ORIGINAL: losguy
Is your audio card M-Audio by chance? If so, there's little that can be done, short of using IDE for audio as you are doing now, or using an external USB2/FW drive for audio.

Yes - it's a bit buried in my post, but I'm using a Delta66. External drive isn't a preferred option at this point, as the SATA drive is currently my system drive (where Windows etc is installed). It would require basically rebuilding the system right now, which is not an option I'd relish.

You can also do what Lliam did (see his posts on the last couple pages) and swap out your MOBO to the ASUS A7V880.

Again, I'd prefer not to have to tear down, rebuild, and reinstall.

If your audio card is PCI, then I would not recommend a PCI card-based SATA adapter for you, since any PCI slot-bus solution could contend with the audio card. It really comes down to the adapter hardware and how the driver for the adapter is written.

I think that sticking with something newer from Promise might be a good bet, but I'd have to research further into it. It would be nice to be able to support the NCQ available on my Seagate SATA drive.

Instead, as a sort of stop-gap, you could use this IDE-to-SATA adapter from StarTech that Lliam pointed out above. IMO it would be a better solution, as it would provide SATA ports that also bypass the PCI slot bus.

That is a possibility, but for the cost it would only be marginally more expensive to get a PCI SATA controller. Incidentally, for Canadians, the same item can be found for less at MyCableShop.

Curious... did you find other forum threads that provided alternate solutions, or did they just further point out the problem?

It was this thread.

Oh, and to clarify - this system was always intended to have a second hard drive in it. There's the SATA drive I use for the system drive, and a second drive which is IDE which I'm using for bulk storage. When I use that IDE drive for audio data in Sonar, I haven't heard a pop/click yet.

Just that occasionally, when playing MP3s or even video files from the SATA drive (in Windows Media Player, WinAmp, what have you), I get some pops or stuttering. So while I'm ok for Sonar so far, I'd still like to clear the problem up as it is affecting the rest of the system. Games have stuttered as well.

ORIGINAL: losguy

I think I got my signals a little crossed on your situation. I was thinking you were looking for SATA audio for SONAR. I see now that is not the case; sorry for any confusion.

Don't get me wrong - I'd like to get the SATA working so that I could use it with SONAR. I want to reclaim SATA for audio like you did! :)

An acceptable alternative for now is to use the secondary drive. I'm trying to decide between that StarTech device, and an add-in card. I can't find much information about the StarTech PATA2SATA device, I don't know what kind of overhead the translation incurs and whether it's going to have an effect on data throughput.

ORIGINAL: losguy
So unless you're looking at another SATA drive, or swapping your current drive configuration, you may already be at the ideal point, amigo.

I had actually originally intended to go with two SATA drives, and for now I'm definitely glad that I did not! I may just leave things as they are, since they seem to be working (knock on wood). I seem to have cleaned up the stutters for other applications, so it looks like I may be OK.

This limitation is true of PATA or SATA drives, so in that sense the interface speed is completely irrelevant (for now). Access-time transients are a different phenomenon, of course, but a decent drive cache can take up a lot of that slack, too.

You are bang on with that. Physically, there is no PATA or SATA drive that's capable of saturating the currently available bandwidth. It's humourous to see that the next SATA spec will be for 300MB/s when we're not even pushing poor old ATA/133!

screen is back...............

now back to the original problem of PCI LATENCY.

Thank You!

Beautiful......................alright..................hmmmmmmmm.........

No changes. All latency settings WERE at 32. I have since changed the firewire set-up to 88 and all the others along the lines of your setup back from page 1.

Please excuse my ignorance, but when you speak of IRQ issues, is the number 17 bad?

It's a dedicated 1394 firewire in the back, not an add on if that helps.

The firewire should not share an Interupt request except for the port it is plugged into correct? Cool. I'm ok there, would the order of irq jack something up?

Alright......I have yet to see any improvement. Any reccomendations? I've just about exhausted any help from guitar center employees. I've even had them come over to my house to try and go through it.

