Recording stopped due to... not!

[DannyG]

I was in the middle of a live, 48 track, 48k, 24 bit recording. Using a 500GB external firewire drive. Brand new drive. Newly formatted with apple disk utility. Oxford chipset.

Suddenly I notice the message: recording stopped due to disk full, or not enough recording space allocated (or something along those lines).

I checked my prefs and I had allocated all available space. The drive was, as I said, new and only about 25GB used. I rebooted, and tried to start again. Same story.

After a couple of reboots it then told me it couldn't allocate recording space.

Then I tried another drive (a 200GB drive I have often used). Same story.

Fortunately my backup system saved the day.

I have since trashed prefs, repaired permissions, etc. It now seems ok, but I am nervous.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Danny

[c-tone]

If trashing prefs solved it, then it probably was just a corrupted preference, naturally.
However, I would never recommend recording 48 tracks simultaneously to a Firewire drive, especially FW400. Sure, it's possible to make it work, but any little glitch in the system could cause what you experienced.

[ChrisMitchell]

I've had experience with recording/playing 30+ tracks on FW400 drives. It is possible, but you have to be careful and tweak it a little.

The 48K, 24-bit should be fine. However, I'm not thrilled with the "all available disk space" option. Try limiting it to about 2 minutes longer than what you think the length of the track will be (just to make sure it doesn't cut you off in the middle of a keeper take). If you leave it "all available disk space", it beats its brains out trying to allocate a butt load of space, which might be where your error is coming from. On firewire, when recording so many tracks, it doesn't take much to overload the bus and for PT to crap out.

It's been a while, but I do believe I had a similar situation as you, and that was the culprit.

IHTH.
Chris

[DannyG]

Thanks for your responses guys, but I've been successfully doing this without a hitch for about 4 years now on countless shows. This is a new issue.

I have been told by a Digi guy that 500GB drives are a bit big, and should be partitioned to improve seek time.

[DrFord]

There's a thread I read the other day (I think it was the one about 1TB Drives) where people were going pretty in depth about partitioning drives for seek time. You should check that out.