I would love some help improving my disk setup

[garyellis]

I believe that any stuttering I have in my system now boils down to disk access - read / and writing, etc...

I know it can be many other factors, but I have an Intel Quad core processor and the appropriate Mobo to support it. But, still I get stuttering..The stuttering only seems to come when I am doing something disk intensive.

i.e, Recording HD and running comskip at the same time....
or copy large video files while recording and playing HD files.

otherwise, really no stutters...

So, how do I make my disk system better.

I have 3 internal disks - SATA 300

1 140GB 64KB segments partitioned 40GB (system stuff) and
100GB video

2 250GB drives 64KB segments sage recordings and movies

I do not use any Raid on any of these.

I also have 2 external USB drives

1 250 GB drive movies 4KB segments
1 150 GB drive stored TV shows 4KB segments


I read that a bunch of drives "Raid Striped" is better than 1 big drive...so, that's a start...

Help, please,

Gary Ellis

[paulbeers]

First off, do not go with a Striped array. If one drive dies, you lose everything. While I don't believe that its a big deal if you lose some recordings, you also do not need to lose everything just because one drive failed.

Secondly, I don't use comskip (been too lazy to set it up), but can't you set comskip to run when the system isn't in use? If you do that then when the system isn't recording it can do its bit. This would negate the negative affects of running comskip while saving.

Third. I would keep one drive to do nothing but store Sage recordings and not record to any other drive. Do not use it for anything else. Even periodic "unexpected" file transfers could theoretically cause fits for your drives depending on how well they handle multiple file accesses at the same time. My Sage server is a Sage server and that's it. Heck I even built a file server that stores my DVD's so that I can move ripped DVD's to it and not worry about it affecting Sage.

Last, are you using your Sage server as your client box to? Or are you sharing to a client of some type?

[garyellis]

Comskip does run at off times, but it has a setting that allows it to run while recording...I thought I would give it a try since I upgraded to a quad core processor. But, the stuttering made me change back...

I do have a drive that does nothing but Sage recordings..I thought that would be the answer when I built it. And i do not use a client. I really only use output to my 2 STX-HD100's...

Something is just not right with my disks..It should be better than this. So, I am looking for a way to better optimize it.

Thanks,

Gary Ellis

[CollinR]

My suggestions
Ditch the 100GB of storage on the same disk as the OS, you can partition all you like but it still has to move the head.

Defragment, I schedule the Windows defragger to run every weekday at 4am. You may need a 3rd party application to schedule the windows defragger. Once it's defragged the daily job doesn't take very long, the first time will take you days and you are better off just tring to do without sage.

You can use Acronis to change the 4k cluster partitions to 64k without loosing your current data.

[erik]

I assume you checked the amount of main memory?
There should not be any page swapping to the page file during normal operations. Only at starting/stopping of applications.

[garyellis]

Thanks....

I just checked my system memory...strange..I have (2) 2GB sticks installed, but in the control pannel it says Memory 3.12GB of RAM..I wonder why it doesn't say 4 GB..

Anyway, then I looked at my disks and their Page file allocation...

The only HDD that has a paging file is my small main system partition... it has 2046MB allocated page file... max 4092MB...non of the other HDD have a page file.

I checked under task manager and the page file usage sits at 671MB until I start an application and then it increases 20 to 50MB while the application is open..When I close the application, it goes back to 671MB's..

Does that tell you anything?

Thanks,

Gary Ellis

[JetreL]

Originally Posted by garyellis

Thanks....

I just checked my system memory...strange..I have (2) 2GB sticks installed, but in the control pannel it says Memory 3.12GB of RAM..I wonder why it doesn't say 4 GB..

It's because you are using a 32bit operating system. If you were using XP 64bit or Vista 64bit you would get closer to using the full 4Gb. But Windows still restricts access because some hardware does not support above the 4 gig mark. Basically its a problem with XP 32bit and not you computer. And no there isn't a way to fix it to use all 4.

Here is a nice article that explains it in more detail

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

Hope this helps!

[garyellis]

Thanks,, good answer...now if I can figure out how to optimize my disk speed...


Thank you,

Gary Ellis

[JetreL]

Your best option is to put video on a non-system drive and regularly defrag that drive.

I just finished building my box and am having the same problem with stuttering. I need to go back and add a second drive just for this purpose. Luckily I have some older drives that will work as a system partition.

Here is an image to give you and idea of the fragmentation that SageTV causes on a drive.




This is after running defrag for ~14 hours.

[garyellis]

Yep...I defragged my drive last night and it is a non system drive. It was not as bad as the picture you have, but, it certainly needed defragging.

We'll see how that helps over the next week..but, I still do not believe that will solve my comskip and recording HD problem...but, we'll see...


Thanks for the help,

Gary Ellis