Have you changed the power scheme so that drives don’t power down? I had this although only at the beginning of songs when my pc had been idle for about 20 mins. I used my own power scheme and not steinberg one but a windows update put it back into balanced. It does sound like the drive is having to wake up to play the files. Are you using an external drive? To test drop a project into your C drive that suffers this and see if it still happens.