9073 "slow/fragmented" disc error - playback stops!! PLS HELP

[VanEdge]

i've been running PTLE 5.1 successfully for about a year on my 2001 g4 533.

i defrag my drives regularly, and i have a secondary IDE drive solely for audio.

tonight i opened up a track i've been working on for a few months and all of a sudden, it won't play all the way through anymore. I keep getting this 9073 error message telling me to defrag my hard drive.

the maxtor 20 gig 7200rpm drive i use only for audio has never given me a problem. i thought it might be that this project has about 21 tracks in it, but the PT Demo runs fine w/o stopping.. all my other projects seem to be fine, also.

this wouldn't have anything to do with adding more memory, would it? i threw in another Ram DIMM 512 meg today - boosted my system over 800 megs Ram.
(slot 1 is 128 meg, slot 2 is 256 meg)

i'm really confused. the answer base didn't help.
my drive is defragged, it's fast enough, and i have ample ram.

what gives??

thanks for any help. [img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]

[flymax]

This happens to me when I have alot of material looping. If this is the case, try consolodating the loops and the problem should go away.
-Pete

[VanEdge]

thanks for your response.

unfortunately, i don't have any loops running. however, i do have a lot of tracks. the song always seems to start cutting out during the second verse.

it's very strange because i've been working on the mix for this for a long time with this amount of tracks/plugins and this never happened until last night after i put in the extra 512 megs of ram (crucial.com memory)

i defragged the hard drive but i still get the same problem.

[VanEdge]

update:
i enabled the window that lets you monitor system performance, and there are certain trouble spots of my song. every few seconds, the system gauge goes all the way to yellow, and the song always stops at the same two points.

i removed some plugins and the song seemed fine.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i thought that the more ram you have, the more smoothly you can run more plugins. i have ample ram in my machine with the new dimm i installed yesterday, and now all of a sudden i'm crashing when trying to play this track. it just can't get past these two rough spots.

i also tried bouncing to disk with all my plugins enabled but PT gives the same error message. i don't understand why it thinks this is a hard drive issue, especially since the maxtor drive is 7200 rpm, has nothing but audio on it, and is defragged.


any suggestions?

[profesrgeo]

VanEdge

Check to see if the DAE is set to the recommended buffer size. The new ram may have caused it to "reset to the "zero" setting.

best o' luck
geo

[where02190]

Allocate more ram to PT.

[unclemurray]

RAM will help, but the plugins really need processor speed to work more smoothly. RTAS plugins rely on the available number of processor cycles to perform their duty. If the load gets too heavy, it will stop playback and tell you to remove some plugins. In your case, the load on the plugins might be taking away processor cycles from the disk i/o. As suggeste din the previous post, try adding more RAM to your DAE and protools, but I seem to remember reading some posts about perfromance decreasing after allocating too much RAM. Also make sure your disk cache is set to 512kb. Good Luck!

[VanEdge]

[img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
YOU GUYS ROCK!!!

thanks a million.
dae playback buffer was reset to 0 for some reason.
i switched it to the #2 setting and i'm back on track.
YEAH!

can't thank you all enough!