Stop the freezing

[Hunter69]

I have been having an ongoing problem with my setup freezing. When it freezes it will then go into slow motion with no audio. This happens randomly. I have determined that this only happens when playing back recorded tv. DVD's/Bluray's (ripped to a drive) are not affected. During this problem I have been getting more and more HDpvr has stopped producing data along with the same error for my hd homerun.

My setup is listed below but here is a more detailed list:

I have a WHS server with sage 6.6 installed.
AMD 9750 quad core with 4gig of ram.
3 1.5 tb Seagate Drives (in the pool)
400 gig wd hd (system drive)
1 1.5 tb WD green drive (in the pool)
1 HDhomerun
2 HDPVR's
A hp procurve 1400 gigabit switch
Dlink gigabit gamer wired router

Now to describe the problem
Of course I started experiencing freezing while watching recorded TV. I started to troubleshoot the issue. I thought it could be comskip running (but that barely challenged the server). I looked to see if I could see a performance issue. The only thing I saw were the Pool drives were above 80%. So I figured I needed to add another drive. I purchased the 1.5 tb WD Green drive (listed above).

The freezing continued. So I thought maybe there is a bad Harddrive. So I began removing HD's from the pool (one at a time). So far I have removed 2 of the 3 Seagates and the problem continued. I thought at one time the issue was resolved because I watched an entire tv show without freezing but the problem soon returned. I am in the process of removing the last 1.5 tb Seagate from the pool to see if the freezing continues. If this does not resolve the freezing I am getting totally stumped.

The freezing is happening equally and randomly on both HD200's. The freezing never seems to happen in the same place during an episode. I am running out of ideas. Can anybody think of possibilities to help me isolate this to what is defective?

If the current procedure I am doing (remove the last seagate drive from the pool) does not fix the problem, I am thinking of removing the new 1.5tb WD Green drive from the pool and make it a recording drive that is not in the pool.

To give you some history, this setup was working absolutely perfect. I followed the instructions on how to properly setup the pool so the recording share can be in the pool.

When I added the new drive to the pool could it of changed the pool so that it is no longer setup properly to record and playback from. How can I check this issue? I know that it needs to be setup as 64K block (just pulling that from memory so please forgive me if I am incorrect).

Please help
Bill

[Hunter69]

So I am debating which might be better.

A. Change the system disk (taking the other disks out of the equation one at a time did not seem to solve the issue) which would require a server reinstall.

B. I did remove the new disk from the stroage pool. Adding this disk to whs outside the storage pool and use it as a recording drive.

I am thinking the boot drive might be having some issue since the other disks made no difference but this is a pretty drastic measure for something I am guessing about.

Ideas? Suggestions?

[Savage1701]

I'm beginning to notice a bit of this on my system as well. I've got mostly 1TB and a 2TB drive.

I am wondering a few things for myself as well - multiple recordings and watching something at the same time is overwhelming my RAID controller and/or ICH10R controller. I'm guessing that my newer 2TB Hitachi is trying to be "green" and spinning down in a manner the RAID controller never foresaw or was programmed to deal with.

I'm assuming since you are smart enough to have a Procurve switch you've already tried making sure your extenders are first at the trough as far as quality of service settings are concerned. And obviously GbE has gobs of bandwidth to spare. Are your NIC's optimized for offload, buffers, etc? I'm not advocating jumbo frames since they can be a headache, but a NIC could be an issue. I'm also not advocating teaming, since that's potentially tricky as well.

One question - If you play back the same episode on either extender, do the glitches recur in the same place at the same time in the same way on either extender? Or on your Sage server itself?

Check the info on the glitchy shows - are they isolated to a single tuner or to a single channel?

I've also had what I call "electronic blowback" where I had to isolate my HD-PVR on a high-quality splitter all by itself. If I used it with a couple of analog cable tuner cards on the same splitter something fed back into the HD-PVR that messed it up terribly and I got intermittent tiling, chop, and dropouts.

I also just caught a thread saying make sure no USB cable exceeds the USB spec of something like 14 ft. Not an issue in my case, but I had never heard of that one - it increases USB communication latency to the point the USB controller thinks the device has dropped out.

There are also threads in here of at least one single station, a CBS affiliate, that is causing OTA ATSC tuners fits. No one knows what that station is up to, but other stations in that geographical area are not causing those users issues.

Another question - You have good signal strength, right? I'm sure you've checked that as well. And under "hardware properties" you have the caches for the drives enabled, correct? A little dangerous, but with a data drive, if the power goes out or the system hangs, you're probably going to lose that episode anyway.

I'd be careful if you just put that green drive in a USB enclosure. You could end up with the same issues. Reading and writing to a USB 2.0 external drive has always been a dicey proposition for my system.

A first guess is your "green drive" since they constantly vary their spin rates and unload their heads. You get great power savings at the expense of things that might not matter if you are saving a spreadsheet but that could matter with something like video that must be very smooth. And since video is just going to slam that drive when it starts I'm guessing it could flood the buffer in the drive, especially if it is set to write through mode, and you could effectively lose data or have it recorded in such a way that it is not suitable to be played back smoothly. DV files require isochronous data streams; if your green drive, or anything else in your system, is messing that up, that might account for the intermittent issues.

