I'm new to the world of DAW recording and learning as I go.  I'm running Sonar on a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop with a RME Fireface 400 sound card.  I added another hard drive that I figured would be my music drive for all my projects, but when I play back recordings from this drive in Sonar, I get digital popping noises. 

I read in another forum that this commonly happens when recording on a slave drive.  I switched the jumper to make it a master and this seemed to solve the problem, except that to do it, I had to make my DVDrw drive a slave, and then I had digital popping when playing DVDs. 

I thought I had an extra cable slot on my motherboard and figured I'd just run my primary hard drive, secondary hard drive, and DVDrw drive all as masters, but the cable slot turned out to be the wrong size (designed for a floppy drive maybe?). 

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to have all 3 drives working without pops with only 2 cable slots on the motherboard?

Thanks, Rip.  I've tried updating my motherboard drivers and moving the firewire card to a different slot.  I looked at the BIOS but didn't see anything that looked like "drive noise".  I'll look into updating my drive controller drivers.  I posted this issue at the RME forum and I'm awaiting a response from them.  If that doesn't work I'll go post at the Sonar forum as well.

Dawg - any solution?  Did you check with RME?

What firewire card are you using, and what chipset does it use? Firewire cards can be notorious bus hogs. A card with a texas instruments chipset is usually a pretty safe bet.