Hello
My MOBO is a Asus A7V8X V(ia KT400) and my sound card is MOTU 828 Mk2 (Firewire through PCI adaptor)
I have those clicks and pops, glitchesv problems while recording audio
USING DDAWG OR WPCRE and adjusting PCi LATENCY TIMER I haven't noticed any consistent improvement except once where I record 3 hours of audio at 24/ 96Khz with the purest sound I've ever heard on my PC (Thanks Motu although they could warn that their MOTU is not Compatible with all PC /MOBO so not 100%)

Unfortunately I haven't been able since to reproduce the magical settings or combination of actions that fixed (till next reboot) my audio problem
Any idea??

My config

PC: AMD 2000+
RAM: 512 DDR2700 SAMSUNG
HDD: 2* UDMA 5,6 120 GO
OS: WIN XP PRO
TI-based FW Adapter
CUBASE SX 2.2

Nick, what soundcard are you using? If it's not M-Audio, then you ought to try a PCI Latency utility first. If it is M-Audio, then AFAIK you'll have no joy with the onboard SiI SATA controller. In the latter case, you may or may not have luck with a PCI-card Promise controller, so it's a gamble (but worth it if you want SATA RAID).

Edit: Please also tell what video card you have.

Blesings,

Thanks for your reply losguy.

I should've been clearer. I am using a Delta 44 with an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 Video card.
So, if I want to use SATA Raid.... I'm taking my chances with a PCI Controller, it may or may not work?

Oh Maudio... fix this!!!! lol

Thanks again for your help losguy

Hey Losguy, thought I'd give you an update.

I'm able to return my HD's, and I'm going to use that money to get two IDE drives and RAID Controller.

Thanks for all your help...

GB!

Maybe someone already mentioned this, but for people with ATI radeon videocards: it might help if you switch from the standard catalyst drivers to Omega drivers (www.omegadrivers.net)
These drivers were build on the standard Catalyst drivers, but they're more stable, and they take over the PCI latency setting from the bios. My videocard went from 255 latency (standard drivers) to 64 (omega drivers)! And without having to use a latency tool. Solved a lot of my problems...

My system:

Asus p4p800e deluxe
Pentium 4 3.2ghz Northwood
2gig corsair mem
2x maxtor PATA
2x WD raptor SATA
Layla24
ATI Radeon 7500

cheers,

Parasite

What an amazing and thorough post, and thanks for that. I didnt even realize this was almost 2 years old now! i think i have read most of the issues.

Heres my situation. I just got a new Dell Poweredge SC430 with a dual core Pentium. really really great on the capabilities and power, but of course i opted for the SATA drives.
i have 2 pci audio cards--- one is the echo layla 20, and one the newer emu 0404. early yesterday, i installed the emu and realized it wasnt popping or clicking. duh, this must point to an irq conflict. so i swapped the echo and emu, and the popping followed the echo--- even tho the irq's changed. so i stumble onto your post, thought id share here.
following your advice, i researched and downloaded a few pci latency programs, but none of them helped. all the things in my system seem to be at 0 latency, with the exception of the emu (at 64) and the layla (at 192). i adjusted them up, down, and sideways, rebooted, sometimes with a low enough latency, playing audio through the layla just locks it up.
nothing has helped.
i am using the onboard graphics card until i can buy a dual head (the dell didnt come with an agp slot)

still researching though. its weird, it seems that when the graphics is "doing something" the layla chokes. in sonar, its fine until i grab a track window and move it up and down furiously--- then the popping starts.

i have searched microsofts db for it, they had a ton of interesting stuff, none of which really helped.

the other weird anomaly is that recording seems flawless, whether digital or analog, doesnt matter.

system:
dell sc430
pentium d (dual core)@ 2.8
windows 2003 server
1 gb ram
2 SATA drives

soundsubs, you might want to play with Hardware Acceleration on your vide to see if that makes a difference. I can't tell from the Dell website if the onboard graphics are PCI-e or AGP, but if you can't adjust the PCI latency for the graphics, you're kinda stuck for tweaking.

If you do get a PCI dual-head graphics card, I recommend the Matrox P650. It comes out of the box with good PCI latency values. Also, check that the Dell BIOS lets you completely disable the onboard graphics adapter. That would be the best situation. Otherwise, you can Disable it in Windows Device Manager, but it's not quite as clean that way.

It just seems strange that a topic such as this can still be going after 2 years. Technilogy has changed so dramatically.