OK, drop outs are back.  I give.  I got SONAR with mAudio to work on 3 different computers a few years ago but I've wasted countless hours trying to make the TASCAM or Alesis interfaces work with this new Win7 64 bit machine.  Cubase for some reason runs like a rock, but SONAR audio engine is too delicate or something.

Next hobby.

CAF

If you have a wireless network card, disable it.

i strongly suggest you do what soundtweaker said.
simply go into device manager and disable your wireless internet driver.
thats for starters.
run the dpc latency checker by just opening it up..youll see if your getting red spikes,your bumming out.
if you mean drop out as in your playback stops,investigate drivers/settings.
if you mean drop out as in crackling and slight loss of sound its your wireless network driver searching for a signal and thats interference in laymans terms.

good luck

chuckles

Western Digital WD15EARS

That's a "green drive". I believe those try to conserve power by slowing or shutting down. See if you can deactivate that feature. 

First thing that comes to mind is something/s interupting the processor in the background. I had this before.
-One thing to try would be go into msconfig
-Disable ALL Services and StartUp items and see if it persists. (I am thinking it will work OK) The images might change a bit as far as layout but Sonar will work. 
-If it does you know something is running in the background causing it. (I believe I used task manager to finally spot what was causing it and left it disabled)

If you have probs just go back into msconfig and select "Normal Startup"

Just a thought

Try this

[link=http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29253-newer-western-digital-hdd-head-parking-and-you/]http://forums.storagerevi...-head-parking-and-you/[/link]

samhayman


Have you checked your DPC Latency?

I'm lucky to have a "monster PC" but my Nvidia was spiking this DPC Latency thingy up to 2000micro seconds every couple of seconds or so and it felt like I had bought myself a dinosaur for my DAW.

So check that. Find what driver is causing your dropouts and take it from there.


EDIT: Once I changed from Nvidia to ATI, this DPC Lat went down to a mere 87us. Now everything works perfectly well.

This is strange....I have Sony Vegas video editing software and in most cases when someone is having problems it's usually attributed to a video card OTHER than Nvidia.  When people switch to Nvidia their problems go away.  Funny how different software apps handle hardware and their drivers differently.


I have an Nvidia video card in my system and both Sony Vegas and Sonar seem to work OK....knocking on wood as I speak :) .

+1 to the Green Drive issue. Also what about that Core Parking people talk about?

ChewingAluminumFoil


.... If it was really a disk bandwidth thing (unlikely with a modern disk I expect....  
 

As others have already pointed out, your "green" model hard drive can cause exactly the problems you didn't expect.... Since it ramps down speed on its own, its the worst possible choice for an audio/video recording PC.
 
Unfortunately, I don't think you can disable it either.
 
Any chance you have another 7200rpm or better (non-green) hard drive you can swap it out with?
 
 

 

Why would the green drive spin down in the middle of heavy traffic?  I couldn't swap the drive without re-building the entire system.

I can try disabling services.  I've already tried disabling network.  Anti-virus is a frequent contributor to problems like this and I also run CrashPlan for backup, but I didn't see any activity that indicated they were active.  But I can explicitly disable them and see if that makes any difference.

This is one of many hobbies and if it's gonna be a problem I'm happy to shift to the next one.

CAF