2.5.50 / ALSA: sound cutouts when playing from hd

I seem to be on a roll today. :)

Whenever I play an mp3 from HD I get sound cutouts. I can't really say when exactly is happening but putting the mpg into ram by running

dd if=mp3 of=/dev/null

until no disc activity occurs seems to solve the issues. The laptop is a p3-700, 128meg free ram, 44 bytes of swap usage and the following is reported by hdparm:

/dev/hda:

 multcount    = 16 (on)
 I/O support  =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 nowerr       =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    = 256 (on)
 geometry     = 2584/240/63, sectors = 39070080, start = 0
 busstate     =  1 (on)

/dev/hda:

Model=TOSHIBA MK2016GAP, FwRev=U0.30 A, SerialNo=X0B70560T Config={ Fixed }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=46 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16 CurCHS=17475/15/63, CurSects=16513875, LBA=yes, LBAsects=39070080 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120} PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 AdvancedPM=yes: unknown setting WriteCache=enabled
Drive Supports : Reserved : ATA-1 ATA-2 ATA-3 ATA-4 ATA-5

This does not happen with the CD-ROM drive and it's not happening now with another mp3 (sigh...) but I have had this happen quite a few times now.

As usual, if you want any more info, please holler.

        All people are equal,
        But some are more equal then others.
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              September 21, 2002 (Abridged version of security speech)