Your WD drives, being the Green versions will spin down to a power conserving mode. I had one on a work PC and it drove me crazy. That could be a part of the problem. What is your power schem ion Control Panel? Also, If you're using Bit Bridge you must be using some 32 bit vsts and vstis, which ones are they? I had a problem when using Drumagog which is 32 bit through jBridge. I was hosting Kontak with one of the Abbey Road kits and it took a while to load. Remember that your 32 bit apps can't see your higher RAM addresses.

Most if not all are WD Caviar Green

Here's your problem, they are an absolute PITA to work with.

The "ridicuous" speed only happens first time project is loaded after the cold boot

Yes, because it takes a while to wake up the green drive and load all of those samples into RAM. Subsequent boots won't have this delay.


I am 99.9% convinced that this is the root of your problem, irrespective of what Cubase is doing.

I did do some looking at the history of the green drives from WDC, and it seems that there were issues early on with them sometimes having trouble 'waking up', and also that their spin rates tended to be slow.

I don't know that this is why you are having these troubles, but in the absence of any sizable number of similar issues from others here in the forum, it would seem that your issues are caused by something with your particular software/hardware environment, rather than some fundamental bug in Sonar.

At the same time, I have no explanation for why you do not seem to have these issues with Cue Base.

I would tend to think that any sort of green drive would be the exact opposite of what I would want for doing any sort of audio processing, as it depends so much on large volumes of data transfer needed at high speed.

I am also not sure of the mix of 32-bit plugs you have, and what any of them may be doing (or Sonar doing with them) that might be any contributing factor to your performance issues.

Perhaps you could try the following, to see if any difference is seen:


1.  Try to create a test project with no 32-bit plugins of any kind, and then see if it too has the long load times.  If you find it still takes several minutes to load, then you can eliminate 32-bit plugins as a main cause of these issues, although you should still develop a sense of their individual performance and reliability nuances - so that you know what to expect when deciding which plugins to use for future projects.  If you find that the load times go back to being reasonable (10-15 seconds or so), then it would seem that one or more of the 32-bit plugins is a contributing factor to your problems, and you would then need to work at loading and testing one at a time until you work through all of them - to get a complete list of which ones are problematic.


2.  Check your Windows power settings, and make sure you do not allow Windows to turn off any of your hard drives.


3.  Try temporarily disabling any antivirus software and testing the effect of that on the load times, obviously turning it back on prior to getting on the internet.


4.  Try running Sonar as administrator - not logged on as an administrator - specifically telling it to run as administrator.  You can set the properties for the icon to do this all the time by right-clicking on the Sonar icon, clicking on properties, then clicking on Advanced and checking Run as Administrator.  Then test your load times again.  I recommend always running Sonar as Administrator anyways.


5.  You could go pick up a single new non-green hard drive with a 7200 RPM spin rate, and then copy all of your projects and samples over to that drive and see what effect that has on things.  If no effect, you can always return the drive.  By not deleting your original data from the green drive you are copying from, there would only be the path change in Preferences to point back to the green drive should you find no difference in performance when trying out the non-green drive with the copied data.

I hope one or more of the above helps your situation.

Bob Bone

Robert, the WD drives, at least the one I had would ignore the power settings in Windows. Something in the firmware would cause it to spin down and stay that way until needed. I have Security Essentials on my PC and if I forget to disable it doesn't play nice with Kontakt. It also kills my start-up time with PT9 because PT9 scans my systems for plug-ins every time. I'm willing to think it's a combination of the green drives and 32 bit apps that are the cause of the ops issue.

I use Avast's free antivirus, and it can stay running without giving me problems.  It can also be temporarily suspended by turning off the various scanning components, but I never have to do that.

I do not think those drives are a good choice for a machine doing audio processing, and I think you are correct in that one or more of your 32-bit plugins may be adding issues.

Bob Bone