Dropouts recording live multi-track to laptop...

I'm having trouble with occasional dropouts when recording 16 tracks live (44.1/24) on a Lenovo Thinkpad W540 onto its internal 5400 rpm drive with a 16GB "M.2 Solid State Drive Double", which (I think) acts like an SSD cache.  (Recording through the USB 2.0 interface on a Behringer X32 console.)
 
When I do the math, it says that each track consumes about 132KB per second.  Dividing that into 16GB (and dividing by 60 (seconds in a minute)  and 60 again (minutes in an hour) then by 16 (tracks)) implies that that 16GB "cache" would fill in about 2 hours.  In my last session (where I was very careful not to bump the laptop which makes the heads temporarily park), it dropped out about 40 minutes in saying it thought it was out of disk space.  (The spinning media still had 500GB of free space.)
 
I'm wondering if I can sidestep all of this by recording through SONAR on the laptop directly to a high speed USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt flash drive.  There are some SanDisk Extreme devices (64GB sequential writes at 220MB/s...or 128GB that writes faster than that) that might solve the problem.
 
Then again...I might not have even properly identified what my problem is.
 
Has anyone else chased this...and what was your solution?
 
...and pardon me for having posted this in the "Computers" section and subsequently hearing crickets...

Are you monitoring through SONAR?
 
If not you can take liberties with your sample buffer and run at a very large setting and see if that helps.
 
When I do field recording I try to quickly hit "save" and then "save as" between songs to make sure I have what I think I already have.
 
I once had a Windows XP laptop that had a DPC latency below 20µs and it would record 16-24 tracks at 24bit/44.1kHz for hours without a single hic cup.
 
that laptop died.
 
The past 2 Win 7 laptops I have owned have been incapable of running below 200µs DPC latency and so they have been useless for reliable field recording. I drag an old desktop out for the task now.
 
Good luck.

Also, we don't know what version of SONAR or system OS is being run.

Well, yeah....
 
 
... I'd advise checking the DPC latency and see how bad the interrupts are.
 
On the machine I mentioned that I was able to get below 20µs there were almost no interrupts to the CPU or the system devices and 5400rpm worked without a hitch. On the machines that can't get below 200µs a 7200rpm drive doesn't help.
 
I'd advise looking for a problem elsewhere and avoid the distractions of the drive as a bottleneck theory. 
 
The dialog may say something like "the drive is full"' but that is just because that is what someone typed in the dialog text line many years ago. The system isn't actually reporting why the stream stopped... it's just popping open a flash card.

mike_mccue
 
The dialog may say something like "the drive is full"' but that is just because that is what someone typed in the dialog text line many years ago.

...well aware of misleading or just plain wrong error messages...

Video card drivers (especially the ones with HDMI audio), wifi drivers, anti-virus and disk indexing services have been known to interrupt smooth performance, though usually the issues are more severe. Are you reasonably sure none of these are interfering?

dantarbill

mike_mccue
 
16 tracks of mono 24/44.1 equals 11.2896 Mbps.
 

Huh?  Why doesn't 44,100 * 24 * 16 = 16,934,400?

 
You are correct and I was mistakenly quoting the rate of a 16 channel a 16bit/44.1kHz stream. I apologize for the mistake.

57Gregy
...I think 11 ms latency is unnecessary...

I saw that too when I started pulling data together.
 
Although that exposes another mini-beef I have.  You can only make configuration changes for a particular interface when you're actually connected to that interface.  That takes even more time during Sunday morning setup when time is at a premium.
 
Hmm...what I could do is just edit the AUD.ini that I use for the X32.
 

I turn off just about everything I can when recording on laptop. I saw you don't have laptop comnected to wi-fi, but also disable the wi-fi adapter completely when using Sonar or any other latency affected product. Disable background services and scheduled maintenance items like scheduled disk defragmentation. Also software update checks that often load at startup like quicktime/ itunes, various adobe programs, java, etc. I recommend going through your list of programs that load on startup every now and then because tons of things from printer apps to various proprietary "assistant" programs tend to load automatically and check for updates too. Just disabling wi-fi and Nvidia's crappy audio drivers alone reduced my latency exponentially. Good luck.

There was a time when it was easy to find the startup folder to check what was loading at starup.
 
Now, in Win7...I am unsure I have actually found it.
 
I almost remember back in the day you could remove programs from that folder...now I am lost.
 
Any quick guidelines for me to pursue on my laptop, thanks.

In an earlier post, you indicate the Wi-Fi is 'not hooked up to anything'.
 
Can you please elaborate on that?  The reason I ask is that many times a Wi-Fi adapter on a laptop can cause massive, but intermittent, DPC Latency spikes, that can cause all kinds of problems for streaming audio applications, such as Sonar.
 
What I do, and many others as well, is to either use a hardware switch (if present) to turn off the adapter just prior to launching Sonar, or go into Device Manager and temporarily disable the Wi-Fi-adapter - again just prior to launching Sonar.  It can be enabled or turned back on as soon as you finish working with your Sonar session.
 
Bob Bone
 

Don't know if this is relevant or not, but a lot of people running Macs with hybrid SDD/magnetic drives seem to have had big dropout problems. There are loads of threads about this on any Mac DAW forum. The solution there seems to be to replace the hybrid drive for a cure SSD or pure HDD. Some people claim to have got rid of the dropouts by putting the OS on an external USB HDD and spooling the audio to the internal hybrid.
 
The problems seem to happen even if the audio is being streamed to an external USB/firewire/Thunderbird drive. The most popular suspected culprit is the OS or the drive itself shifting data from flash to magnetic storage as it feels the need - including the OS swap file.

Ahhh Laptops, the bane of the DAW world. I normally only have to disable a few things, I did a test once where disabling things in MSconfig does little but make for a faster start up on booting. The DPLAT test did not improve after disabling a dozen services. Mostly those stay idle.
Software that checks for updates, ya but it cannot do that if there is no internet..
Open device manager and disable your wireless and the battery management for starters,
Those are the 2 biggest hogs.
Don't let any software auto load on start up.