I’m trying to diagnose a problem and wondering your opinion…
My Cubase Disk Cache meter is maxing out instantly when playing a moderate amount of tracks in a project on my internal SSD C: drive (running Windows 10). Also, the task task manager shows the C drive maxed out completely.
I assume the maxed out task manager C drive is the issue.
When I backup the project a play the project from another SSD drive, the Cubase Disk Cache stays low and the project plays fine… but the C drive in task manager hits 100%.
I assume that Cubase (loaded on my C drive) has something going on (unrelated to the number of tracks) that is maxing the C drive out, since the other drive is easily accessing all the audio tracks (which are on that separate drive). Is this correct logic?
!!!How do I track down the problem so I resolve the C drive spiking, and can play projects located on the C drive??? Would upgrading to Cubase 13 help??
Thanks for the suggestion. Looks like the disk usage column shows Cubase as the sole problem.
When the project sits idle, both the Cubase Disk Cache and Task Manager C drive drop down to zero. When hitting play, they max out.
Another strange thing. I backup the project to a different ssd (and it runs fine from there), and then backup that one, returning it to the C drive ssd… and it then runs fine on C drive.
Some projects are ok, but seems like older ones have an issue, and it only happens when recorded audio is playing back. I just can’t seem to find the source of the problem.
Does the fix also work when you back up one of the misbehaving older projects to the same SSD (your C drive), without the detour via the second SSD drive?
If yes, it would seem that the backup process fixes whatever the original issue with the old projects is. – Are your older problematic projects copied from a different disk than what you have now? Maybe with a different folder structure or even disk drive name? Maybe also from a spinning HDD?
Can you include a picture of the Task Manager as Nico5 has done while your project is running?
Also, what do you mean by ‘task manager C drive’?
Generally speaking, even if your project is located on the C drive it shouldn’t be overloading unless something else is hammering it at the same time.
Is your system doing a lot of paging I/O?
Edit: Responding to the questions in your first post… You really shouldn’t keep your projects on your C drive as a matter of best practice and no, upgrading to C13 won’t help in this particular situation.
Very helpful suggestion. I backed up the problematic project, directly to the same SSD C drive, and that indeed fixes the problem! No need to backup to the other SSD first.
Just to clarify what I mean by problematic project:
While Cubase is playing audio, the task manager, under performance tab, shows the graph for C: at 100%, and the Cubase Disk Cache meter maxes out.
Note: Task manager c drive graph, and C12 disk usage both drop to near 0, when the project reaches an area where no audio is currently playing. (although I believe that the task manager c drive sometimes initially, temporarily, maxes out even as I load the problematic project).
No. One problematic project’s audio files were recorded in the project itself. No imported audio.
My best guess is that the problematic projects are a bit older, but I’m not sure if that’s the source of the problem. I have retested the problems and am certain that the problem is not coming from another computer program that is running in the background or a bad disk. I agree it is not best to run the projects from C drive, but in this case the problem lies within cubase somehow. Something effects disk usage on these particular projects.
At some point something changed, as I worked on those problematic projects (quite a while ago) without any issues that I remember.
I’m looking to your diagnostic abilities to track it down. Any thoughts??
Is there any chance that the entire folder for the affected projects is now in a different folder hierarchy? For example, maybe you recorded the project MyIncredibleHitSong while that project folder was in
c:\MusicProjects\MyIncredibleHitSong
and now it is in a different folder hierarchy, like for example:
I’m asking because at least in older versions of Cubase, there was some hard coding of the exact path (technical term for the folder hierarchy) - and that created weirdness when moving an entire project folder to a different place.
When doing the backing up of the project, Cubase re-does those path names to be consistent with the new folder hierarchy.
My speculation is, that maybe saving the backup makes the project consistent again and that the crazy disk drive activity may be the result of some sort of searching for all of those audio files every time you hit play. And depending on how many audio files there are and how smart the search algorithm is, this could end up in quite a lot of disk activity - especially if your SSD is a SATA SSD, rather than an NVMe SSD. (While SATA SSDs have much higher throughput than spinning HDDs, they have a lot less throughput compared to NVMe SSDs).
No, I don’t think that these folders ever changed location. But you might be on to something with that older Cubase issue with hard coding the audio file paths.
Time-wise, the problem might align somewhat with my upgrade to Cubase 12, but that is kind of a guess. Most problematic project audio (not the project creation date, but the creation date of the recorded the audio) date before my C12 upgrade, but there is one at least project that has recording creation dates from before and after the upgrade, and it plays fine.
Do you know which versions of Cubase that had that hard coded audio file location problem? Is there any reason why a project simply recorded on an older version of Cubase would have some issues on a later version. Would and upgrade from C12 to C13 fix it?
It would be nice to figure out what the core issue is, as I have quite a few old projects, and would take a while to backup and fix the bad project folders… and I’m a bit nervous having issues and not knowing why.
To be honest, I’m not sure if my recollection about Cubase path names is even correct, because my memory is also intermingled with Kontakt library paths being hardcoded, which can also cause grief.
But it seems that whatever the backup function does, is the difference maker.
I guess you could manually compare the audio files in the old project with the new one you created with the backup function.
Maybe comparing file sizes will give additional hints?
Are there any new audio files in the new folders?
Any other new files in the project folder?
Many files in the old project folder, but not the new one?
And maybe share a screen capture of the dialog box options you’ve selected when you export? i.e. something like this dialog:
I’d also be curious what your Cubase RAM consumption looks like, comparing an old (misbehaving) project and it’s new (well behaved) sibling.
p.s. I don’t have any knowledge of Cubase internals. All my speculation is based on me just being a long time user - albeit probably with a bit more than average computer science kind of knowledge and experience.
So there may be some faulty paths in my remote diagnostic attempts
I have no reason to think one way or another that Cubase 13 would behave any differently with these projects. From what I’ve seen, Steinberg has not been particularly detailed in their divulging all of the things they changed between 12 and 13, so I’d hate to make a guess one way or another.
I guess maybe you could try with a trial version of Cubase 13, if you were enthusiastic enough?
I ended up deciding to back up the problematic projects, since it ended up being not too many.
During this process I have been moving files between from the C drive to the other SSD, and it seems extremely slow (2-3 mb/sec). Seems weird that it’s maxing out the C drive graph in Task Manager, and slowing the computer down, when I’m simply transferring files (albeit very large ones)… but maybe that happens when moving big files?? I guess I’m back to wondering if there’s something wrong with my C drive. [The stuff that I am moving from folder to folder are Cubase project folders, just to archive the data temporary]
I was initially pretty convinced that my C drive was fine. I tried the program Crystal Disk and it said it was in good shape… But maybe it wasn’t a thorough check. I’m not much of an expert on SSD diagnosis.
The Cubase back-up project process really seem to help the Cubase Disc Cache meter issue, but I suppose that it may have just streamlined the audio path connections a little bit, but I still may have a SSD problem on the C drive?
Any thoughts on how to get a clear answer on whether my C drive is failing?
Thanks much for the help by the way!
I’ll attach a couple photos of the drive scanners that I have. The screenshots were made during the transferring of some pretty large files.
Large data transfers can be slow for a variety of reasons – too much to get into in this thread.
As long as the SSD works well enough during your normal workflow, that’s what really matters. And it would seem that doing the Cubase backups of your troubled projects fixed things ok.
