I'm running a MOTU896HD which is going into a LaCie external hard drive via FW400. That hard drive is, in turn, chained to two OTHER LaCie external hard drives via FW800 and all going into my computer (a late 2015 15" MB Pro) via a FW800->TB connector. I've had this arrangement, or something like it, for years at this point with no problems. For what it's worth, I also have a fairly antiquated Dell monitor connected via an HDMI-mini-displayport adapter going directly into my computer.
A couple of weeks ago, everything started running very slowly. Like, with nothing open or running, Activity Monitor said that I my system was using 70 or 80% of my CPU's resources. The first thing I did was update my OS to the current version, which didn't help. I then took everything apart and connected components one-at-a-time to my computer to see if I could figure out what was causing the issue; it was still unclear.
Meanwhile, when I unhook EVERYTHING from my laptop, it seems to run fine.
Yesterday, I decided to crack open Disk Utility and test my external drives to see if anything was weird. Two of the drives were fine, but my main recording drive failed with this error message:
So, I formatted a drive that I use for JUST THIS PURPOSE (I know this drive is in perfect working order), copied everything over from the damaged drive, and everything was fine all day.
This evening, however, the same problem started. On a whim, I checked the new drive to make sure it was okay and received the exact same error message as I did on the last drive.
I'm wondering (1) if an external hard drive can slow an entire system down in this way, (2) if anyone has ever seen this message and what I can do about it -- like, might there be some corrupted file in the 380GB of files that I need to find and delete, and (3) might I be reaching the limitations of my set-up and I just need to buy a new interface and connect things in a not-totally-janky way.
I appreciate ANY help on this -- sorry to be so long winded!