I *think* I'm hitting a bottleneck with my track count on the hard drive. Are there any settings which would help? - I'm finding on really busy tracks I get crackles and the transport bar flickering red yet my cpu meter is comfortably low... I have a separate drive and it's on it's own IDE channel (if that makes any difference. It is also UDMA enabled.) Kind regards Dave Rich

unlikely to be hd's unless it's in bad shape. could be seek-time related though - maybe try a defrag? i use jkdefrag, works pretty well.

Dave, I'm sure you've already checked this, but at great risk of stating the bleeding obvious ... Are you recording, or mixing only? If the latter, something as simple as increasing buffer size might be enough to help you .... :) ... or it might not :(

My question Dave, is how old is your motherboard? I guess it's a P35 with 2 IDE channels? I'm wondering why you're just not using all SATAII drives, I have 6 in my system, using the RAID config. I put one of my OLD (10 or so) IDE drives in the computer on the 1 IDE channel. But the damn drive was so loud, compared to the SATA drives, that I just ditched it altogether, and I'm all SATA (with 2 SSD's in RAID 0) as the system OS. I'm sure it worked at one point, also, check out how much of the drive is full, you may be now writing to the slower inside tracks (I read TONS about this crap) as I'm into buying 1TB drives, and short stroking them to only use 250 GB or so, which out perform faster 10 000 RPM drives!!!!! And it's the same price as regular 250 / 320 GB drives, with RETARDEDLY nice performance for the buck. They are bigger though!

Dave I think you're writing to the inside track of the drive. Or your drive is going, or you've been downloading too much porn, and it's fucked something up. Or you've tried to install some stupid ass VST or some retarted program you didn't need, and it started writing virtual SCSI devices, and making new calls to shit all over the place. That's what I think.