Pro Tools 6101/9128 errors

[jeid]

Ok, I know what sort of answers I'm expecting, but I'm going to post here anyway.

Current setup is 27" iMac with the i7 2.93Ghz CPU, 12Gb Ram, 1TB hard disk and a 1TB Lacie D2 Quadra external drive. I use an RME Fireface 800 as my main interface. Newest drivers and firmware (updated the driver last night). Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and Pro Tools 9.0.6. If I've missed something relevant, let me know.

The chain is iMac->Lacie Drive->FF800 (and has been for months)

For the past month or so, I've been getting 6101 errors. (not my screenshot)

It's been annoying the fuck out of me. So far, I've done the following

Trash prefs
Fresh install
Drive optimization
Format drive and re-install everything

Still the error remains. I'm expecting people to say that it's the drive, but I've had no issues for well over a year.

The CPU is only ever peaking at a max of about 50%, so there's plenty of power left. I can understand the odd error when there's a lot of plug-ins on my sessions, but I've had this happen on empty sessions when I've been tracking drums. It happens more when my H/W Buffer is set to 128 samples, but when I'm mixing, I always set it to 1024 samples as it saves on errors.

My RME setup looks like this:

And my Pro Tools Playback Engine screen looks like this:

My possible solutions are:

Buy a new external drive
Upgrade to PT10
Try new cables
Punch myself in the face repeatedly


Money is tight just now as I'm going on two holidays in a couple of weeks, so cheap quick fixes are my favourite. I'm not looking for people to come in and tell me that PT is shit.. I know it's flawed, but this is getting ridiculous now. Going to post this on DUC as well.

Thanks for any tips

 

[mva801]

Where do you have the drive plugged in in the chain? Between the interface and iMac? I believe that's a no-no. Take the hard drive out of the equation and see if it helps, or move the drive over to a USB hub and keep it the hell out of the chain. I run an iMac i7 2.8, pro fire 2626, owc external drives, and I honestly have the best luck with the drives in a usb port instead of in the firewire chain. I really hope someone comes out with some affordable thunderbolt drives soon because I get those errors sometimes too, and with the cpu at like 30%... Usually helps if I separate the drive and interface like that...

Also, I believe you should set your host preocessors to 3 or 4 instead of 7, as I don't think PT can take advantage of the hyper-threading or whatever it's called

 

[jeid]

The chain is iMac->Lacie Drive->FF800 (and has been for months)

Always been setup this way in fact, never had any issues until recently.

I'll try switching CPU's down to 3 or 4, but again.. I've always run PT like this without any issues until recently. Cheers for replying though.

I'll switch the interface to first in line and plug the external drive into the back of the FF800 to see what difference that makes.

 

[egan.]

http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Error_Message/en299475
http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/troubleshooting/en349739?popup=true

IME with PT this stuff like this always comes down to some dumb setting. You may have to play around with stuff but the solution is most likely free.

 

[jeid]

I've got most of that setup.. but I'll double check tomorrow. It's been suggested that there's an out of date plug-in somewhere. I am checking the list against known versions and I'm thinking I've found something!

 

[jeid]

Here's a checklist if anyone is in doubt.

http://akmedia.digidesign.com/support/docs/ProToolsPlugInCompatibilityGrid.html

 

[::XeS::]

In my opinion sometimes firewire is shit. It doesn't matter where you put the drive in the chain (after the interface is better anyway), sometimes I get these errors and I often encounter synch problems (you need to restart PT or the interface), etc...
If you have a powerfull computer it's not a performance issue (like in your case). I always used an external Lacie for my sessions, also with my mac pro, but when I started to use the second internal sATA drive for my sessions, the cpu peaks and the shitty errors disappeared and all the usages went down a LOT.

 

[Strachan of D]

have you got a thunderbolt port you could get a tb drive

 

[DavePiatek]

As much as I love working on Pro Tools, I swear it's alive and some days decides it just doesn't want to work. Sometimes you just have to kill it and put a brand new, clean install on your comp. That's what I do when I start getting weirdo errors.

 

[mva801]

In my opinion sometimes firewire is shit. It doesn't matter where you put the drive in the chain (after the interface is better anyway), sometimes I get these errors and I often encounter synch problems (you need to restart PT or the interface), etc...
If you have a powerfull computer it's not a performance issue (like in your case). I always used an external Lacie for my sessions, also with my mac pro, but when I started to use the second internal sATA drive for my sessions, the cpu peaks and the shitty errors disappeared and all the usages went down a LOT.

I tend to agree with this. I have much better luck when I take my drive off the firewire chain and just run it USB. I like to minimize using any firewire. Can't wait til people come out with some cheaper thunderbolt interfaces/ drives...

 

[::XeS::]

Thunderbolt or pcie+external converter (like ssl card+ssl alphalink). Unfortunately it's not an option if you have an iMac so thunderbolt

 

[jeid]

I don't have Thunderbolt either guys. I'm going to switch some stuff around and see how things go. Thanks!