latency problems can be caused by an eSATA drive

[rlauriston]

I spent much of the past month trying to pin down the cause of latency issues (pops and dropouts) running Live 9 with Komplete 10 in 64-bit Windows 7 on a Dell Latitude E5420.

I tried various audio interfaces, both 1394 and USB; did all the optimizations recommended by Ableton, Presonus, Focusrite, and others; disabled every device not in use and disabled the drivers for others; even replaced the laptop with a state-of-the-art eight-core desktop. No matter what I did, I couldn't get rid of the dropouts without setting buffers to 1024. The problem projects ran fine on a Mac with similar specs.

Eventually I tried copying some of the Komplete libraries to the laptop's internal hard drive and disconnecting the eSATA external (Fantom GreenDrive). That solved the problem.

Since I had the same problem with the new PC I suspect the problem is the chipset in the external drive and another brand / model eSATA drive might work fine.