Spinning Wheel when playin audio

[Defekt]

Hello.
I'm normally a Pro Tools LE user, but a friend has had me set up their pro tools HD rig with a mac pro. Everything seems to be working fine except that when doing otherwise simple tasks such as playing back a song with just a handful of tracks. I get the spiinning wheel for about 5 seconds before it plays. once it finally does, I can move it around without any problems for while. But if I stop and do some editing then come back and hit play, i'll get it again.

Now he's running HD 7.4 on a Mac Pro Quad-core with a Magma Expansion chassis and an HD192. He has 1 core card and 2 process cards in the chassis and 3 GBS of ram. I've tried various buffer settings and still can't seem to get it to stop. I'm new to the HD world, so perhaps there is a setting or preference I'm not familiar with that could be causing this?

Now my LE system at home is on the same computer with an 002 rack and it runs flawlessly. I've hooked his rig up maticulously: what could be the issue?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Andre Knecht]

A few things come to mind…

Did you disable the CPUs being allowed to nap?
Are drives allowed to spin down?
Is Spotlight Indexing disabled?
Are you mixing FW 400 and 800?

IHTH.

[Defekt]

Some good thoughts. I'm pretty sure I covered all that. But next time I'm there I'll double check. Your referring to the system preference settings for put hard drive to sleep and the energy saver setting for the CPU Right? Any other ideas?

[Chief Technician]

You may want to get a Universal Binary copy of TechTool Pro or DiskWarrior and scan for directory errors. These types of errors can cause the SWOD, as can a failing hard drive.