system failure- Type 3 occurence

I'm assisting a session. Our studio is equipped w/ an HD 3system. The engineers problem is either immediately or after a while of play the computer will just stop give a prompt saying generally that the disk may be too slow or too fragmented. The session is full of edits and most likely a lot of unused audio files in the regions bin. My suggestion was to consolidate the edited files and clean the audio regions bin by removing the unused audio files from the session. We went as far as making unimportant tracks inactive, no further. Things are o.k. now, but I'm still not satisfied w/ the current state. Please if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to lay it on. Thank You

The problem could be caused by a lot of things. Are your drives fragmented? Even the least bit of fragmentation can trip-up a complicated ProTools session. Use something like Norton SpeedDisk to check the level of fragmentation, but I don't recommend using it to actually defrag the drives. Instead, transfer the data on the drive to another drive, initialize the original drive, and transfer the data back to the original drive. If you're using SCSI drives for the audio, make sure you don't have a cable problem or a terminator problem. Swap-out the SCSI cables and the terminator... If you're using SCSI, what *kind* of SCSI drives are you using? Do you have Ultra160 drives on the same SCSI chain as, say, UltraWide drives (that would be a problem requiring a "repeater board" in the Ultra160's enclosure)? What SCSI controller card are you using? Is it compatible with the types of drives you're using? Is it compatible with ProTools? If you're not using SCSI, and you're using FireWire instead... do your FireWire drives have the Oxford 911 chipset? Lots of possibilities...

Check to make sure your DAE playback buffer size is "2" or higher. It will sometimes reset to "0" after trashing DigiSetup

The best thing you can do is get a copy of Disc Warrior and run that on your drives. The problem will go away.