Dreaded "hard Drive Slow", have gotten error message..help! Options

[ArchivalAudio]

hey
so...
I am new to AudioDesk... and the Ultralite

I have been in the field( with power) the past 2 weekends recording two festivaLS
the Pickathon and North West World Reggae Festival
been using my MOTU Ultralite > AudioDesk 2.04
on my Mac iBook G4/1.2 ghz / 1.25gb ram OSX 10.3.9

while I have recorded a number of thing, my iBook has not been recording for so long as at thses two festivals
12 - 15 hours perday w/o restarting
I have gotten now a few times a message about memory buffer full (harddrive slow) with the option of clicking continue...

I always optimize my drive (internal 7200rpm 80 gb) using techtool and also use applejack to repair permissions etc partitioned in 1/2 all software and OS is on one partition and the faudio fdiles are written on the other partition


in the past I have tried recording to different 7200rpm firewire external drives...

which is what I did all day Sunday at reggae fest
and the end of the last couple of sets on saturday , after the message
sunday same message

all were recording only 4-tracks 2 mics 2 hosue PA soundboard feeds
24 bit / 44.1khz


I am wondering if the fact that both evens wwere powered with bio diesel generators, and at least at NWWR fest we were having some issues with even power off of them
could have caused it?
or running so long with out restarting, causing temp files to build in the cache?


ran with my CHUD sysprefs processor nap off

any one got any ideas...
more info needed?



thanx
in advance

peace thru music

-- Ian

[gdoubleyou]

How much free space is on your system drive? OSX will allways use part of your system drive for virtual memeory, when sysytem disk space drops below 10GB system performance will suffer, and the os will be required to access the drive more often.

[ArchivalAudio]

How much free space is on your system drive? OSX will allways use part of your system drive for virtual memeory, when sysytem disk space drops below 10GB system performance will suffer, and the os will be required to access the drive more often.

that could be it
I have too many photos in iPhot and too much mp3's in iTunes
I only have about 4.7 gb left on the "system" drive...

why would it only happen after recording for like 10+ hours?
is it because of cache files?

thanx for the tip
I guess its time to clean off my pics n music...

--
ArchivalAudio

one other thing that's wweird
is I have the monitor window open
and the play back and record buffers
were fine never went to red
and were in the lower (left) 1/4 of the bars...
but then there was a buffeer memory issue... even though the meters didn't seem to show that

[gdoubleyou]

What could happen, is that over time will allways have priority, and OSX may delay apps from disk access, while it 's doing house cleaning.

That could trigger a drive to slow error message,even though the drive isn't actually slow.