Greetings. Long time Cubase user and only 2nd time I’ve ever had to post a problem. Since switching over to Apple Mac Silicon M4 some of my sessions will just have random Disk Cache errors where the audio cuts out for a second due to Disk Cache hitting MAX from out of nowhere, then it drops back to zero. Everything being used is SSD, computer is super fast as are the hard drives. This is really becoming a problem and have had it interrupt a session with client. That’s bad for business. I need this to STOP, please help!
Mac Studio M4 Max, 64GB Ram, Sequoia 15.6.1
Cubase 14.0.4
RME FireFace UFX
Most of the hardrives are SSD, all of them being used on session that made me post are all SSD.
Hey, how are the external SSD drives attached to your machine?
Are you running any other applications at the same time you’re using Cubase?
Maybe Spotlight is indexing your drive(s). You could try going into Settings→Spotlight→Search Privacy and adding the drives you’re using for recording.
Typically when I’m in Cubase, that’s all that’s happening. When I wrote this post last night, Cubase was the only thing running other than Chrome to try and solve the problem. I opened a new session and didn’t have the problem at all. I wish I could say it only happens with sessions that were created on my windows machine, but I’ve had this random spike happen with a couple new sessions since I made the switch to Mac.
One or two of the SSD’s are connected directly to the Mac, everything is on Hub due to Mac computers having so few connections and Producing requiring more than a couple drives.
Spotlight isn’t a standard application–it’s a system service that runs continuously in the background, even if you don’t manually use the Spotlight search box.
It will automatically index everything on your filesystem, and that can definitely cause I/O spikes at random times. Best practice for DAWs is to add your project disks under Search Privacy so Spotlight won’t index them.
It might be caused by a certain plugin. The way to diagnose this is simple: turn off your computer’s Wi-Fi and any other wired network connections, then open the project file where you’ve confirmed the issue occurred, and observe whether the problem still happens. A potentially helpful step: back up the folder /Users/your name/Library/Preferences/Cubase 15, then delete it and restart Cubase.