Cakewalk FA-66

My FA-66 constantly drops out - Win 7 Pro, new Dell laptop, Firewire throughput and nothing but problems for six long months. Can't even play a cut or film w/o freezing the screen for seconds on end and even completely losing the entire installation until I reboot. Optical input is just as bad, and varies in terms of drop out frequency and duration. Is this product even supported or did I just throw away three hundred dollas in Roland's direction? Not even remotely acceptable, people.

In Sonar you want to make sure you're using the ASIO driver.

It ain't necessarily so....... been using one for years with no issues and it works better for me in WDM. The installation instructions actually recommended WDM for Sonar. It will also work with ASIO, but WDM just performs better for me. I don't think there is a right or wrong with this, it's whatever works best on your system, so it is misleading to say you must use ASIO.

I'm still using Win XP32 8.5PE (if it ain't broken - don't fix it) and it's rock solid there, so looks like it may be W7 / X1 issue. Could be a faulty unit I guess, but generally they have a pretty good rep, so I would look at OS / Driver issues before blaming the FA66.

I did once read that it needs to have TI chipset for Firewire, but I don't know for sure if that's correct and to be honest I have no clue if mine is or not, I just plugged it in on day 1 and it worked.

 I have two FA-66, because my first one worked absolutely 100% dropout-free:
- PowerStudio660 (= green/black coloured FA-66 known as an SPS-66 and branded as Cakewalk hardware, bundled with full version of Sonar 6)
- WinXP 32 bit pro
I bought my second FA-66 (darkish red coloured Edirol branded) cheaply, looking to double my microphone inputs. Daisy-chained/cascaded together, they also worked 'in unison' absolutely 100% free of dropouts and crashes.

I then upgraded to X1 and Win7 64bit, because my former PC, assembled in 2003, couldn't handle many MIDI tracks and effects (CPU load too high, limited RAM). Now I keep having problems with dodgy things in X1 or Win7 - often, nobody seems to know why(?), but the FA-66 itself hasn't let me down, yet. I have, however, not been brave enough to daisy chain them (I was over-optimistic when writing my signature), for fear of getting even more problems. I think I remember reading in the notes on the Win7 64 bit drivers for the FA-66 and SPS-66 that their support is 'limited' for Win7.
So, based on my experience with two almost identical units, I too believe that your FA-66 may not be the culprit. Rather, their interplay with either Win7, 64 bit, or X1 and the FA-66 drivers is the problem - but that of course is even more irritating, because you can't solve any of that easily by yourself ...