Hard Drive Issue and Performance Monitor

I've had a couple issues recently with performance and my hard drive. The Hard Drive icon lights up and I get drop outs. Is the icon referring to my scratch or my system disk? I pared down the scratch to about 1/3 full (Samsung 256GB SSD) and the system is about 1/2 full (Intel 180GB SSD) but it still happens on occasion.
 
so does the performance monitor refer to scratch or system? I don't have a large sample library on the system, what I have is running out of Kontakt which is a resource hog on the first core. otherwise I *should* have performance to spare.
 
Thanks for the help.
 
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Basics of the rest of system
AMD Vishara 8350
32 GB RAM

It is my understanding that the disk activity monitor in Sonar is measuring the proportion of the disk buffer (for the disk to which Sonar is writing data), that is being filled. So for most people that represents the disk set up to record projects or the "audio" disk in the setup. If that buffer capacity is exceeded then you can lose data, but you can increase the buffer size. This is not the same as the audio driver buffer, but is accessed under Edit > Preferences > Audio - Sync and Caching under File System. Too small a buffer can result in problems regardless of the capacity or speed of your physical hard drives under Windows. 
 
As dRank says, you can get a better view of the actual disk capacity and usage via Windows. I think that an actual shortage of disk space or even fragmentation of the disk is generally not a big problem for most users of Sonar, although defragmenting is frequently advised on the forums. A massive load on the system drives from other programs could possibly swamp the system drives, but again, that should be something you can check in the Windows Performance Monitor. 

Yeah... crank your Read/Write i/o buffers and it should correct itself.
 
However this does not seem to be something I'd expect from an SSD... but I know jack balls about that shiz. Maybe those Read/Write settings need to be adjusted no matter how fast the drive is.
 
Anyway... I think the default i/o is 256. Doubling it should keep that Perf Module from going red (and avoiding drop outs). I have mechanical HDDs so as a project grows I often have to crank it up even further from there (but we're talking a SHIZLOAD of tracks loaded up with a mountain of takes in each).
 
Edit: and in case you don't know where to set the Read/Write i/o's it's...
 
Edit > Preferences > Audio - Sync and Caching: File System... You'll see two buffer options for Playback and Record. Enter your desired values in those boxes. Don't crank them more than you need to though because that can cause other problems.

Excellent responses. Will check everything tonight. I get a clean bill of health from latencymon usually. Never realized that it displays the buffer. It explains why at startup of a project it shows close to 90％, but settles back to 60％　after a few seconds.

Hmmm Octacapture eh?
 
This might sound crazy but try deleting AUD.INI (google for details).
Cheers..

Doktor Avalanche
Hmmm Octacapture eh?
 
This might sound crazy but try deleting AUD.INI (google for details).
Cheers..

yeah I see a lot of people are talking about Octa-Capture these days. The driver from Roland is not new so I wonder if one of the Sonar updates has caused it.

gunboatdiplomacy
 
I already have that disabled. why do you think would that make an issue?

Current performance bug in Platinum it appears.. Still recommend trying deleting AUD.INI were are hearing that issues which this resolved for Octacapture users.. The scope of the actual problem is not fully accounted for, at least at my end, worth a go anyway.