Can't record 16 track live without "disk too slow" message. WTF?

Hi,

did you use the HFS format with journaling off ? When recording to an external HD, keep journaling turned off. This could improve your performance.

Fox

Your problem is most likely a firewire bottleneck. Running 16 audio channels on a firewire 400 bus uses up all the bandwidth. Try recording to the internal. Most of the time it is best practice to avoid that and keep the audio on a separate drive but the internal sata bus is way faster. As far as I understand it any time you hook up a 400 connection to an 800 the bus will be slowed down to accommodate the 400. Also high sample rate recording will also be an issue if that is what you are attempting. After recording is complete the firewire drive should be fine for playback of a copy of the session if you are just using a few output channels from logic and not sixteen.
Hope that helps.

PS.I can play back 48 tracks of 96k off a macbook internal so even if an SSD was faster it would not solve the firewire bottleneck.

I had the same problem. recording to internal is not an option. USB HD's never worked; not enough bandwidth.

I had to record to an eSATA external drive. Once I got that set up it was snappy and flawless.

Hi Chip
You may have trouble getting an esata port on your computer so I did a couple of tests just to see.
I just checked on a macbook with 10.5 and Logic 8 running with a TC Konnect 48 firewire interface and am able to record 24 tracks at 96k directly onto the internal 5400 drive with no problem. I did 2 passes of 25 minutes each. It also seemed to punch 24 tracks on the fly which blows my mind considering I have had trouble with Protools HD doing that. I mention this not to depress you but to give you an idea of what you should be able to get out of your setup all things working properly. To my knowledge the TC does not have a particularly good audio driver but maybe the version I have is great with that system version.

I guess my test here proves that a single firewire 400 can do the job as the HD and cpu meters do not go above halfway on peaks. Your problem may be incompatable drivers due to you running the latest OS check to see if Presonus has a newer one. Recording live is a scary prospect as it produces long files where one single glitch in an hours recording of a unique performance trashes everything (which is why using a backup system on critical recording situations is often done). You don't want the spinning ball just before you hit save!

As far as I know even though drives read faster than write you should be able to do a relative test of the performance of your system by comparing playback using the internal hardware drivers versus the presonus's. If you can play back lots of tracks using the internal hardware but far fewer with the presonus just through 2 outputs it is pointing to the audio drivers in my opinion.
If there is no new driver see if you can borrow a different brand interface for a comparison. Regarding hard drive Fuzzynormal says the internal is not an option, it may not be preferred but you may have no choice. I am not sure why he is ruling it out, he may have had trouble but I don't believe it is outside of the spec of your computer. I agree with him regarding USB as it only has a high peak capacity and can get system request interruptions. The internal is on a SATA bus which is fast and should be able to handle all the audio and any additional requests from the system. All things being equal a separate drive is best. If I had to use an internal I would try to make sure you had lots of drive space and not expect to record past 80% and then copy to the external immediately for security. The problem with firewire audio in particular is that the drivers need to match the system and the software so your computer and drives may be plenty fast enough but your presonus audio drivers are too old for 10.6.3. You may find that installing the latest 10.5 version could work better on your computer if presonus is slow getting a new driver out.

As an example of version incompatability I have been mixing 96k multitrack (High Track counts) for years on a G5 2gig and still use it for some projects with particular plugins despite my Mac Pro sitting unused and waiting for the latest plugin updates. Sometimes it takes days to get a new system loaded up and debugged particularly when you have lots of plugins.

ChipPorter wrote:
Thanks Fox.

Do you know if I can reformat a partition, or do I have to back up my data and reformat the whole drive?

Neither...

It can be changed from Disk Utility.

Don't know how much it would help because of running two intensive I/O firewire devices off a single firewire chip. Might be worth a try.

In disk utility, select the external dive, go to the "FILE" menu... using one of the modifier keys (Option or Control) will flip the menu entry to "Disable Journaling".

pancenter-

Chip,

What size drive are you thinking of getting... this will be the drive you'll be tracking with, correct?

pancenter-

ChipPorter wrote:
The largest 7200 I can find for my Macbook Pro is 500GB. I can't afford a solid state, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the 7200 will do the trick. I plan to track internally and transfer the audio tracks and the project file to an external archive after mixing.

There will most likely be those that disagree with me but I would consider partitioning the drive into two sections 100-150 for the OS/applications and the rest for an audio partition. I would also make the first (fastest) partition the audio drive and the second (slower) partition the OS partition.

1. Makes it much easier to back up the system, ditto for the audio partition.
2. Makes it easy to clear off (and reformat) the audio drive so that each session can start on a clean slate.
3. You will always be recording on the fastest section of the drive and there will be less fragmentation.
4. The partition can be formatted with journaling off while leaving it on for the OS.

pancenter-

fuzzynormal wrote:
USB HD's never worked; not enough bandwidth.

This is a myth. I use USB to record 16 simultaneous tracks at 48/24 all the time.

Message was edited by: tankfield to add the sample freq/bit depth