Underrun Errors - Disk Too Slow On Alesis HD24??

Derrick · Post by **Derrick** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 12:02 pm

Hi, I have an Alesis HD24XR. When I was recording yesterday, in the midle of a song sometimes the recorder would stop and flash the message "Underrun Error... Disk Too Slow". This happened a few times. It's the drive that came with the recorder so I didn't get/use the wrong one or anything. I could just go out and buy another drive, but I want to know if any one else ever encountered this or have any tips 1st cause I'm frugal?

stinkpot · Post by **stinkpot** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 11:33 am

I used to get that back in the day with my Tascam MX2424. It was caused by heat troubles if I remember correctly. I think the power supply was overheating - some people switched out the power supply and that took care of it, but I just cleaned out the completely clogged grill on the exhaust fan, then maintained it and never had that issue again.

Different unit, I know, but I hope that helps.

Derrick · Post by **Derrick** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 12:13 pm

Thanks but it is already surgicaly clean

heylow · Post by **heylow** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 8:40 pm

I have gotten those in 2 different scenarios....

1) A hard drive developing bad sectors....I'd back up anything you want to keep asap and reformat because it only gets worse.

2) This will sound odd but it was really an issue on the Alesis help board a while back and did happen to me: Recording really loud guitars too close to the unit seems to somehow throw something off in the drive. No one reported this happening with things like drums but loud guitars seem to have a negative effect in many cases (mine included). Supposedly, it has something to do with resonant frequencies. All I did in this case was either move the amp or put up a gobo (office divider) on one side of the amp. To be clear, this only happened while recording huge sounding electric guitar near the machine.

Wierd, yes....but it happened and was remedied. Incidentally, in this case, you are basicly back to scenario 1. Back it up and reformat ASAP....you now have bad sectors.

Hope this helps.

heylow

stinkpot · Post by **stinkpot** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 2:12 pm

Yea, that was the other thing I meant to menation. Reformat frequently. I used to do it every 2 weeks or more. Totally helped.

Derrick · Post by **Derrick** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 8:51 pm

Reformat? Well, I have the 40GB that came with it and that's the one that was having the problem. I got a 300GB for backup and everything is safe on it now. This "Underun" problem happened again today during the most beautiful take (SOAB!) so I said F it and went to recording directly to the "Backup" 300GB drive and had no problems. This tells me there has to be something wrong with the drive. I am wondering if the drive is fast enough even though I think it's the one that came with the unit. It doesn't say the speed on it, but part of the Seagate model number says "3400". If that's the speed, that's def. where the problem is. BTW... I'm not that close to the amp or drums so this is likely not my issue. Thanks for telling me this though! Good to know. Where is the messae board? I should visit this! Oh yea (reformat)... this seems like a problem to have to keep reformatting and then put everything back on there (for redundancy). Is that really what you guys do?

stinkpot · Post by **stinkpot** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 7:49 am

That's exactly what I did with my MX24. I looked at it like drive maintenance since i couldn't defrag or anything like that. I could tell when I was getting bad sectors, little weird things would start to happen.

It wasn't too bad since I had a smallish drive in the machine for working projects and would back up to larger drives via ethernet.

It's a good idea to do that with any computer, really. I wipe all of my computers at least once a year, if not every 6 months, and start fresh. It's amazing how much crap builds up on these machines and slow things waaay down.

rwc · Post by **rwc** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 8:12 am

I highly suggest investing in a program called spinrite. Find some old PII someone is willing to give away or has lying around, and run spinrite on the drive you record to in the HD24 everytime you get home.

It reads something on every sector of the disk, so this way the drive does something like move the sector or know not to use it in the future.. opposed to fucking up right in the middle of a good drum take.

If you have a 320 GB drive, this is not practical, since it will take too long. If you're using 40-80, then it isn't that bad a process.

Derrick · Post by **Derrick** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 9:00 am

I have a feeling that this is not a bad sectors problem... more a write speed issue. Is there a way to check?

kayagum · Post by **kayagum** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:42 am

Just dump the drive and get a new one. You can get a new drive with way more storage for $80 or less.

Track Rat · Post by **Track Rat** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:53 am

I've had an HD24 for over two years and about two months ago I had the same problem. I replaced the drive and about a month ago it happened again on a different drive. The first time I lost a 12 hour seesion with a paying client which REALLY hurt. The second time I ran the scan disc utility (scan and repair) on the offending drive and it seemed to correct the issue but it still leaves me with an uneasy feeling.

GooberNumber9 · Post by **GooberNumber9** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:14 am

Derrick wrote:I have a feeling that this is not a bad sectors problem... more a write speed issue. Is there a way to check?

Given how often hard drives go bad or develop bad sectors, coupled with the fact that I've used 5400 RPM drives to record 4 continuous hours of 24 tracks on my HD24, it actually seems more likely to me that it is a bad drive. Just my humble opinion.

The thing about computer error messages is that they usually do not say what the actual problem is. Just cause it says "Disk too slow" doesn't mean the speed of the drive is the actual problem. More likely the on-disk electronics are encoutering a bad sector, then they are trying to slow down the data buss while searching for a place to write the data, and then the HD24 sees a bottleneck on the drive and the only error message programmed in for that is "drive too slow".

Todd Wilcox

Derrick · Post by **Derrick** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:27 am

Todd, I agree but untill your explanation about the HD taking time to serch for sectors to write to I was open to other possabilities. I will get another HD cause loosing tracks isn't a mistake I want to make. I'll then try reformatting the old HD to see what happens for shit's sake. Thanks guys!

Message Board

Underrun Errors - Disk Too Slow On Alesis HD24??

Underrun Errors - Disk Too Slow On Alesis HD24??

Who is online