[SOLVED *increase Playback Buffer*] Perf. Module HDD icon turning red/Audio Engine stop

Well this is just peachy. After all that careful contemplation and trying to get everything just right for my MIDI drum bounce now I can't play the bleeding things. All the tracks are there. I can see the waves (though it took a while for them to draw) but when I start playback the Hard Disk icon in my performance module goes blood red and after a couple seconds I get an audio engine stop error.
 
Things I've tried:
 
Saved and restarted Sonar.
 
Archived the MIDI track feeding BFD.
 
Cranked the buffers on my Focusrite 18i6 to max.
 
and... well I'm tired so I didn't try much else.
 
I checked my available disk space (I am currently writing audio data for this project to my C drive just because that's how I foolishly started the project many moons ago and don't want to double up the data or have something screw up if I try to move it) and there plenty of room.
 
It is a SATA 500GB 7200 RPM Barracuda (or Cav Black... I forget because my brain's not working but it's a nice one).
 
I can only assume this has something to do with hard disk buffers but I a) have never had a problem like this before and it's only and extra 10 tracks or so and b) am not quite sure the right approach to fix such issues.
 
I'm calling it a night but could use some advice on how to troubleshoot this in the morning.
 
Here are some more system details...
Focusrite Scarlett 18i6
Win7 Pro 64
Sonar X2a
i7 2600k
16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3
700W Coolermaster PSU
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro Gen3 MOBO
System tweaked as recommended according to the Sweetwater Optimization guide minus a few Sonar specific tweaks left off.
No external controller or other devices connected.
AV disabled.
 
What a drag. lol

brundlefly

Beepster
I can only assume this has something to do with hard disk buffers

 
Yes, you'll need to increase your file system buffers under Preferences > Audio > Sync an Caching.
 
I'm not sure what the default is any more, but mine are at 256kB and handling large projects pretty well. But running 96kHz sample rate doubles the load vs. 48kHz.
 

Thanks, man. Exactly the area I was looking for. I've kind of left all the fancy internal system settings alone hoping Sonar's defaults would be enough but I guess that may have been wrong.
 
However here is what that section is telling me:
 
Playback and Record buffers both set to 256kb (so I'm at your settings but perhaps I should boost it anyway?).
 
Also the two checkboxes labeled Enable Read/Write Caching are not checkmarked. Should I enable these options or at least "Read" option?
 
Thanks again. Very helpful.

Well there is a multi out BFD Eco set up (so I think 12 audio tracks there) and 3 duplicates of the MIDI feeding it (the original takes in one which is archived, the bounce clips track of those takes also archived and the final tweaked MIDI track which is what I used for the bounce and I archived after this happened). There is only one instance of BFD and no other synths.
 
Then there are three bass tracks (cloned for blending).
 
There are however a LOT of guitar tracks. You know now that I think about it there are at least a couple dozen of those because of all the original takes I did while writing it, then the keeper tracks, then the clean tracks and huge count of little solo bits that I kept separate on their own tracks because they weren't blending well VIA traditional comping (for some weird reason).
 
Now the new set of bounce BFD tracks. Still though I figured I could get like 100 tracks on this rig without problems but if Sonar isn't set right to take advantage of the horsepower that obviously is a problem. I'm shut down for the night but I'll start archiving any unnecessary crap tomorrow and up the Cache if need be.
 
I'm curious though... does increasing the cache like that introduce latency or other not so desirable stuff?
 
Thanks again. I have neglected studying this type of system setting stuff within Sonar in favor of actually learning how to work the bloody thing. lol

I had this problem once and someone on this forum told the same thing. Once I raised the Playback and record buffers I've never had a problem since.

Good morning. So I had to increase the Playback buffer to 1016 to get this project playing without the HDD icon going red and causing an Engine Stop. Thank you brundlefly and everyone else. I figured this would be what I should look at but as I said I had never messed with those settings before.
 
I do find it a little odd that I had to crank it that high when only adding 10 more tracks by bouncing. They are however stereo (which I intend to fix today because I want most of them to be mono... I think I need to change the Input of the tracks to Mono from BFD but I'm not sure if that will only give me half the signal). This Project now has 48 tracks in it, most of them audio and many of them are merely little snippets.
 
I'm kind of wondering if perhaps there is a Windows setting that would affect this also. I have disabled power management of the HDDs (as well as all the other usual stuff) but I may have left some of the fancier settings alone. It's been a while since I tweaked this rig which is yet another reason why I'd like to completely wipe the system and start from scratch now that I'm a little more confident and have various articles/thread bookmarked about the matter.
 
Anyway for now it seems to be working although it does take some time for playback to begin (couple seconds) but that's okay. I'll probably be able to bring the buffer back down again if I go through and do some archiving of the bed tracks and other unused stuff.
 
Cheers.

Thanks. I think a lot of the problem is that I (as you mentioned) am running at a very high sample rate and am using my program drive for the project and audio data. In the future I may drop down to 88.1 and after I wipe and reinstall everything on the system I'll use a much more logical data path (like make sure the project and audio paths are pointing to the second drive like it's supposed to).
 
I am wondering though... isn't there a way to offload some of this type of thing to my RAM? I have 16GB DDR3 and it hardly has a dent in it in this project with MANY instances of TH2 and one instance of BFD. I don't think I've ever even come close to breaking 50% RAM usage with anything I've done. I thought RAM could act as the prefetch storage area or whatever instead of the HDDs.
 
However these are topics I should bring up with support and will before the wipe but I'm still gathering up my thoughts before I compose what will be a rather lengthy list of queries for them. I'm just curious and it will help me ask better questions when the time does come to harass whatever poor Baker has to deal with my insanity. lol
 
Thanks again, man. Saved my arse with this one.