Just started getting strange -9073 error messages saying

DAE can't get audio from the disk fast enough. Your disk may be too slow or too fragmented. A firewire disk could be having trouble due to the extra firewire bandwidth or CPU load..

This is happening on PT sessions with only 8-10 tracks of stereo audio and no plug ins running.

My drive is a Lacie 500Gb and partitioned into 2x250GB partitions and is connected to my intel imac via firewire 800. This makes it seem strange that this could not stream fast enough.

Anyway initially I backed up my firewire drive audio partition, erased it plus reduced the length of the Firewire cable.
This then worked okay for a while until yesterday when the problem came back again. After restarting the mac it seemed to be okay but I wonder if this is going to happen again.

Anyone else get this error and any idea what could cause it?

Seems according to digi support site that the -9073 error is a catch all and applies to systems not even using firewire which seems strange.

Cheers

Do you have anything attached to your FireWire 400 ports (such as your audio interface)?

My understanding is that there is actually only the one firewire bus on the iMac which operates at the speed of the slowest device attached. So if you've a Digi003 attached by FW 400 and an HD by FW800, both will operate at FW400 speeds.

Even if that is the case, your track counts do seem very low.

If possible, you could try daisy-chaining your FW devices.

I used to get the same error message. For me, it was my external hard drive- It was too slow. For optimal performance, your hard drive must have an Oxford Chip. Check out the Digidesign site for recommended hard drives, or go to ezq.com, and look at their hard drives. I bought the Pro A/1 250, and have not received that message since, or experienced any latency or performance issues since. Good Luck!

Hi guys,

Thanks for the tips. The strange thing was this seemed to only start happening after the upgrade to 7.4.

Anyway I cant do much with the imac's firewire setup.

Quite silly it seems to offer 2 ports but then have both slow down to the slowest connection but there is not much I can do about it. Yes I have my drive on the 800 port and the Digi connected to the 400 port.

I will look at the faster drive as a possible fix. If anything it will give me more backup options.

Thanks again for your help

cheers