More DAE error 35

[Richard Barrie]

We have started getting very occasional and very hard to pin down Error 35s on what has been an extremely stable system.

The error is always associated with external (new out the box) drives used for audio recording. We have very large track counts etc.

We have seen the error happen with different manufactures hard drives and the behaviour seen is similar to a problem originally encountered a couple of years ago when ECO/Energy saving modes became possible with the latest versions of the Oxford chipset. In this case drives would vanish after 30 minutes of inactivity without warning, but firmware updates to the external drives allowed the default ECO mode of these drives to be over ridden all all went back to normal behaviour.

Default ECO times are now down to as low as 5 minutes, but all of the drives I have tested so far follow the setting in the energy saving system preference, as they should, as long as Pro Tools is not running.

I am beginning to wonder if DAE can inadvertently trigger the ECO/standby/whatever-the-manufacturer-calls-it as I believe that DAE still accesses audio drives directly rather than using system drivers.

The problem is still too vague to get a handle on. We run a range of OS and ProTools versions, so I won't specify.

In a typical scenario we would have four external drives connected to the system. Two of these would be being used as audio record drives and the other two would be used for backing up between takes. The backup drives could therefore sit for quite a while with no activity (which is how we found out about the 30 minute ECO mode).

We have actually seen drives vanish while the system is actually in record!!!!!. When a single drive goes into or out of ECO mode it appears to affect all other external drives and this is catastrophic when DAE is running as the behaviour is much different than what happens with just 'normal' computer usage, where drives going to sleep and waking up are well handled.

Any comments?