Does this sound like a hard drive issue to you?

[MrJoshua]

About two weeks ago I started getting frequent error messages in ProTools LE 7.3, to the effect of ProTools "could not get audio from the drive fast enough. The drive may be fragmented or full..." to paraphrase. The drive (a Seagate 320GB SATA2 drive, about six months old) was half-full, so just to be sure I backed up each session to an external drive, then formatted the drive. After formatting I moved back ONLY the sessions from the current project. So the only thing on the drive is 9 ProTools sessions, 24-bit, 44.1kHz. A total of less than 10GB of space taken up on a 320GB drive. And everything worked fine ... until tonight. Tonight the "could not get audio from drive fast enough" error was back with a vengeance. I opened up the "System Usage" window and sure enough, the disk meter would start very low, then spike and stay very high, then the session would crash and the error message would pop up.

This is with six mono audio tracks, 24-bit, 44.1kHz, NO plugins. I tried changing every setting I could think of, and nothing worked.

So, just to be sure, I copied all the sessions to another drive just to be sure everything was backed up. Windows reported the time to copy as about two hours. So I canceled out of that, and went to the other room to work on some songwriting issues instead for a while. Then came back about an hour later, told the files to copy again, and it took about twenty minutes.

So at this point I'm thinking something is either wrong with the drive, or the SATA controller on the motherboard.

Does this sound like a drive issue to everyone else? I'm thinking first thing to do is check all the connections inside, then if they're all good, move the cable to a different SATA connector on the motherboard. If I still get errors, then I'll order a new drive. I might order another drive anyway so I have an additional internal drive to use for backups instead of just the external drive.

Any other thoughts or suggestions? Anything I'm overlooking in the troubleshooting?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[MrJoshua]

Well, later today I'll be moving the hard drive to a different port on the motherboard, then if that doesn't work, I'll be ordering a new drive. Thought I'd bump this to make sure nobody else had any suggestions.

[peter kuchar]

You could make sure allow drive indexing and allow compression of files are both unchecked on all drives. my computer/right click the drive/properties/general or try another sata controller. Good luck

[MrJoshua]

Drive indexing will make a difference? I knew compression would, but I never thought about indexing.