Windows 10-Slow SSD Access and Many Sonar Crashes!

Hi!
 
I did a search and didn't see too much on Windows 10 but I'm guessing it's been discussed a fair bit here and I just didn't see it. My experience is not good, at least with Sonar. 
 
I find the OS to be just find for normal use, including photoshop (although maybe it's a bit early to really say) but for SSDs and Sonar it seems to be... not working.
 
Right away after the upgrade I noticed Windows boot times were MUCH longer. And by "boot times" I mean the time it takes to actually load everything at startup. They seem to have moved the login screen to the very start so that loads fast and the desktop appears quickly after that, but if you watch the hard drive you'll see it loading in everything else (programs and services) slower afterwards.  My boot time in Windows 7 was around 30-40 seconds but in Windows 10 it's around 2 minutes. And that's without the driver for my Emu 1212m card, which for some reason it wont load automatically any more.
 
Next I noticed it when making MP3s with RazorLame. The encoding time doubled. Same thing happened when I went from XP to windows 7.
 
But Sonar is the most obvious. There's a little window in the bottom right corner that says "VST Scan". In Windows 7 that window came up almost instantly and immediately said "97 Found". Now the window comes up a bit slower, but it stays blank for about 15 seconds before telling me what it's found. That's a pretty significant increase! Then opening a project definitely takes about twice as long as well. 
 
Anyway, Sonar has crashed about 10 times in the last week since the upgrade. It only crashed once every 4-5 months before that in Windows 7. In Win 7 it would blue-screen, in Win 10 it just stops playing and I hear a loud BZZZZZZZZZZZZ, basically 20ms  or so of what I was listening to repeating over and over. There doesn't seem to be any way to stop it. One thing I've always found about Sonar is that I can't shut it down once it crashes, even with the Task Manager. The only option is to reboot. Totally kills my mood and creativity.
 
Tonight I updated SSD firmware and all motherboard drivers and after about 10 minutes of recording Sonar locked again.
 
I've also seen a message about audio engine dropouts. I never saw that before, except in extreme circumstances. Last night it happened once while the whole thing was idle! I came back from another room and found the message sitting on the screen.
 
I do use a lot of tracks but not all at once. And this song has only about half the tracks I've used in other songs.
 
My feeling is a lot of this is a disk access problem. It just seems much much slower than before.  Even bouncing a short 1 second audio clip takes 6-7 seconds. 
 
My MB: Gigabyte Z77-HD4
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770
C: SSD is Crucial M4-CT256M4SSD2
D: is  WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 2TB SATA
Drive with Sonar files (all audio) Crucial_CT240M500SSD1
Sound card is Emu 1212m - onboard sound also enabled for windows sounds (have not found a way to make windows use the ASIO drivers and play sounds through the 1212 so I re-enabled the onboard audio for that)
Graphics is onboard M2762D on Intel HD Graphics 4000 
Qualcomm Atheros AR938x Wireless Network Adapter
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit - all updates installed  
Nothing changed between Win7 and Win 10. One hour to do the upgrade and then back to work, other than eventually enabling onboard sound after trying ASIO4ALL and a few other things.
 
Sonar is up to date. Drivers, BIOS and firmware are all up to date. Everything works perfectly otherwise. I've had no issues with Win 10 at the office yet either and I've been using it there for a few months now on several computers.
 
And, of course, I can't reproduce the crashes. It's very random. One day everything is fine, the next it crashes. No idea what could be different. Generally nothing changes except the song as I work on it.
 
SO... any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Scott
 
 
 

I just noticed you are using ASIO4ALL.
That will get you booted right off the forum .
No seriously, that could well be the dropout problem. (or your soundcard itself).
I read that the lastest W10 version (1511) fixed some things for 1212m like a sample rate issue.
from the Creative Forum.
10-17-2015, 04:15 PM
Windows 10 Build 10565 fix the sample rate issue.
The memory leak of PatchMix it's fixed too.
PatchMix still does not load at startup.
 

I have a healthy distrust of SSD's, having come by it honestly. The probability is kind of low but it may be a bit of a red herring that the Windows 10 upgrade coincided with the issues you're having now. It may in fact be hardware related.  
 
Since slow boot times are generally not caused by Sonar  you either have some issue with your OS configuration, or you are in the early stages of an SSD failure. Check your Windows event log for signs of a failing drive, and make sure you have an up to date backup in place if it does go out on you. In the meantime I agree that a clean install of Windows 10 might do the trick for you.
 
Good luck and keep us up to date on your progress!
 

I have a SSD and when I installed Windows 10, I too had a longer boot time on my PC and it didn't make sense.   After investigation and disconnecting each piece of hardware, each internal and external hard drive and each USB device, I found the culprit to be a USB 2.0 Motu Micro Lite midi interface.   It seems when I installed Windows 10 as an update from Windows 8.1 the Midi Interface didn't appreciate it.  It crashed and stopped my computer from booting up properly.  After calling Motu and sending it back for repairs, it is working properly and the SSD hard drive boots windows 10 with everything connect in about 6 seconds..

Go back to W7. 

Sorry about your issues, but also thank you... Because I've seriously been so on the edge about whether to take the free update (my PC Manufacturer says it works fine, and basically every piece of software, the developers say it works fine)... But I just don't trust it. I don't need any Windows 10 features and everything works fine already... I think I'm gonna just stick with 7 forever pretty much. And I have Windows 10 on my two non-music-making laptops and it works great. But I'm just too nervous about random weird issues on my studio PC.

Hi, Scott... I was also experiencing slow startups of Sonar projects after upgrading to Win10...Seemed strange after all the improvements to loading in Kingston...  I uninstalled SPlt, using the clean install procedures provided by Scook:   https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013392/SONAR-2015-Clean-Install-Instructions
 
Now my Sonar bootups/projects are blazingly fast.  Faster than ever.  Large track counts (75+) and multiple Kontakt files which use to be slow load in 15 seconds... really worth the SPlt reinstall... I did encounter new problems using the start screen but I've just stopped using it after reporting these problems to the bakers in the fault reporting system.  My experience is reported here:  http://forum.cakewalk.com/Reinstalling-platinum-m3332089.aspx
 
Best of luck... and I'm glad to know the clean install proceedures for win10... might do this during the rainy season to start totally fresh although it'll be a real pain given everything on my boot ssd.