Can a slow hard drive cause sudden Resolve crashes?

Just trying to pinpoint the problem and doing some troubleshooting. My client has provided me with a set of Seagate external USB 3 hard drives with the footage. I suspect these aren't the fastest USB 3 drives out there (I have graded in the past from external USB 3 drives with no issues).

I'm running the latest Resolve 14.2 and it's been crashing randomly both in use, and during render.

Since for me, Resolve has been rock solid on other projects, and testing it with files where the footage resides on my internal RAID doesn't yield any issues whatsoever, I can only narrow it down to two things:

1. The external hard drives are too slow, and when Resolve can't access the data fast enough it crashes.

2. Some of the footage is corrupted in some way (the footage is a combination of Alexa ProRes 4444XQ and RED Epic in 6K) and that's what's causing the crashing.

Has anyone experienced similar crashes in the past and arrived at a similar conclusion?

maybe hated "green" drives inside the houseing?

they go to sleep if not pinged often enough, and causes anythig downstream to think the drive is gone from the system

Hi,

No idea if it helps: disable in preference => user => Performance Mode = Automatic and activate Manual.
Then test one by one the 3 options ... but I think it is better to test the Optimized Image Processing after having made a good backup (.DRP)

Thanks. For the time being I'm resigned to render out in 10-minute chunks and recombine the renders later in a separate timeline. Was thinking of doing a DPX image sequence export but the resulting files are huge.

Mostly I was wondering if this has happened to anyone else? The crashes are like someone turned off Resolve suddenly. It disappears from my screen in the blink of an eye. I already reported the crash logs to Blackmagic, but it is annoying that this is happening at all. If I can just track down the cause, I can prevent it in the future.

I would suggest stringing out all of the footage onto one (or more) timelines and just playing it out to see if there is particular file or some other identifiable pattern to the crashing.

I'd also run a disk utility to check the health of the drives. And open up some system performance and GPU monitors to see if you see any unusual spikes. Good luck.

I would suggest stringing out all of the footage onto one (or more) timelines and just playing it out to see if there is particular file or some other identifiable pattern to the crashing.

I'd also run a disk utility to check the health of the drives. And open up some system performance and GPU monitors to see if you see any unusual spikes. Good luck.

I was about to finally render everything out by limiting the max render rate to 5 frames per second. Thankfully it now heads over to VFX for the next few months, and by the time it comes back I'll make sure all the footage gets transferred to an internal RAID. If some of the footage is somehow corrupted, I'm not sure how to go about fixing it. But once again I suspect the culprit is the speed (or lack of) of these external hard drives.

Nonetheless, and regardless of the reason, I wish Resolve would be able to report an error and stop the process rather than crashing.

Are you familiar with creating a diagnostic log file?