I have a dedicated PC for music recording and production and I recently, out of the blue, started seeing serious performance issues with SONAR LE . Firstly I would like to say that I never install anything on this machine frivolously, in fact the machine is not even connected to the Internet. The only thing that I had changed within the last 3 months was to increase the amount of RAM on the machine from 512MB to 768MB.

SONAR allows you to record sound and has this fairly standard horizontal graphic layout of the recorded sound. During recording sessions over the last 3 weeks I had noticed that at the conclusion of recording an instrument SONAR would freeze for between 25-35 seconds. During the freeze you would not be able to do anything within SONAR. It would then go back to normal operation at which point I would here a flurry of disk operations. Now the amount of tracks (concurrent recordings) that I had did not seem to affect anything (upper limit is 64 based on the workstation). In fact I was able to replicate this issue with a brand new project.

My first assumption was that I was having an issue with the hard drive and I figured I was overdue for a defrag, but after completing the defrag I was still getting the same issue.

I am a firm believer in if I did not change anything then nothing should have changed, but I am aware that the Windows operating system is not quite so static. So I ran some internal diagnostics within SONAR LE and still rolled snake eyes.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that this issue may be related to the colossal burst of disk activity that proceeded the freeze, my primary assumption being that the wave file that is being recorded was not being handled correctly. So in order to determine what was going on I employed the FileMon tool as developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell.

What File Mon revealed was that Sonar was creating the recorded wave correctly and appropriately and in fact closing that file before the freeze, but it also revealed that is was creating and reading files in the folder called C:\Cakewalk Projects\Picture Cach\.

Now this folder contained about 10.000 *.wov files dating back to about 2005 which was when I got this machine. According to Sonar these files are related to the picture representation of wave file and were not related to the function of the music project . I simply could not believe these files were left abandoned for all eternity.

Upon deleting approximately half of these *.wov files I found that the issue of freezing went away. In fact the refresh rate (opening) of all my projects has increased dramatically.

I officially dig FileMon! Check it out if you have the time!

I have just completed a week long campaign to update the standard 40Gb Western Digital hard drive in my Dimension 2400 Dell PC. A few months back I started recording at 24bits and 44.1kHz, up from 16 bit 44.1kHz so I am burning disk space at approximately twice the rate. It should have been a quick install using the Seagate Disk Wizard to copy all my current data across to my shiny new 250Gb Seagate internal drive. I got this from Best Buy, as I had a $100 gift certificate to burn, and this drive was on sale for $99.

So I complete my drive Install/Data Transfer, and it takes over 6 hours (note 6 hours) to copy the files from one hard drive to another. I plug in the new hard drive and the first thing I notice is that my beautiful 250Gb hard drive only shows 127Gb! Surely this was a mistake! However, Disk Manager confirms that I only have 127Gb. After going through the Seagate manuals apparently I need to ensure that I have all the latest Windows Service Packs available to ensure that I can enable 48 bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) support. 48-bit LBA support enables drives to be allocated in excess of 137Gb.

It should be noted that my DAW has been disconnected from the outside world since its purchase. There is nothing more frustrating than starting to record, and then having Windows go and respond to some network activity and drop the recording mid groove. So I began the long process of updating the windows OS, and while I was there I updated Windows Media Player (I was on  version 8 I think) and IE.

So again I started the 6 hour transfer process, and wow, I have over 200 Gb spare capacity for additional recording. This story should have ended here, however, I try to play some music in WM Player and I hear clicks, pops and stutters all the way through the music. I open up SONAR (my recording software) and its doing the same thing! Pure frustration! This behavior seems related to the hard disk so I take it back to Best Buy and get a replacement and start the 6 hour transfer process ... again ... and again I get the clicks and the pops.

At this point I do not believe I can get 2 hard drives with the exact same problem so I figure it must be my EDIROL UA-1000 Audio Capture sound card. So I update the drivers for the sound card with still no luck. At this point I start grasping at straws and begin looking at Disk Read\Write stats, along with Page Fault Delta information. All in the hope that my nightmare will be over. I did a couple of Defrags and even look at what it would take to optimize the Virtual memory allocation through the Paging File (Pagefile.sys).

Then I noticed the that I had not changed the IDE cable when I put in the new drive!!! There was a change from the 40-conductor IDE cable to the 80-conductor IDE/ATA cable (picture on right). The new cable is pin compatible with the old drive and so would not present a 'square peg in a circle' situation. The old cables do, however, present a problem with signal quality and reflection. Hard drive intensive activities would be the only real way to realize that there was an issue. I think I would prefer it to not work at all!

"The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby." - John  Milton