Chaining Drives with the 1814 (problem/solution)

[spkguitar]

I got to experience first hand the audio "clicking" problem people have been having with the 1814 and chaining the firewire drive this weekend. It has something to do with how much data you are putting through that connection. 2 tracks were fine. 16 tracks caused the problem everyone is talking about (and had me perplexed and sweating because I was doing a big show, with someone else's gear).

Chaining the drive to the 1814 does not work with heavy track loads.

THE SOLUTION:
So unfortunately, you can't chain the drive. However, you can use a third party firewire interface. I was using a Belkin PCMCIA card, the Gateway 7410GX laptop, a Western Digital external FW drive and the 1814. I had the 1814 connected to the laptop's built in, and the WD drive hooked to the belkin. The belkin card I was using had the Texas Instruments chipset. I don't have the model number handy, but I will post it later.

Everything ran smooth as silk; 80 minutes of live show, 16 tracks (8 from the Presonus Digimax via lightpipe) at 44.1kHz/24bit, not one problem.

Yes, it sucks that you can't chain them. But at least there is a solution, and hopefully you will read this before you discover the problem at that critical moment.

[dillon99999]

this would coincide with my observations that the data path is being clogged with too much traffic for the device chain to handle.

i think that it's just too much information to process and route on the firewire chain (when you have an m-audio firewire device - and a firewire hard drive).

"splitting" the data path from the device path seems to help - as you have pointed out.

and your posting helps to further that theory.

thanks.

[Sugarnutz]

There used to be a problem in that SP2 broke the FW400 driver so badly that thruput was reduced to about 80 meg. There was supposed to be a hotfix thru MS support that fixed this, but as far as I know you had to contact MS support and request it. Another solution was to reload the 1394 drivers with the SP1 drivers that were available for download on certain sites.

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article
Download the Patch

[spkguitar]

There used to be a problem in that SP2 broke the FW400 driver so badly that thruput was reduced to about 80 meg. There was supposed to be a hotfix thru MS support that fixed this, but as far as I know you had to contact MS support and request it. Another solution was to reload the 1394 drivers with the SP1 drivers that were available for download on certain sites.

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article
Download the Patch

That is definitely not the issue here.