[Dolphineas]

I’ve been using Pro Tools for almost twenty years for home recording. My current audio interface is the Focusrite 18i8 (3rd gen). Until recently, for recording I’d been using a Dell laptop with a i7 processor and 16gb of RAM, along with an external 1TB, 7200 rpm HDD drive. This was my work computer and thus not ideal, but mostly worked with only occasional problems with pops and clicks during recording and sometimes a system crash. So not bad, but I had an opportunity to upgrade to a dedicated audio computer and thus did so, but I’m having a lot of problems with 9073 errors and I cannot figure it out. My current system is the following:

HP Envy Desktop
Intel Core i7-11700 Processor
64GB RAM
1TB SSD
2TB HDD (supposedly 7200 rpm)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Graphics
Windows 11

I’ve got Pro Tools on the SSD drive and I’m recording to the HDD.

When recording with my band, normally using just four tracks (two mic’d guitar amps and two mics on the drums), I routinely get 9073 errors that end the recording process. I’ve searched the error and done almost all of the Windows optimization and troubleshooting steps recommended by both Avid and Sweetwater. I’ve removed all bloatware from my machine and I’ve stopped virtually all the other background processes that I can while recording. The one major exception being “Antimalware Service Executable” which is the part of Windows Security that I cannot stop. The only way to do so is to uninstall the security program completely and I’d like to use that as an absolute last resort because I do want to be able to get on the internet sometimes. It also seems like it should be unnecessary since this computer, with 64 GBs of RAM, should be plenty fast enough! Yet I’m still getting the error. Usually happens between 5 and 15 minutes into recording.

Now here’s the really weird thing: I seem to ONLY get 9073 errors when we are recording the band. If I just leave Pro Tools recording the relative silence of the room through the four microphones I cannot get it to crash (For example, I just left it for nearly 200 minutes). This also makes it hard for me to test potential fixes and impossible for me to watch for any CPU spikes in the Task Manager to try and detect what might be turning off and on. This situation does not make sense to me, because the volume of what’s being recorded shouldn’t have any role in how much the computer is being forced to work, right? There’s a 44khz sample rate whether or not the mic is hearing loud guitars or low hum of my furnace. Or am I wrong about that? I suppose it could just be dumb luck that I’m only getting the errors when it actually matters, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely. So that’s question number one: Could the content of the recording have any bearing on getting a 9073 error? Any other explanations (beyond Murphy’s Law) for why I only get it while recording something I really don’t want to lose?

Now, as far as potential sources of the problem short of Windows Security: Sweetwater says that a big HDD drive can lead to fragmentation and thus you should partition a big drive into smaller bits. So this is question #2: Is my 2TB hard drive simply too big and perhaps the source of the problem? Should I partition into smaller chunks? If so, how small?

My final hypothesis was that perhaps it was my usb ports not getting sufficient power. Apparently one problem with these pretty fast computers is that they are not provided with an adequate power supply for all of their power. People see 64 GBs of ram and two drives and so forth and that’s what they want to pay for. But then manufacturers go cheap on power supply and there isn’t enough to really run the machine at full power. So I did buy a powered USB hub thinking that perhaps that would be it, but my Focusrite will not connect through the powered hub (don’t know why). Furthermore, I’ve read that this is NOT recommended and that it’s better to have your audio interface connected directly to the machine. But I thought I’d throw the power thing out there as a potential explanation and see if anybody has any thoughts.

This is incredibly frustrating as I’m sure you can imagine, so if anybody thinks they have a solution it will be HIGHLY appreciated! Thanks!