Help with an external drive problem.

[peht]

I have pro tools 8.03 running on windows 7 system. Freshly installed - overall everything seems to be running OK except for this one problem.

When I load a session, I can immediately play any audio in it, record new audio etc. But then if I tinker around with something else for like 5 minutes (say playing a few notes on my keyboard trying to write something) and go back to play or record more audio, pro tools stalls. It doesn't crash, it just stalls - for a long time. Sometimes it will be 2 minutes, sometimes 5 minutes. Then out of nowhere it picks up and the audio I pressed play on will play or it will start recording. Very rarely it doesn't play at all and I get a 9073 error. This happens regardless of a firewire or a usb connection between my external drive and my computer (an elephant storage 7200rpm drive with the oxford chipset). Any thoughts? Have I perhaps missed a crucial step to setting up my external drive for pro tools? I am monitoring my system resources in pro tools before this happens and everything is low/looking fine. I am completely baffled as to why it is doing it. It almost seems like the drive is saying "ok, not doing anything - going to sleep" then needs to get woken up every 5 minutes (which I believe I have prevented with power settings).

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Mork_]

I would double check your power settings and make sure it says hard disk never. Is it a laptop or a PC?

[peht]

Yeah, I double checked it. It is set to "never" under the hard disk options of my advanced power settings.

I also double checked to make sure it was the external drive - it is. I copied a session to my OS drive and ran it from there. I was able to start and stop my audio no problem. I left it and did the dishes for like 10 minutes - went back and was able to hit play and it quickly played.

It's so weird. The external drive doesn't even stutter or error when it is playing, it just takes like 5 minutes before it will play after i hit the button.... but usually then it's fine until i leave it for a minute or two.

[stickboymusic]

hello


sounds like your hard drive is going into "autosleep" mode

if you got any software with the hard drive then see if there is a way to turn it off

if not then keep this little utility running

http://lifehacker.com/5163175/noslee...-shutting-down

and see how you get on

[peht]

Awesome! At least some form of hope! I will try this tonight.

I didn't get any software with the HD... but this could be the problem!

[JMS40]

Is it a Green drive by any chance?

[peht]

No - it's an Elephant Storage Drive.

www.elephantstorage.com

bought from a boutique mac/digidesign retail store in Toronto.

[peht]

Originally Posted by peht

Awesome! At least some form of hope! I will try this tonight.

I didn't get any software with the HD... but this could be the problem!

This did seem to help! Thank you so much! But only with USB. The problem happened again with my firewire connection. I switched to USB and it seemed fine. Used it for about 2 hours - tested periodically hitting record and play after stretches of just playing my midi piano. I need to figure out what's up with the firewire now - that might be a whole other issue. I am hoping another roll back to the legacy driver will make it work.

[jronkindy]

you might try to turn off windows' indexing that runs in the background. Because of a "fresh" install, your log files for the indexed data have been deleted and windows will recreate them. Turn off indexing for your external drive - I turn it off for all drives and email - and you may see a significant difference. If you switched to USB and it worked fine, there is a chance the initial indexing of the drive completed and isn't causing the problem anymore. This may not be the problem, but it could easily cause the hanging for several minutes because PT and indexing use a lot of resources.

1) Go to Windows Explorer and right click on the external drive
2) Click Properties
3) On the General tab, at the bottom make sure "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" UNCHECKED.
4) Click apply to all files and subfolders
5) Reboot the computer

[peht]

I had done that prior to making this thread... But thank you!