ORIGINAL: warpman
As I mentioned in my reply to Z, I had to get a quick fix for this, which ended up in buying a WD 80G Caviar to replace the Raptor that was in place... But considering another sound card may be a solution. I'll see how funds go in the future...!

Sounds like a good intermediate solution. In the meantime you can always use your SATA drive for backups and such. And you can save it for when your hardware platform changes favorably for SATA audio (MOBO, audio card, RAID 5 controller?).

God bless.

ORIGINAL: BeachGuitar
I've been away for a while, but it sounds like the same SATA problems continue. I finally gave up and yanked all my SATA's and built an IDE only system. I've had fairly good success, but on occasion (not often) I will get an audio recording with pops. I simply delete the track, close SONAR and open it again, and re-record the track. I am sharing IRQ's on the Delta card (it has irq 16 by itself).

Hey, thanks for checking back. Life can be such a Beach, right?
;)
Seriously, it looks like you can add your name to the growing list of frustrated folks combining M-Audio cards with SiI3112 SATA controllers (like the one on your A7N8X-E, if that's what you still have). From the looks of it, if those two play nice, then you may consider yourself fortunate indeed.

Glad that you got it working with IDE. That's definitely a reasonable solution, and always a fallback option (has been from the start). FWIW, and for future reference, I do think that you may have had equal success by changing either of the two offenders, too, i.e.

1) going to a SATA controller PCI card with a different chipset, like Promise

or

2) changing to a different manufacturer's audio card.

These options may be handy to remember if anything changes in your hardware setup. And of course, if you still have your SATA drive(s), then by all means hang onto them for when you get your monster Athlon64 system!

The Sata in my Dell 8400 was working fine. The reason I put it in hATA mode was not related to audio but was because I was trying to install XPSP1 on another partition and without a floppy drive it was too much of a PITA

ORIGINAL: Zlartibartfast
Yes, Warp, I have seen the Sil series all over the place - for most folks it is a good choice. I'll lay down a bet that they NEVER tried validating it for DAW use! I do remember Carlos reporting in the early posts of this thread, that the placement of the chip (in relation to the system chipset) seemed to make a difference on the degree of performance, so it is possible that a PCI card in one of the first 3 slots might work better than a chip "integrated" on the system board, but adding in the Delta Factor seems to make it nearly impossible for us to get the skips/pops out completely. Again, I'll bet M-Audio did not try to validate their Crystal-based cards against the SIL controllers - heck when the Delta came out, SATA was still in design!

Good points Zlart, and I'd bet that you're right about cross-validation, or rather the lack of it. SiI tech support told me right off the bat that their primary customer focus is server systems, and they are optimizing their hardware and drivers for raw throughput, and not realtime PC system performance. As I recall, the way that I even got their attention in the first place was to cast my request as being for a "realtime interactive multimedia" application, and not as for a DAW! It all worked out, though, because to their credit, it was them that first pointed me to look into PCI latency timers.

That said, I will add something else to your above guess ventures: I would venture that M-Audio is more likely to investigate driver fixes for the SiI series than the other way around. I'd bang on M-Audio's door, and get the word out, so that they can't stand the din any longer and do something about it. Unless anyone else reads this and chimes in, I think that (so far) they are (by far) the worst offender in the SATA audio compatibility saga.

Looks like the Holy Grail is a truly integrated SATA controller, such as the type used in the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
losguy - it supports SATA RAID level 5...;-}

No doubt SATA RAID 5 is nice, but that's on the SiI SATA controller, and not on the nForce SATA controller. It seems to me that the SiI controller would still have to hang off of the PCI bus like all the others. Now, I haven't read the MOBO manual yet... it would be very cool if they used a dedicated PCI bus for the SiI, i.e. not on the other side of the same bridge as the rest of the PCI slot bus (even better, a dedicated 66 MHz PCI bus, since it's RAID 5 and all...). [Edit: Even better: a dedicated max-out PCI-XPress bus. I see it has PCI-Xpress for the graphics card, which is also cool.]

Carlos you're right again - I didn't read all the way down the page on the nVidia Force 4 chipset - it's an Sil controller added to the board. I looked a little further into the MSI offerings and found that their K8T Neo2, using the VT8237 Northbridge chip, does integrate an SATA controller, supporting RAID 1 or 0 (I still chuckle over the idea of a non-redundant Redundant Array of Independent {Inexpensive?} Disks).

Good point about requesting M-Audio to develop a driver that's plays nice with SiL controllers. Considering the amount of reads/posts this thread has generated. I think a significant number of users might be able to voice their requests to M-Audio.

It's a good chance for Avid to prove that their recent aquisition will benefit the DAW community, amd show their quality!

You couldn't possibly be alone in this arena... though it's possible that a lot of M-Audio users may not have paid any attention to exactly who made their SATA controller chips! Maybe they deserve a gentle nudge to check. They need look no further than their Device Manager, but they could always load PowerStrip or SANDRA... anyway, judging by this thread at least, you sure seem to have some amount of company out there! Anyone?

