Maxing out HD?

[Aenigma]

I\'ve got a peice that has major playback problems in just a few places. It\'s happening around 90-110 voices... it\'s not a typical click and pop thing, rather notes enter and drop suddently, then return.. and sometimes random notes on random instruments seem to be played. It doesn\'t appear that polyphony is the issue, as there are places with much higher polyphony without these problems. I degregmented my drive and it helped some, but didn\'t clear it all up. Should I assume from this that I\'m just pulling too much data from the drive, and it can\'t handle it at those points? The hard drive activity light is solid on during these moments. Also, most of the samples used were toward the end of the drive. Would it make a difference if I formatted the drive and put these sounds on first, then everything else? Or would I be better of splitting these sounds over a couple drives?

The drive is a dedicated sample drive, it\'s an IBM 60 GB 7200 RPM ATA100 on an ATA100 interface, with DMA checked. The disk has about 1.5 GB of free space.

Any help would be appreciated!

[pendragon]

So 58.5 gig is used with samples? that\'s an aweful lot, perhaps it\'s a locating sectors problem.

I don\'t know what else.

Cheers,
PDG

[Simon Ravn]

Sounds like a VIA chipset to me.. http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif I had the same kind of problems until I recently changed my motherboard to one with a SIS chipset. I don´t believe it will help much if any to spread out the samples on more drives.

[lex]

Aenigma,

Which MOBO do you have? just wandering..

[Simon Ravn]

... and maxing out your HD is no problem at all. Your system is not writing to the disk. Just reading from it.

[lex]

....Simon is right...because once I managed to cure this issue, and it wasn\'t the HD...
I have this problem again, so I\'ll have to work on it tonight...I\'m not sure but I think last time it went away when I turned off all USB in BIOS...
I\'ll check it out tonight..

Alex

[Haydn]

Need more details on your system such as processor, memory, etc. Also, what programs are you running including items in the systray?

[Roman Beilharz]

Hi,

my experience is, that a single, fast seek, 7200 RpM, perfectly defragmented, 32k-clustered and well installed UDMA4/5-enabled-HD is capable of streaming around 80-90 simultaneous voices (playing a single instrument will possibly give you some more). Nevertheless it might occur, that you achieve a full 160-voices-peak with this lonely drive anyway, since short samples/notes do not need to get \"stream-sustained\" and get played from the RAM only.

On the base of that, I don\'t find there has to be any problem with your system.
I use to balance the samples of each .gsp on two HDs, that both contain all my instruments (they get synchronized at shutdown). This way I get easily and cheap, what only a RAID 5 with at least 3 roaring HDs was able to provide me:

1. Maximum security (cloned HDs)
2. Maximum transfer-rates (balanced sample loading - never glitches!!!)

Greetings

Roman

Btw - Simon: Did you connect your sample-HDs to the Promise-controller of your former A7V133 by accident?? I have switched my K7V to the A7V133A this week and found out, that it is not the VIA-drivers/chipset to blame, but in fact Gigastudio was not able to access my Maxtor-HDs at the Promise-IDE in UDMA5!! They ended up at a transfer-rate of around 5 MB/s there, so I had to put them to the VIA-IDE - everything was just fine then (busmaster-driver 3.11). I don\'t know yet, if this problem is specifically connected to the Maxtor\'s (5T030H3). Has anybody experienced anything similar?

[This message has been edited by Roman Beilharz (edited 03-21-2002).]

[Simon Ravn]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Roman Beilharz:
Hi,
Btw - Simon: Did you connect your sample-HDs to the Promise-controller of your former A7V133 by accident?? I have switched my K7V to the A7V133A this week and found out, that it is not the VIA-drivers/chipset to blame, but in fact Gigastudio was not able to access my Maxtor-HDs at the Promise-IDE in UDMA5!! They ended up at a transfer-rate of around 5 MB/s there, so I had to put them to the VIA-IDE - everything was just fine then (busmaster-driver 3.11). I don\'t know yet, if this problem is specifically connected to the Maxtor\'s (5T030H3). Has anybody experienced anything similar?

[This message has been edited by Roman Beilharz (edited 03-21-2002).]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Nope I didn\'t have an A7V and no Promise controller so... http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif It was connected directly to the normal IDE channels. The VIA chipset is definitely to blame. I had several VIA chipsets on my GS system before and always had problems.

[Roman Beilharz]

...interesting! But strange, I never experienced problems with the certainly not very user-friendly and horribly to install Via-chipsets and GS - using strictly Asus boards (K7V, A7V133E, A7V266E) and Maxtor drives. Additional HD-controllers never worked with GS and the Maxtors, regardless if I took a Highpoint-Tech-based-controller (e.g. Abit) or a Promise-controller - always weird sample-jam or slow rates.

To find a combination that works can be a real pain in the a** sometimes. Anyway, if you have a system that works: stick to it as long as you can. And don\'t lead us into temptation...

Roman

[Aenigma]

My HUGE apologies for not replying until now -- I figured I had posted this on the wrong message board, so I reposted it on the hardware board and was checking on there for replys! What a huge surprise to see all the help you are offering.

Here are the rest of my system\'s specs:
ASUS a7a-266 motherboard
1.4 ghz amd thunderbird
1 GB Mushkin DDR ram
Aardvark LX6 sound card, in first PCI slot.

When this happens I\'m only running gigastudio and Cakewalk 9, and memory is about 70% filled.

[Aenigma]

I forgot to mention that I do also have a Promise ATA-133 PCI controller in my computer, however it\'s not used at all with my gigastudio setup. It\'s a dual boot system, and I use it on the XP side of things.

[Doug Marshall]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Roman Beilharz:
Btw - Simon: Did you connect your sample-HDs to the Promise-controller of your former A7V133 by accident?? I have switched my K7V to the A7V133A this week and found out, that it is not the VIA-drivers/chipset to blame, but in fact Gigastudio was not able to access my Maxtor-HDs at the Promise-IDE in UDMA5!! They ended up at a transfer-rate of around 5 MB/s there, so I had to put them to the VIA-IDE - everything was just fine then (busmaster-driver 3.11). I don\'t know yet, if this problem is specifically connected to the Maxtor\'s (5T030H3). Has anybody experienced anything similar?

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, I had this exact problem. Giga couldn\'t deal with the Promise controller and limped unbelievably. All other software was fine! - Doug