My system is a fairly beefy system. Core I7, 64 GB RAM, 2 SSD drives (one for samples, other for audio), RME Fireface 800 and Cubase 9. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of disk caching and spiking where my audio will drop out for a few seconds, even on songs with low track counts. It’s especially noticeable when I resurrect old projects (some of them 15 years old from Cubase SX days). It was driving me insane because I knew it wasn’t a hardware issue and it seemed to be getting worse. For example, I would write a song with roughly 10 audio tracks and everything would be fine. 4 months later, I would open the song up and play and I would get audio track dropouts due to disk caching.
So… I did what everyone says you don’t have to do, I defragged my audio drive which is an SSD drive. Windows 7 reported it was 47% fragged. After it ran overnight, I loaded my song back up and everything worked great.
The only thing I can think of is my audio drive has data from 2 decades and it’s been trough 3 or 4 different drives, so maybe that really did scatter everything around… but for whatever reason, defragging it fixed it.
Just sharing my experience.