Hi Mac OS 10.3.5, C1 PRO 3.5.2 (v1081)
Thought I ought to share this idiots (me) experiences so you don't go through it yourselves.
I was processing and writing to an external drive, everything was working fine until it came to create large files.
It appears in retrospect that the file took so long to process that the drive it was writing to had put itself to sleep, waiting. (At the time I had no idea what was going on). The software of course had appeared to stall when I examined it, so I started the processing again. The net result was that the computer started running slower and slower, presumably because the ram was filling up. This of course resulted in the hard drive going back to sleep compounding the problem:-(.
When I examined the hard drive, no files had been written to it so I assumed the software was malfunctioning, did the usual randomly switching the software off and on and restarting. And started the re re processing.
It appears that with monumental effort, despite my best efforts to prevent it from working, the software was writing the files (from ram) to the hard drive, whenever my floundering around in the system woke it up. The files whilst written to the hard drive did not appear in the menu. I couldn't see the files, so guess what I did, go on guess, I started re re re processing them, the hard drive got bored and went back to sleep etc etc etc etc.
The net result of all this, is when I sussed it and stopped the hard drive from sleeping and restarted the computer so it could work out what on earth I had been up to, I have between 3 and seven copies of lots and lots of up to 200 odd meg files to sort through.
This will teach me to try and do my bit for the environment, the hard drive got lots of sleep, I got almost none. I wonder what would have happened if I had completely filled the hard drive up in mid process? (I came close).
Hey ho, only wasted about 36 hours in total.
Cheers
Matthew Ward
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