Sonar X3 Studio crashing

Recording live drums to 8 tracks using Comping mode. No effects at all.  Roland Studio Capture. 48k, 24 bit. Project files on an external USB hard drive.
After about 20 takes (having kept about ten take lanes), I keep getting the error "Audio Engine stopped unexpectedly." 
At that point, I can't even play the song for more than 6 seconds and it crashes. Restarting Sonar has no effect. Loading a different song which has no drums recorded yet works perfect.  But I'm sure it too will begin crashing after a bunch of takes.
 
Anyone know what is happening?  Should I abandon Comping mode when recording and use Overwrite instead?

No, I don't have any other option and I don't want to buy any hardware. The laptop is a very powerful computer, and I don't think I'm doing anything extraordinary recording-wise. Does having all those take lanes recorded really tax the system? It was working fine until I had a bunch recorded.

Doktor Avalanche
The more tracks you are playing the more bandwidth you are using up between your PC and your USB hard drive.

I understand that, but what I don't understand is how the large number of take lanes affects things.
 

Your next move is to try it on a faster disk (I.e. internal). If you are using a C drive (not ideal best use another faster drive if you have it) you might want to defrag it first for best results.

Backpeddle USB3 should be fine. Sorry. Got into USB2 mode.

The speed of your hard drive may be a factor..

http://community.avid.com...s/p/101848/586457.aspx


Happy recording..

Faster rpm would be better. But it will probably work fine. Apols for misleading you earlier.

With a 5400 RPM drive, another thing you may want to try is adjusting Disk I/O buffers in SONAR preferences. If the buffer is too small or too large, it may not be feeding the audio engine properly.
 
If you open SONAR Preferences, check "Advanced" at the bottom, and look at the Audio->Sync and Caching page. In the "File System" section there is a Playback and Record I/O buffer size (KB). IIRC, they default to 256, and you might want to try two things: 1) bump these up to 512KB each, and 2) enable Read Caching and enable Write Caching (I think these are off by default).
 
The caching will also allow for the system to be used as a cache if the handshaking to the drive cannot keep speed.
 
Another thing that will improve seek time on a magnetic drive is to defragment them regularly. They tend to write in any available space, but then reading makes the heads move more than they need to (a single file may be in numerous chunks, each with a "12ms seek time" to recover). An "optimized" defragment will also consolidate data files together, but this is not required as frequently - these also take longer to perform, so best to start when not using the machine and walk away (don't sit and watch it).