PT 8 LE writing every single file fragmented

[sunburst79]

If its not to much trouble could you post the SiSoft Sandra system "overview" before you do anything drastic?

Also you might try downloading the WD diagnostic utility, burning it to disk and running an analysis on the disks from outside of windows. Might turn up something. You may have a copy from your disks packaging or Rain. I believe the name of the program is Data Lifeguard.

[Rocker61]

Thank for the replies. I nuked the entire machine down to the bios defaults and repartitioned and formatted the hard drives and loaded Windows and PT back up from scratch. Too early to tell but we'll see. Strange problem that nobody's ever heard of other than I've seen a couple internet posts about NTFS writing fragments. I changed my audio drive to exFAT and bumped the sector size way up figuring I had nothing to lose, disk space not an issue. If this fails I think I'll have to go to a solid state drive for my audio next. Thanks again.

[sunburst79]

I'm not sure whether PT supports ExFAT actually. I think I would have left it NTFS.

I suspect that no ones heard of it simply because its not a common issue with Windows or NTFS. I would like to know the root cause though.

Also unless something's changed recently PT and SSD Audio drives may not play nice together. Sample's love SSD's, Windows loves SSD's as boot drive's. Audio Playback should be fine but the small files that get written the audio drive while recording are the types of files SSD'd least like.

[Rocker61]

Unfortunately, the Rain guys are stumped too. I've been working on this with them for 20 months with no success. I nuked the entire machine and rebuilt Windows from scratch but still won't work. I have to say I spent a ludicrous amount of money on a music supercomputer that can't handle a simple Pro Tools session, unless is is a PT 8 LE specific problem but since nobody on planet earth has ever heard of this I find that unlikely. Very disappointing, I am seriously considering throwing in the towel and selling the Rain and just buying a gaming computer for 1/4 of the price. It is literally useless for Pro Tools.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by Rocker61

Unfortunately, the Rain guys are stumped too. I've been working on this with them for 20 months with no success. I nuked the entire machine and rebuilt Windows from scratch but still won't work. I have to say I spent a ludicrous amount of money on a music supercomputer that can't handle a simple Pro Tools session, unless is is a PT 8 LE specific problem but since nobody on planet earth has ever heard of this I find that unlikely. Very disappointing, I am seriously considering throwing in the towel and selling the Rain and just buying a gaming computer for 1/4 of the price. It is literally useless for Pro Tools.

Don't go blindly buying another PC. The wrong parts will give you nothing but misery(as if you haven't had enough). I'm still unclear on how you decided that all your files are fragged? In any case, for future reference, AMD is not the way to go. i7 socket 2011 is the king of the hill these days. Socket 1366 is "old" but well-proven. Socket 1155 and 1156 are a crapshoot, so I would not go with either of those.

[JMS40]

May be I've missed it, but what exactly are the problems you are having that are making PT unusable? I mean, you say you're are having these fragmentation issues, but what specifically is the result?

[sunburst79]

I'm still thinking the most logical reason for this is a bad chipset driver or chipset issue. Or a bad disk controller on the HDD. Of a format issue. Check with WD for a drive firmware update. Since both drives are that same why not try another brand drive as a audio drive? And I would try NTFS.

[The Weed]

I thought NTFS was required for 8 and up. Also, IIRC Avid recommends 32k clusters.

Cheers,

[Darryl Ramm]

You should have stayed with NTFS, and I don't see any reason to suspect the initial errors are due to what you think is a fragmentation problem. I would very carefully go over all the standard optimizations and troubleshooting steps. What exact ones have you done/tried? Does this happen with new sessions? Does this happen with all plugin files removed from Pro Tools? Does this happen after a Pro Tools clean uninstall and reinstall? What are all your playback engine settings?

Darryl