Hard Drive Overload (even after upgrading my HDD)
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  1. #1
    Tech Wizard MarioMHJV's Avatar
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    Default Hard Drive Overload (even after upgrading my HDD)

    After 2 years of Ableton Live Suite 8 working perfectly... all of a sudden, I'm getting slight cpu spikes while producing, but most importantly the 'D' for Hard Drive Overload come on at random times after DJing for 1hr +.

    I thought the issue was my shitty macbook pro hard drive @5400rpm, so I just upgraded to a 256GB solid state drive which has SERIOUSLY boosted the performance of Live and my entire computer. However, the issue with the 'D' coming on and stopping my tracks mid-set, still happens.

    I have the latest version right now 8.2.8, and I'm not sure what the problem is. My tracks are all in the same folder, I have RAM on, my samples is set to 512 samples. Everything else is pretty much stock, and while DJing I'll only have 2 tracks going at once.

    Really don't know what to do...



    SPECS:
    MacBook Pro late 2011
    4GB RAM
    256GB SSD drive
    2.4GHz quad core intel i5

  2. #2
    Tech Guru botstein's Avatar
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    Go to 8 GB of RAM - it's not expensive to do so.

  3. #3
    Tech Wizard MarioMHJV's Avatar
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    I'm thinking it's not a hardware issue anymore. It worked great for over a year without any audio dropouts/hard disk overloads. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? When DJs play live sets in Ableton, do they freeze their tracks if they're not using VSTs or plug ins?

  4. #4
    Tech Wizard MarioMHJV's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by botstein View Post
    Go to 8 GB of RAM - it's not expensive to do so.
    Ableton is only 32bit meaning it can only use 4GB of ram at max

  5. #5
    Tech Guru deevey's Avatar
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    I was having the same issues till I cleared out my cache folder before playing, and moved my sample/gig folder to a different drive than the cache folder (I got an Optibay Clone), so far so good and I haven't seen the dreaded overload come on yet.

    I'm using 8 tracks total with FX on all channels and preloading around 60 full length tunes and 100ish loops. CPU peaks around 40%

    May or may not work for you but worth a shot.

    What version of OSX are you using BTW ?

  6. #6
    DJTT Administrator del Ritmo padi_04's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MarioMHJV View Post
    Ableton is only 32bit meaning it can only use 4GB of ram at max
    Yes, but if you take it to 8gb you have 4gb dedicated to Ableton and the rest for the OS (hugely recommended with Lion). Only spec my lappy is superior is in RAM and even with a much slower drive and processor i rarely get spikes or drops.

    You can also take advantage of that extra RAM and preload some samples into it (there is a RAM button when you double click a clip near the tempo box).

    Clean the Ableton cache in the prefs window like you have been already told and give Onyx a run to do some maintenance on your system.

    If you are in fact playing live most of the people do bounce everything down to WAVs unless you are planning on seriously tweaking it but if that is the case you should still be economical with plugins.
    Last edited by padi_04; 03-21-2012 at 06:49 AM.

  7. #7
    Tech Guru deevey's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by padi_04 View Post
    Yes, but if you take it to 8gb you have 4gb dedicated to Ableton and the rest for the OS (hugely recommended with Lion). Only spec my lappy is superior is in RAM and even with a much slower drive and processor i rarely get spikes or drops.
    He's running a 256 SSD though (which I missed), so really should not be getting disk read errors & ram will not help with them - certainly doesn't sound like he's lacking in juice (no harm checking the ram usage in activity monitor though).

    Even running out of the ram the SSD should have enough "oomph" to allot virtual memory almost as fast.

  8. #8
    Tech Wizard MarioMHJV's Avatar
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    My bad to resurrect a dead thread, but I found the solution if anyone has a similar problem:

    1. I turned RAM mode off for everything/cleared my cache
    2. Had to turn my buffer size really high (1500 right now) which means LOTs of latency, but it's hardly noticeable since I launch my clips quantized a bar earlier.

  9. #9
    Tech Guru mostapha's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MarioMHJV View Post
    I'm thinking it's not a hardware issue anymore. It worked great for over a year without any audio dropouts/hard disk overloads. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? When DJs play live sets in Ableton, do they freeze their tracks if they're not using VSTs or plug ins?
    If you're just playing audio, frezzing won't do much.

    Did this issue show up right after a software upgrade of some kind (OS version, Live version, etc.) ?

  10. #10
    Tech Wizard MarioMHJV's Avatar
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    No, but at the same time I started having hard drive problems in general where many programs were slow to boot and the whole OS would sometimes fail to boot. Hard Drive 'First Aid', as it's called, helped but it forced me to upgrade to the SSD.

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