Hello everyone,

I've been a Mac guy my whole life, but last year, after overloading my mac pro on a large song, decided to build my own PC sample slave. With the help of a friend we built a SMOKEN i7 VE-pro slave for under a grand (US)!! Since then I've been able to load this thing with a full template and if I try hard and load it with synths/guitar amp sims, it MIGHT break 50% CPU! I have maxed out the 16GB ram on big projects, which is a shame, but given the shear amount of samples and synths I'm running outside my main DAW mac, I couldn't be happier!

But I seem to have a problem. What was once a smoking system doing full orchestral mockups, now cannot sustain a 3 note chord!! Whenever I hold a chord (using either Kontakt or VSL VI player) the samples will cutoff after about 2-3 seconds.

Any idea whats going on, or better yet how to fix it? I didn't change any settings in Kontakt or VSL, but the fact that its happening in both players leads me to believe its not a software setting, but something else. I recently was backing up my system & sample drives, but that couldn't cause this problem, right? I'm currently defraging the sample drive in the hopes this fixes the problem, but is there anything else I should look at?

Thanks in advance for the help and I'll update this thread once the defragmentation is done. (should I also defrag my system drive?)

edit: Defrag didn't fix the problem. Dont know what to try next. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

edit2: Tried streaming the same samples off the system drive and they play back fine (no cutoffs). I've gone into my energy settings and all sleep and HD sleep are still set to off. I also tested the HD with windows disk verification extended test (took 8 hours) but it passed! Any ideas?

Well, I reformatted my HD, put some of the samples back on it, and it works fine again. Chords can be sustained as long as necessary! Yeay! So this begs the question, should I get a replacement HD (under warranty) or put all my samples back on this drive and see how long it lasts?

I'm thinking replacement, as that behavior cant be normal, but maybe a reformatting is all that was required?

Assuming you're using a spinning-platter hard drive not an SSD:

Most hard drive manufacturers provide a downloadable image for a disk diagnostic and repair CD. Seagate's is particularly good. I'd suggest you get hold of whichever disk is appropriate and run any diagnostics available. If that indicates the drive has low-level errors, you should be able to repair them from the tool. if it indicates it has problems (ie it is failing), return it under warranty for a replacement.

If it doesnt indicate anything, chalk it down to weird voodoo shit for the meantime, unless it happens again.

Well...Got a replacement HD from Hitachi, formatted it, put all my samples back on it, and played a chord....AND ITS BACK!!! The chords will not sustain!!!

So I'm at a loss as to what to do next. Please advise if you have any idea. This is driving me NUTS!!! I have noticed that when notes drop out that the "disk" meter in kontakt spikes, and VSL shows voices dropping out. For example, I'll load a VSL string patch in VI pro and I'll hold a 3 note chord, which is 16 voices in the VI pro player, and it will cut off and I'll be down to 8 voices. Tried another chord, held it for about 5 seconds and it dropped form 16 voices to 4!

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Does this mean anything to anyone? To me it seems like I'm missing some sort of sleep mode or something, but I'm fairly sure I do not have any sleep settings on (in my "adjust power settings" I have it set to never put the computer to sleep & "turn off hard disk after" set to never).

I also ran a disk testing software for PC and got the following results. According them this is really slow!!

Read Speed 99.09 MB/sec
Cache Speed 241.67 MB/sec
Access Time 21.76 ms
Score 421.75

Here is a link to the free HD speed test I used, incase someone is willing to test their drive and compare scores: http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=13%2F&Action=Ne wOSID&DownloadVersio n=9

The HD in question again is a new Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB 7200rpm 6gbs drive. Could it be a problem with my motherboard or something else? I'm all out of ideas, and this is FRUSTRATING not being able to make music with my PC anymore!!

I have had and still have very similar intermittent problems with Kontakt 4 & 5 so it could be software. Have you tried playing the chord in a different sampler?

Yeah I thought that too, but VSL's VI player experiences the same problem as well.

Plus my HD test scores are very low! I think the problem is either some setting in windows that I'm not aware of, or my HD cables might be bad? Going to go to best buy and try to buy some new cables and see what happens.

Update, I put the PC sample drive in my mac and tried playing samples off it, and they all playback fine!! What is going on in my PC?!

SOLUTION: LOL, it was a program that came with a recent external HDs I bought that was causing all this trouble! Can you believe that!! I deleted this program and now everything is running great again! I wish I remembered the name of the program, but as a warning to other users if you experience this behavior in the future, it could be software you recently installed!! I really cant believe a HD manufacture would have software that so adversley effected hard drives!

Live and learn (and share your findings) Happy music making to all! Cant wait to finally get back to it!