"bounce to disk" stutter problem

[calden]

Hello:

I recently got a firewire hard drive (OWC Mercury Elite) to use with my iBook and protools free; needed the extra storage. Plugged it in and it worked fine. I did some editing and then burned to disk to make aif files. After about an hour and a half of work I then move the setup downstairs to my basement studio, and something strange happened. I suddenly could no longer record, getting an error code 9060. Okay, I quickly researched the problem here on the DUC and found that I needed to reformat the drive with Mac utilities and disable the extension drivers that came with the drive. Did that, and could record.

But something else changed - Now when I "bounce to disk" it sounds stuttery. THe music bleeps out for a split second, about every second, with each blip of the hard drive as it writes. (It also does this bouncing to the internal drive as well, which it never did before.) After freaking out over this I did a test and found that although it stutters when bouncing, the final aiff file plays fine in iTunes.

This has never happened before with my ProTools free setup, and didn't happen the first few hours of using this drive. Because it happens whether I bounce to the internal or external drive it must be something newly different with Protools free, and not with the new hard drive, right? It bugs me because it shouldn't be happening, and I keep waiting for something else to malfunction.

Anyone have any experience with this? If so, is there a fix?

Thanks,
Carlos

[Slobticket]

This probably won't help, but ...

I have the same problem, except it happens in any type of playback on the second machine. I'm moving a FireWire drive -- a WD in an ADS case -- between an iMac and a 7500 with a G3 card in it. The iMac handles everything fine, but I get playback glitches on the 7500 -- and like you, I didn't notice them happening right away. There are little whoopses every second or so, like you say -- the result is almost a crunching sound. This effect doesn't seem to happen in a very simple session -- say one track with no plug-ins enabled. I've been thinking the problem may have something to do with the difference in bus speed between the two computers -- or simply that the 7500 itself may somehow be the problem. Also the final bounces (always done on the iMac), or for that matter any files moved back to the iMac, sound fine.

Hope you get a better answer to this one, because this has been driving me crazy.

[M.Brane]

Have you guys checked the sustained throughput on your drives?

Something is obviously starved for data in both cases. Perhaps it's an issue with the bridge chips used to convert the ATA drives to FW.

On the iBook perhaps it is the system bus. Could be that on the 7500 as well although I've never had this issue on my 8600/G3 400 with a 50mhz bus speed. I don't use FW drives though. Before I got my Tempo Trio card I ran 2 50pin SCSI drives (9MBps) on the stock bus, and got 8 tracks without any problems. The 2 WD JB drives on my Trio card are doing 30MBps. [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img] I boot off one, and record on the other.

It's always better to wipe a drive clean than to de-frag. Don't forget about directory maintenence either! A hosed directory can really screw things up. If your audio files become fragmented the drive has to work much harder to read/write all those tracks at once.