Spinning Wheel of Death - Any further thoughts out there ?

[Savage1701]

Not sure if this belongs in the Hardware section, but I think I may have an issue where my power supply was not capable of supplying the surge necessary when Sage kicked in and started grabbing 4 shows at once off, say, prime time slots.

I also turned off thumbnails as well and switched to row view, so this may be a software issue. I also tried disabling import folders but then I tried the opposite to break Sage and imported a ton of old files from BTV that I changed the suffix from .tp to .ts on. So far so good. I can't break SageTV on row view, and believe me I have tried, both from the server and an HD200.

I have also upped the Java heap substantially, ran Sage as an app and as a service, etc.

Again, this may belong in the HW thread since it usually happened on my extender.

I will leave it up to the mod to move this thread if necessary and I am not going to cross post it.

If you are like me and run a lot of hard drives (8 for me, plus 2 SSDs although they primarily draw 5V current) you could have this issue. My goal is to replace my 8 1TB and 640GB's with 2TB's as the price comes down and get to 4-5 mechanicals. The SSD's should not burden the PS as most surge current on HD spinup and running is on the 12V side. Replacing the PS is trickier as it is a server one sized for a 3U server case, so I had to hot-wire an old PSU to be always on and power half my hard drives. If you can use an ATX PS that makes your life easier. And try to use one that only has 1 rail for the 12V supply. Multiple rails are usually a joke or a trick or worse. Corsair is your friend here.

BTW, don't get too enamored of "green" drives. It's a total lock that their tricks to save power will slash their life expectancy in high-intermittent-use situations like SageTV and such. If money is no object I'd actually go with true enterprise-class, high-availability drives used in servers.

Again, though, this could be a Java heap issue still or it could still be some sort of thumbnail corruption. To borrow a phrase from the economists, "It's too soon to tell."

[Savage1701]

I honestly now believe my PS was being overloaded when multiple drives spun up to grab 4-6 Sage tuners' outputs at once. This may have resulted in all the power-on resets I was getting and corrupting gosh knows what, frequently resulting in the spinning wheel of death when using thumbnail views of my recordings. My WD blue drives seemed especially susceptible to this.

I took an older Antec 350W PSU and gave it 4 mechanicals and 2 SSD's so it had an adequate load. Most PS's get more efficient as their load goes up, and many require a small load present at at least the +5V and +12V outputs or they sort of freak out and may shut down. Since my Sage server never shuts down, I leave the Antec shorted on all the time as well.

4 Hard Drives will present a total 12 amp load of +5V and +12V at cold spinup and at least 1/3 that at use. That is adequate to keep my Antec happy. It also takes a huge burden off my 2U server-type PSU which would be expensive to replace. I use an ATI 3650 card that seems more than up to the task of the little viewing I do at the server but provides EVR, 3D, H.264 timeshifting, you name it. I have uses DirectShow filters from Arcsoft, Cyberlink, Elecard, and Main Concepts. Core refuses to let me get a 14-day sample of theirs, but I've heard they are awesome.

I am still skeptical on "green drives" as they achieve a good deal of tree-hugging by doing a head "load/unload" cycle that can ruin a consumer hard drive really fast even though it powers it down. There's many reasons hard drive warranties at the consumer level have dropped back to 3 years from 5. That is one of them. TLER and PUP utilities are iffy at best, deliberately made hard to find and download, dubious at helping with this and may do more harm than good. These green drives also tend to drive RAID arrays nutso due to deep cycle error recovery than the controller interprets as bad and marks the drive as such. Have that happen to 2 drives at once in a RAID 5 array or 3 in RAID 6 and you better pray the controller people have a utility to force re-recognition. Same even for a single disk on a controller. To me, the couple watts one saves, especially as capacities keep heading up, make the risk of green drives unacceptable.

Personal hope and prayer is for 1TB affordable laptop drives at 7200RPM SATA II. I think this is the absolute sweet spot for power use vs. transfer vs. cost vs. drive life expectancy, especially with SageTV server-type apps and they are highly compatible with many RAID controllers. Good x4 or x8 controllers make a huge difference, especially when they have BBU-backed RAM Cache onboard.

Just a few thoughts on the long journey that may have finally led me to what was causing my Spinning Wheel of Death.

[Flash69]

Very interesting information.

I have not yet tried to have my drives power down. What are your thoughts on this? I only have 2 6400AAKS drives in my Sage server at this time, but I will be adding some form of WD 1TB drive soon.

My biggest factor is I also have 2 ESX hosts and 1 Openfiler with drives that spin 24/7. My Openfiler server now has 8 hard drives, 4 various older drives and 4 6400AAKSs. I just upgraded to a Perc 5/i SAS/SATA RAID card and added the 4 640 GB drives in RAID 10. I am mainly using the RAID 10 for the VM guests but I have thought about allowing Sage to write to these drives.

Not really sure if I can get any power savings at this point.