Curious Problem, WHS and HD200

[mikejaner]

I am wondering if I could get some help diagnosing a problem I am having. I recently moved SageTV over to my Windows Home server, so I can consolidate my network machines, etc....... Up until then I was running SageTV on an XP SP3 based Athlon X2 machine, 2gb, ATI chipset etc.. with no problems. The WHS is a similar system with an Athlon X2, same amount of ram, Similar Motherboards (Both 780G and made by ASUS) etc.. My WHS is running 6TB of drive space 64K clusters, and redundant.
Anyways, the problem I am having appears to be a networking issue, but it's hard to tell. Here's what I have been seeing. About three or four times a day, either watching recorded content or Live TV, The HD200 will freeze up during video playback. If you just sit there and watch it, for about thirty seconds or so, the screen will stay frozen, then advance a frame or two about every ten seconds. After this for about another thirty seconds the playback will go at about five frames a second with no sound. If I wait until it gets past that, the video will usually end up returning to normal playback again. Now, here's were it's making it more interesting and difficult to diagnose. When I rewind the video back to just before the point were the lockup started, it will play through as if nothing happened. When looking at Windows event logs, there are no problems related to system resources, network dropouts, disk issues, etc.....
I read about issues with WHS and Realtek based NIC's and thought that may be the problem (although my XP machine has an integrated Realtek chipset also). Before I go and buy a new Broadcom based NIC, I thought I would do some testing. I tried eliminating a network speed or signal issue by changing Speed 1000 vs. 100, Flow control, TCP offloading etc..... all with the same results. Connections to the WHS, like RDP and file transfers to my laptop seem unaffected while this lockup is happening, as I made sure to test during one of these random situations. I am starting to suspect a bug in the HD200 networking code.
Any advice would be apprecated.

[gplasky]

With duplication turned on you may want to look as to when the demigrator service task is running and see if there is a coorelation. Also try turning off duplication to see if that goes away. How much disk space do you have left in the pool? If space is getting tight it may be using the d drive.

Gerry

[freedml]

I have similar problems with the HD200 on a regular Windows server. The HD200 is buggy and unpredictable (but better than the alternatives I've tried). Sometimes it will do that, then you go to play the same file a few hours later and it plays just fine.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by gplasky

With duplication turned on you may want to look as to when the demigrator service task is running and see if there is a coorelation. Also try turning off duplication to see if that goes away. How much disk space do you have left in the pool? If space is getting tight it may be using the d drive.

Gerry

I have something like 5.5TB free at this point. I will try turning duplication off to see if that helps. I just don't like the idea of my shows dissappearing when a disk goes down. Is the demigrator service setup to run through task scheduler, or somewhere in the WHS settings stuff?

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by freedml

I have similar problems with the HD200 on a regular Windows server. The HD200 is buggy and unpredictable (but better than the alternatives I've tried). Sometimes it will do that, then you go to play the same file a few hours later and it plays just fine.

The problem I have, is that the HD200 was perfect in playback etc... with Windows XP. I did get full UI lockups every once in a while, but not anything like this and not nearly as frequent.

[freedml]

As a workaround I have my Rewind1 set for 2 seconds. That usually solves the problem for 5-30 seconds. Therefore, I think it's a buffering problem with the player.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

I have something like 5.5TB free at this point. I will try turning duplication off to see if that helps. I just don't like the idea of my shows dissappearing when a disk goes down. Is the demigrator service setup to run through task scheduler, or somewhere in the WHS settings stuff?

DEMigrator is the Drive Extender Migrator service. It's the component that deals with folder duplication and balancing the data load across all the disks in the storage pool.

I'm only guessing at your issue but I had seen it before. You should check what processes are running when this happens. Also I don't know if you copy a lot of files to your WHS or download files to it but if you do it needs to balance these files and if duplication is turned on also duplicate them. Look at CPU, memory or other factors whne this begins to occur.

Gerry

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by gplasky

DEMigrator is the Drive Extender Migrator service. It's the component that deals with folder duplication and balancing the data load across all the disks in the storage pool.

I'm only guessing at your issue but I had seen it before. You should check what processes are running when this happens. Also I don't know if you copy a lot of files to your WHS or download files to it but if you do it needs to balance these files and if duplication is turned on also duplicate them. Look at CPU, memory or other factors whne this begins to occur.

Gerry

Gotcha, thanks. Now I have a few things to try this weekend.