Hi lads. I have this project that will invariably drop out sometime after the middle of the song. I can see the disk load icon going to 80%, out of nowhere, sometimes at a point where I don't even have half of my tracks playing, and shortly after it goes red and there's a dropout. The project is a simple dance tune with 16 synths, of which 9 are frozen. I raised my asio buffer at 384, and tried enabling write caching, to no avail. Could it be because one of the partitions on the hard drive in which my project is located (but on another partition) is nearly full? I'm running out of ideas here, that's not normal. My interface is a focusrite pro24dsp and my pc is quite fast. Thanks.

Try adjusting your disk read & write I/O buffers. Prefs--->Audio---->Sync & Caching

There's no "right" figure try adjusting them both up & down until you find the most stable solution for you. Too large a buffer will cause almost as many problems as too small.

Ah, that was it. I changed the read buffer size to 1024 from 256 and now the disk load remained at 0.08% for the duration of the song. Thanks a lot, good sir. I'm puzzled though as this isn't my first project similar to this and never had playback issues before. Strange beast, our daw is.

The project may have some fragmented audio files causing the drive to work a little harder.