Hey everyone - Does anyone have any great advice for trouble shooting 'disk too slow' errors and crashes in logic? I have a student who continues to suffer these and we've tried a lot of stuff to fix it. He has a brand new macbookpro with plenty of RAM. He's using loads of Native Instruments stuff as well as other 3rd party stuff and his sessions are fairly large and mostly MIDI. Another interesting thing about the sessions is that they all contain MIDI data that was exported from an old KORG triton, and it was a bit of a mission to find all of the residual cc messages and what not that Logic didn't need and was actually causing problems (like sending all the faders to max and panning things oddly). He had most of the projects on the desktop and I thought we'd solved it when we moved them into the music folder, but alas. Nothing out of the ordinary is going on in activity monitor. I always keep all my projects on an external firewire drive but that doesn't seem to be necessary anymore these days? Is that still good advice? At this point all his samples, loops, etc are on his internal drive. We've adjusted buffer sizes and all that stuff. . . I guess what I'm looking for is just some things we could try to fix the issue. We're going to have a Genius at an Apple Store run diagnostics on the drive soon, but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something obvious. Thanks for your time! Bret

Hi Bret, What version of OSX and Logic is your student running? Also, are his NI plugins up to date? And is Logic running in 64-bit or 32-bit mode? Even if there;s mainly MIDI regions... if the instruments are samplers then audio samples will be read from the disk. Try turning off Time Machine and repairing permissions in Disk Utility. Also, disconnect the audio interface and use the built-in audio interface... If you don't have much joy can your student try out: - a fast 7200 FW800 external drive to run projects/samples from or - 7200rpm internal drive or - SSD internal drive

We can totally rule out the source of the MIDI data. The processing power required to play that back is fairly inconsequential in the big scheme of things. Next, we can rule out any advice that you might get from an Apple store Genius [i]unless[/i] they are well-versed in Logic and the specifics of a Logic system configuration. And Geniuses who fit that description are rare as hen's teeth. Maybe even rarer. And lastly, you can't equate fast processors to a lessening need for hard drives. One thing has nothing to do with another, which I'll explain below. In short, tho, Rounik hit the nail on the head: audio samples are read from disk. And if your student is streaming a lot of samples in his instances of Kontakt then right there you have a problem that will result in disk-too-slow errors. In order for a Mac of any size to run efficiently in a music-oriented system that's being taxed heavily with lots of plugins (they consume the power, not the MIDI data driving them), you need to separate the data: - system drive (never used for projects or sample storage. See note below) - project drive (for audio and projects, no samples) - sample drive(s) for playback of samples Note: the only exception to the above are the samples that are loaded onto your system when you install Logic. Those live on the system drive, and they're fine there. If you try to read data for projects and samples all from the same drive, the head has to move to a billion different places to keep up the pace. Meanwhile, it also needs to be able to access data from the disk just to run the system. So when you try to demand too much thruput from a hard drive for all of those different tasks, there will reach a point where it just can't handle it and: bingo, disk-too-slow errors. The problem will get progressively worse as your internal drive fills up to. So you can probably see that this has nothing to do with processor power. It's all about data thruput. HTH, Ski

You guys are fantastic. I know we are all up to date and everything is running in 64bit and there aren't any 32 plugins running either. I suppose i haven't worked with anyone who is using as many samples as this fellow is. Ski's explanation makes total sense. I completely get it and I'll be able to explain that to my student in a way that he'll get. My own projects are always on an external because I heard that was just what you were supposed to do but I never really understood why. Can I send a box of cookies to the home office or something? You guys are invaluable.

Hi Brett, That's very kind of you to offer to send cookies. I'd love to take you up on your offer too (because I'm such a cookie fiend, especially around the holidays) but it's enough that you made the offer. Glad to help you out.