G4 Buffer Problems with an 828mkII

[ryan4594]

I run a 17" 1.33ghz PowerBook G4 with 1 GB of Ram and an 828mkII in DP 4.52 with 1.2.5 firewire firmware

Problem: Recording 8 Tracks Simultaneously 24bit/88.2 with all my buffers maxed!! i get about 10 seconds of recording before i get this:

File buffer not ready (disk too slow? too many tracks?)
(MotuAudioSystem Mas MasRecorder.cpp.131 [1:0])

the weird part: i don't have this problem when i'm recording air on all 8 channels...meaning no active input, yet i'm still recording.

i've checked for loose firewire cables and other hardware issues but everything seems fine.

...this also happens when i record in 44.1

anyone have any clues?

[ryan4594]

..using Tiger 10.4.1

[WKWizard]

Sounds like you need a faster hard drive. Those Powerbooks use 5400rpm drives. When your running your system from it and recording 8 tracks, you're bound to have i/o issues. If nothing else, record to a firewire drive or drop down to 16bit/44.1kHz

[XYZ]

If it happens identically @ 44 vs 88, it probably is NOT the hard drive since @ 44 the problem should be half as bad.

How full is the drive? Are you using journaling? Have you de-fraged [normally not needed, but could be an outlier]?

What it could be is the seek time of the drive. If DP and/or the OS is doing any swapping [e.g., not running completely out of memory] the disk head has to keep siwtching from one part of the disk to the other, wait until the drive rotates around to the part it needs, read that info, then slew back to where the data you want to write is. How much sound is the drive making?

If the above is true, if you can get the OS & DP to chill, you might get back to normal. How hard would it be to get more memory? I run with 3.5 and have little swapping, normally.