Hard Drive adding noise

[priechm]

I just got a 300 GB Seagate Baraccuda to use as my audio drive for Pro Tools and i'm having a problem with it. It's installed and formatted correctly and working fine but when I try to run a Pro Tools session off of it, I start getting clicking noises coming through my speakers, along with all the audio. I know there is nothing wrong with the sessions b/c they work fine off my other hard drive. It's Serial ATA 1.5 and i've got it connected to a new Vantec SATA host card I put in. Anyone got any ideas on why I'm getting noise from it?

[Tuttle]

Try moving either your SATA card or the sound card to a different PCI slot.

[MuFu]

Does it only click when using Pro Tools? What happens if you mixdown a session to mp3 and play it with Media Player? It might be something to do with the ASIO driver configuration, if you're using one. If there are options to change the buffer size and playback/recording latency settings, try adjusting them. Same goes for if you're just using the DirectX driver (although this is less likely if other system audio works fine).

It could also be caused by a conflict on the PCI bus, as Tuttle is suggesting. If shuffling the cards around doesn't help, try downloading PCI Latency Tool. You can use it to change the PCI Latency allocated to your SATA card and sound card, which might help with the clicking.

[dannyboy27]

could it also be worth increasing the spread spectrum setting in the BIOS, to reduce RFI interference?

[priechm]

I moved the card to a different slot and it didn't help any. But the drive only adds destortion in Pro Tools. If i bounce to a wav and play it with windows media player it sounds fine.

I went and messed with all the latency and buffer settings and nothing worked. I got that PCI latency tool but I don't even see the SATA card showing up. So I changed the PCI latency in my BIOS but it didn't help either.

I don't really know what spread spectrum is. I have an option for AGP spread spectrum and FSB spread spectrum but both are disabled and greyed out so I can't change them anyway.

I'm going to try and contact DigiDesign and see if they know of any compatability problems with SATA host cards, b/c that's all that I can think of that can be wrong since the audio plays back fine with other apps.