Over 18 minutes to save a project

It wouldn't hurt to have a look at your system event log to see if there are any disk errors being reported.
 
 

Thanks for staying with me guys, especially Scook
BobF - How do I look at my system event log?
New info: I just ran the windows memory test as suggested by Anderton and no problems were found.
Scook - If it's a drive failure what are my options?
Larry

Windows 7 Event Viewer info:
 
http://www.sevenforums.co...n-use-windows-7-a.html

You are not running more than one anti-virus are you ?
Also you may want to check if your drive controller is set to DMA mode,
http://forum.digital-dige...f-necessary-61905.html
16 mins is a really long time for a save regardless of any settings etc.
Have you run an disk benchmark programs like HD-Tune that look at the health of your HDD ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_zT3D1OmvQ
http://www.hdtune.com/faq_1.html

Thanks for the feedback.  Will use it it all to get to the bottom of this.
I've been experimenting all morning and discovered that I'm not having the "save" problem on less recent projects.  Problem may have started when Band in a Box started exporting tracks to DAW as ACID files.  For that reason I'm going to try Bristol-Jonesey's suggestion first.
Thanks again guys.  With your help I'm going to get through this!

Does the project have audio snap in it?
Max

Larry,
 
First off these aren't endorsements by Cakewalk but merely tools I've heard of that have helped some folks.
 
I'd recommend grabbing the demo of HD Tune Pro, use the error scan tab and click the speed map button.
That will flag any slow blocks on the drive.  Several of those would indicate a drive having trouble even if an error check doesn't show anything.
http://www.hdtune.com/
 
That will just alert you to the problem but won't necessarily resolve the issue unless the scan happens to convince the drive firmware to stop trying to use those blocks.
 
For a possible short term resolution, you could use a commercial tool like GRC's SpinRite.  That does some magic to mark bad blocks and convince the drive firmware to perform much better.  Not only that but I've heard many testimonies over the years of it recovering drives from Tivo, mac hds, etc. where the device using the drive couldn't startup.  Of course it won't help if the drive has a mechanical failure, but it can definitely help to get some more mileage out of the drive before replacing it.
 
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
 
Keith

Seth Kellogg [Cakewalk]
Samsung has it's own monitor that is incredibly helpful as well. You can also check firmware and run regular benchmarks to see if your drive performance is dropping. It's called Magician. I use it for my 850 and 840 EVO's.
 
http://www.samsung.com/se...sd/download/tools.html

Seth, that's a good point. I have the Samsung tools, which I used to setup and migrate to the Samsung SSD.  Good stuff!  The other tools pointed out in this thread are all good recommendations, and I am particularly interested in looking at the HD Tune stuff.
 
But I noticed that most every drive manufacturer provides a toolset for their hardware.
 
I had looked for a simple tool to use as a "dashboard" to keep up with all installed brands, at a glance.  If you will notice the top row of CrystalDiskInfo shows the status of all installed drives. By clicking on the drive button, you will get the full page of details for that respective drive.
 
Of course, should you see any errors or otherwise suspect something is wrong, then using the dedicated vendor tools for a deep dive would be the best approach.
 
The same developer also created CrystalDiskMark, a popular free drive benchmarking tool. It was interesting to look at the before/after benchmarks for my move from HDD to SDD ... not that I needed any convincing of the huge boost in performance ... but it was fun to look at the numbers anyway.  Besides, now I have a baseline that I can check against in the future to see if things are slowing down over time ...