Another guess is your USB hub is being overwhelmed by your HD-PVR's. I don't use an HD Homerun, but if it's sending what it gets by either USB or ethernet I'd consider that as well. I use an x1 NEC-chipset USB controller card for my high-data-rate ATSC sticks and HD-PVR. It makes a big difference. I can crash my system at will if I hook them all up to the mb's back USB ports.

If you google around you can usually find a copy of WDTLER that lets you change some deeper settings on WD drives than just their standard tools. Usually you have to take that drive and hook it to a standard "SATA as IDE" or "SATA as enhanced IDE" configured port. A lot of times WDTLER and other lower-level DOS programs won't "see" their target drives under Intel RAID or on a RAID controller. You can disable some of the power saving features and make sure the buffer is set to write back mode to allow it to help smooth things out for the drive.

[Hunter69]

Well as far as QOS goes, my procurve switch is a nonmanageable version 1400.

I have looked at the nic on the whs server, it is a realtek rtl8168(p)PCI-E gigabit ethernet nic. The only settings it offers is:

vlan, flow control(enable), jumbo frame (disable), offload checksum(tx/rx checksum), offload tcp_largesend(enable), wake on lan, WOL and shutdown link speed(100 meg).Linkspeed/duplex mode(Auto)

Do you see an adjustment that I could make that would possibly make a difference?

My motherboard does have two pci slots but when I tried to install a modem it either would not boot at all or would not see the drives with the modem installed. So I am interested in this usb controller but am wondering if it would conflict in the only two slots I have. What is the model of usb controller so I can see if I can purchase it.

No worries in regards to usb cable length.

The recording disk is internal but I am trying to figure out how I could install it and use it for a recording directory outside the storage pool. ANy input?

The problems I am experiencing were occurring before I purchased this WD green drive. My setup was working great until recently. I cannot figure out what happened yet.

Thanks for you time and knowledge
Bill

[JetreL]

Recording on your shared drive worked horrible for me. I changed the recording directory to be it's own non-pooled drive and all my playback issues went away on WHS. The setup that I found that worked for me best was:

System Drive - WHS Install
Pooled Drives - Images, Music, DVD & BR Rips, Documents, other files I want to keep (Duplication is turned on for everything on these disk)
(2) 1.5 TB drives (Formatted to 64K Blocks) - TV Recording Drives

[Hunter69]

So I have been in contact with Silicon Dust tech support, they tell me that the logs indicate either high cpu usage (it isn't) or a harddrive problem. So I removed the WD green (new drive) from the storage pool. I changed the recording directory to that disk. I asked them to check the logs again after tonights recordings to see what they indicate.

I would still like to address some possible changes to see if I can get rid of the HDpvr "stop producing data errors". Do you think this could be resolved by adding a nec chipset based usb controller?

Looking at what I posted about the onboard nic that is in my server, do you have any suggestions? Changes in settings? Change to a more capable giga nic?

Thanks for all your help
Bill

[Hunter69]

Well as far as the freezing and recording problems go, it looks as though the problems were resolved by changing the recording directory to the new wd green disk. I switched the recording directory to the new disk and now I am see my recordings showing up in the Videos directory (instead of the "recorded tv" sub menu) so I have to look into what I did to change that. I am happy to report that the issues seem to be gone.

[farscapesg1]

This is interesting because I recently ran into similar issues. I added a WD Green drive and a Samsung LP drive to my WHS to increase storage. Shortly after i started noticing "freeze/glitches"... but in my case they were definitely a corruption with the recording. I could rewind and it would freeze in the same spot and I could play the file in VLC and it would freeze. I also had "halt detected" errors about the same time one some of the recordings (but not all). This was spread across multiple devices (HDHR and two Nvidia DualTV cards).

After beating my head against the wall, I gave up and removed a drive from the drive pool, set it up as a recording folder and moved all my recordings (luckily I had whittled them down to less than 500 GB). Since the change, I haven't had a single hiccup with the recording (except when Comcast changed the QAM channels for the 3rd time this year already ).

What is really odd is that that everything had been working fine until I added the new drives and SageTV started recording to the new "green" drives. I'd be curious if this is some sort of issue with the slower "green" drives being used in the drive pool for WHS. It makes me reconsider replacing the rest of my drives with low power ones. I'd prefer to use the drive pool for my recording to make it easier to expand as I need it.. especially since it used to work great

[Hunter69]

My belief is that I have a drive going bad. I have not figured out which one but I am sure it will happen soon. The mistake I made was ignore all the bad reviews those 1.5tb seagates have received .

My plan is to get one of thoses 1 tb wd drives especially made for dvrs and then replace the drive that is bad in the storage pool.

I forgot to mention one thing. Silicon dust's tech support was instrumental in determining that it was a bad harddrive. So i definitely have to give them their kudos in doing a great job.

[mayamaniac]

I haven't read all the posts, only read the first one, but have you isolated the freezing to a specific tuner or does the freezing occur on all tuners, both HD-PVR and HDHR? You can see which tuner the recording comes from by looking in Detailed Information of each recording. Also, have you tried playing back the recordings on another media player like VLC, preferably on a separate computer? The fact that you said that the freezing never occurs at the same place in an episode means that it is unlikely a tuner or recording problem.