What kind of external drive are you using? Is it one optimized for audio? You may want to google search for an external FW drive with an Oxford 911 chipset. When you had the dropout, what was your CPU looking like? It probably has less to do with the amount of tracks you have total as opposed to how many tracks you have running at the same time (and their length...I've noticed that longer tracks tend to be a little more taxing on my CPU....not sure why), or how many plugs you are running. I never had complete dropout but I have had some weird stutter effects in the past while performing live (it never happened at home...WTF?) and yes it does suck.....my sympathies and good luck! You may want to look a little closer at a couple of the things I just described. Paying attention to them helped me. Thankfully, in my case, what I do is glitchy enough to where nobody really noticed when my issues happened.

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