Newfound latency in Acid

[YOUR KONG]

On Wednesday I got a "Delayed Write Failure" error message. The program said it couldn't save to my second HD, then eventually my second HD disappeared alltogether.

I tried the changes Microsoft Support listed, rebooted.

Then when I rebooted I got an error message (before Windows started) saying that my second hard-drive couldn't be found. I got this when I first installed the hard-drive and I hadn't pushed in all the connections all the way. So I pushed everything and rebooted. Then I backed up everything

Everything worked, the second hard drive was recognized, so far, so good.

UNTIL I started to record last night - my computer hangs, then resumes, and everything I record after that point has distortion on it (not the good kind).

I tried to reduce the load on the PC by bouncing my 4 backing tracks to one track and then restarting Acid and recording while that one track was playing, but I still had the same problem.

Clearly it's some bugaboo with writing to the HD. This NEVER happened until I moved last week. It was such a trustworthy machine =(

I'm using Acid 3.0 on Windows XP. I tried defragging both drives, but they looked pretty defragged before I started the process. Any thoughts?

[otter]

ok, so i don't use acid at all.
i just want you to know that is a great name...

[YOUR KONG]

What's a great name? Acid or Newfound Latency in Acid or King Kong Kitchie Kitchie?

Anyway, to continue the thread - I killed all my inessential processes and dropped my RAM usage to 9 of 384 megs (or that's what the little meter in the lower right-hand corner of the Acid screen says). This time I had no trouble recording - until I did a couple fo takes and got up to 11 of 384 - then it started happening again.

11 of 384 megs hardly seems like a heavy load for a processor.

I can get it back down to 9 by quitting Acid and starting again (that sentence was for you, otter). Which is kind of annoying, but at least it's not hanging in the middle of my takes anymore.

(maybe I should just quit and start recording on tape - oh, wait...)

[apropos of nothing]

Couple of ideas...

One, how full is the hard drive? This could impact performance, but....

Secondarily, the disk not being found makes it kinda sound like that hd isn't doing so well. I'd make sure that you have backups of all important data on it before proceeding.

I'd also do a check with some drive performance software to see if the drive is performing up to spec. The manufacturer of the hard-drive may have something like that on their website if you click around a little.

A bad power-supply could also induce this kind of behavior, weirdly. Could it be the power at your new place sucks? You might check it with one of those line-voltage/polarity checker things.

What kind of hard-drive and what wattage power-supply are you using? I suspect one or the other of those being the culprit.

[YOUR KONG]

Thanks for the reply, apropos - to answer your questions

There's 19 megs of data on the 149 meg HD. It's a Maxtor drive - when I was searching for this I did read something weird on a forum about how Dell PC's don't always like Maxtor HDs - I discounted that as a possibility because the drive worked fine for about a year. But maybe moving pushed it over its limit?

I'll check the voltage in the new house and look for some HD performance software (didn't know about that!)

Thanks again