ORIGINAL: boseyman1
Losguy,
I have a question for you. I am adjusting my PCI latency with Powerstrip. My ASUS Tek RAID Controller is set to 96 latency, on bus 3 device 4. If my Echo Layla is on the same bus and set to a latency of 88, can this cause cracks or pops. Thanks for your help.

It's really hard to say... (wait, is this a trick question?) Before we begin, I'm assuming that you actually are experiencing pops and crackles using SATA for audio? If yes, then we'll go on...

First off, are those devices by themselves on different IRQ's? If not, then by all means, get that straight first.

After that, like I said in earlier posts, there is no magic formula or scientific equation (yet) for PCI latency numbers. You didn't mention graphics, either. Please check your AGP card or video interface. Is it over 200? Lower it to below 100. The RAID controller does look rather high. It could probably go down below 48, while the Layla could be happy over 100. Mainly, it's a matter of finding the sweet spot, and unfortunately, you can just about expect every system to have a different one. But you can use the ranges I gave you as a guide. Hope that helps, and let us know what you find.

ORIGINAL: warpman
You bet! I guess that this is a good place to start. Also, any of you think that pointing M-Audio to this thread would be good idea?

warp, I was thinking of suggesting this myself, but you beat me to it. That's a great idea. While you're getting M-Audio's attention, Zlart has started another thread in the Gear forum that they should be aware of, and of course there's the original thread over in the SOS forum. Over there, a poor bloke (avatar handle: Crash Helmets) fell victim to the same thing... he had an Audiophile card.

Edit: I said it over in the gear forum, and I'll say it here: I'd talk to M-Audio myself, but the only thing I have from them is a USB MidiSport 2X2 and 4X4.

Thanks, Z. This could get very interesting!

Not sure, Jay. First offhand thing that springs to mind is P4 denormals, but it looks like you didn't have this problem in S3? Besides, I'm sure Mr. Reams factored that into his test plan.

Could it be some weird Windows service that somehow crept in after the S4 install and is now popping up?

Speaking of popups, there's always spyware, but I'm sure that's a long shot...

Have you tried running a process monitor to try to track down what's eating CPU at the time of the spike?

ORIGINAL: paulfurze
I'm using an Abit Av8-3rd eye mobo with an A64 3500, GeForce 5700, 2G Ram (crucial Ballistix), 2xSegate Barracuda 200G Sata drives Raid 0, Maxtor 40G IDE drive used for the system. The soundcard is a maya1010. I'm getting those horrible scratching pops and glitches that this thread is all about.

Except for the crackles, this ought to be a screamin' system!

I've used Powerstrip and the latency timers were horrible....
GEforce5700 (Was:248, Now:8)
Maya1010 (was:38, Now:160)

You're right, they were kinda bad, but 8 on the graphics card seems a bit low. While you're getting your IRQ stuff sorted out, you might want to see about raising it closer to 50 to avoid GUI problems later.

Now things have improved, I can get 6 channels recording at 24/96 but it's just a little scratchy.
I've investigated the IRQ thing and found that the SATA device is on the same IRQ as the maya1010. I've also looked at the mobo manual for the IRQ/PCI table but can't make much sense of it.

You're on the right track, and yes, it sounds like you should get these on different IRQ's by all means.

Q) How do i change the IRQ of the Maya1010 and what slot should it be in? ... The table shows this

Thanks for the table, and for telling me which slot your Maya is in now. It's a pretty squirrelly table. But at first glance, if yoru Maya card is only sharing with the SATA and nothing else, then the Maya is probably yanking INTB, which shares PIRQ_5 with the SATA (on its INTA). According to the table, the only two PCI slots that don't share a PIRQ with anything on INTB are PCI slots 2 and 3. I'd try either of those to see if that gets the Maya on its own IRQ.

ORIGINAL: Al
PCI Latency Tool 2.0
HTH

Al, helpful as always. Question: Does it adjust anything besides AGP? The gamers on that site were, of course, only concentrating on the graphics card!
:)
This is the first free tool I've seen that provides "sticky" settings at bootup. I suppose that to reset to factory default PCI latency, you just uncheck the "sticky" box? Thanks!!

Al, helpful as always. Question: Does it adjust anything besides AGP? The gamers on that site were, of course, only concentrating on the graphics card!

Hey , anytime... i didn't try it actually ( no sata ..and my mobo/cards work fine here) but it seems like you are right about those gamers..
they only have one thing in mind i guess it is just for the AGP..nothing else .

any of you think that pointing M-Audio to this thread would be good idea?

I did do that, but so far no bites.

Need better bait....I'm gonna have to come with another SATA drive, then re-create the problem, before they (M-Audio) take any action.

ORIGINAL: Zlartibartfast

any of you think that pointing M-Audio to this thread would be good idea?

I did do that, but so far no bites.

Thanks for that. I (or someone) should go through and tally all the M-Audio users in this thread (and others around here) that have had No Joy with the SiI-baed SATA audio.

Need better bait....I'm gonna have to come with another SATA drive, then re-create the problem, before they (M-Audio) take any action.

I'll be watching with... baited breath!