Good morning. So I had to increase the Playback buffer to 1016 to get this project playing without the HDD icon going red and causing an Engine Stop. Thank you brundlefly and everyone else. I figured this would be what I should look at but as I said I had never messed with those settings before.
 
I do find it a little odd that I had to crank it that high when only adding 10 more tracks by bouncing. They are however stereo (which I intend to fix today because I want most of them to be mono... I think I need to change the Input of the tracks to Mono from BFD but I'm not sure if that will only give me half the signal). This Project now has 48 tracks in it, most of them audio and many of them are merely little snippets.
 
I'm kind of wondering if perhaps there is a Windows setting that would affect this also. I have disabled power management of the HDDs (as well as all the other usual stuff) but I may have left some of the fancier settings alone. It's been a while since I tweaked this rig which is yet another reason why I'd like to completely wipe the system and start from scratch now that I'm a little more confident and have various articles/thread bookmarked about the matter.
 
Anyway for now it seems to be working although it does take some time for playback to begin (couple seconds) but that's okay. I'll probably be able to bring the buffer back down again if I go through and do some archiving of the bed tracks and other unused stuff.
 
Cheers.

Without seeing that particular project, it's hard to say, but my impression is that your audio drive is under-performing. As a reference, you might try unfreezing all the synth tracks in the X3 Javier Colon demo, and seeing how it plays back. With disk buffers at 256kB my relatively lowly system doesn't break a sweat running this project with all tracks active. At 128kB, it will spike to 50% or more when I click around the timeline during playback to to force disk reads, but doesn't ever drop out. At 64kB, it's on the edge of dropping out, but can play the project through if I don't mess with it.

Thanks. I think a lot of the problem is that I (as you mentioned) am running at a very high sample rate and am using my program drive for the project and audio data. In the future I may drop down to 88.1 and after I wipe and reinstall everything on the system I'll use a much more logical data path (like make sure the project and audio paths are pointing to the second drive like it's supposed to).
 
I am wondering though... isn't there a way to offload some of this type of thing to my RAM? I have 16GB DDR3 and it hardly has a dent in it in this project with MANY instances of TH2 and one instance of BFD. I don't think I've ever even come close to breaking 50% RAM usage with anything I've done. I thought RAM could act as the prefetch storage area or whatever instead of the HDDs.
 
However these are topics I should bring up with support and will before the wipe but I'm still gathering up my thoughts before I compose what will be a rather lengthy list of queries for them. I'm just curious and it will help me ask better questions when the time does come to harass whatever poor Baker has to deal with my insanity. lol
 
Thanks again, man. Saved my arse with this one.

I don't think there's much incentive to pre-load a lot of track audio data into RAM. It would just take that much longer for projects to initialize and be ready start playback. And the time to switch projects or move around in a much larger project that can't all fit in RAM would just be that much greater as the amount of data needing to be swapped increased. Given that a moderately high-performing disk system with dedicated drives for audio and possibly samples should have no trouble keeping up with the demand of a large project, letting HDD handle the audio streaming load and reserving RAM for plugins and non-disk-streaming samplers that need instant access is way to go.