SageTV very sluggish on WHS

[Hunter69]

See the following link


http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48250

My problem ended up being the seagate drives. Although the drives are not reporting an issue, when I switched my recording drive to a single wd drive, all was better.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Hunter69

My problem ended up being the seagate drives. Although the drives are not reporting an issue, when I switched my recording drive to a single wd drive, all was better.

Was it a bad 1.5TB Seagate?

I have several drives in my system for a total of about 8TB of storage. Here are my drives:

500 GB WD (System)
3x1 TB Seagate (reported as ST31000340AS)
1.5 TB Seagate (reported as ST31500341AS)
2 TB Hitachi
1.5 TB WD

Hunter69 - where would you start? Removing the 1.5TB Seagate? Just to verify - the problems you were having caused by a bad storage drive, correct? Do you still record to the pool or to non-pool drives?

I am having problems with slow response with Sage menus which, theoretically, shouldn't always have to hit the storage drive(s). In other words it can be slow to get any menu response. While this may be a bad system drive, that is very painful to fix so I want to try all other options first.

edit - I have just noticed that my Seagate 1.5 TB drive is 98% - does this make it even more likely that it could be the source of my troubles? My WD 1.5 TB is also almost full at 97% - these numbers are from the Disk Management AddIn.

[wayner]

I have decided to try removing the 1.5TB Seagate from my system. It has been chugging away for about 2.5 hours but the progress bar isn't moving so I am worried that the process may be stuck or have died. Anyone have any advice on how long I should leave it - would 24 hours be enough to empty off a full 1.5TB hard drive?

[rlvogel322]

Originally Posted by wayner

I have decided to try removing the 1.5TB Seagate from my system. It has been chugging away for about 2.5 hours but the progress bar isn't moving so I am worried that the process may be stuck or have died. Anyone have any advice on how long I should leave it - would 24 hours be enough to empty off a full 1.5TB hard drive?

It would not surprise me that it would take a LONG time. I removed a 1TB drive that was 80% full and I remember it taking over 4 hours. I don't remember much of a progress update either. The HD light on the server was constant so I let it keep going.

[wayner]

But did the progress bar move or was it stalled, like I am seeing?

[rlvogel322]

I remember it seeming like it was stalled.

Can you hop on another machine and get to the console and see what disk management is saying? Not sure how respsonsive the system will be but it is another check.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by rlvogel322

Can you hop on another machine and get to the console and see what disk management is saying? Not sure how respsonsive the system will be but it is another check.

I tried that and my console died on the server where I had initiated it. I will leave it for a day or so and see if it appears to end. Right now the whole backup service is stopped, which is required to remove a drive, so hopefully it restarts itself in a few hours.

[Hunter69]

Originally Posted by wayner

Was it a bad 1.5TB Seagate?

I have several drives in my system for a total of about 8TB of storage. Here are my drives:

500 GB WD (System)
3x1 TB Seagate (reported as ST31000340AS)
1.5 TB Seagate (reported as ST31500341AS)
2 TB Hitachi
1.5 TB WD

Hunter69 - where would you start? Removing the 1.5TB Seagate? Just to verify - the problems you were having caused by a bad storage drive, correct? Do you still record to the pool or to non-pool drives?

I am having problems with slow response with Sage menus which, theoretically, shouldn't always have to hit the storage drive(s). In other words it can be slow to get any menu response. While this may be a bad system drive, that is very painful to fix so I want to try all other options first.

edit - I have just noticed that my Seagate 1.5 TB drive is 98% - does this make it even more likely that it could be the source of my troubles? My WD 1.5 TB is also almost full at 97% - these numbers are from the Disk Management AddIn.

Sorry it took so long to get back. I was having horrible issues mainly with recordings. I removed/replaced everyone of my seagates but I did not seem to make any serious headway to resolve my issue. What I ended up doing was just adding my new wd green 1.5 tb as a non pool drive, then I moved the recording directory to it. This seemed to resolve my problem. So I do feel that one or more of the seagates are not functioning properly but to determine which one will require me to boot from some diagnostic software to figure it out. I will tell you that all my dvd's and blurays are in the pool and I can stream the videos with no issues. Recording to them is not good. I had been recording to the pool without a problem for quite some time, so I know one or more of the drives is having a physical hardware issue


I reread the thread to make sure you have not tried what I am about to suggest. It appears as though no one has suggested this, so here goes:

Have you adjusted your java heap size. At one time I was having very slow response issues. I searched for a solution and found that I could change the java heap size. This seemed to resolve my slow menu response issue. I changed it from (default) 512 to 1024. Then I started getting a weird issue once I updated my java and had to drop the java heap size from 1024 to 768. It seems to be responsive with no java errors at 768.

[frontlinegeek]

Seagate drives:


They are the devil... If anyone read my blog links in my earlier post, they are just not dependable enough for anything let alone use in a server running 24/7. Get them out and replace them with anything BUT another Seagate. Period. With even one effed up Seagate drive in your server, it will cause the demigrator service to take forever to run.


64k clusters:

I know that it was a basic requirement back in the day with Sage, but on all the modern hardware we are using now, I have never had an issue not running in 64k format. I am glad to see that in Sage7, it is dropped as a requirement.


WHS Boot Drive Changing:

BIG no no. Do not try cloning your system drive. It will know and it will not like it. I tried and it is a messy road. You are better off to just set all your shares to duplication and then when it is all duplicated, shut down, pull the boot drive, replace it with your new one and then reinstall with all the drives connected so that the WHS installation detects that you are rebuilding an existing server and not doing a from scratch install. I have done this and it works fairly well. You still have to reinstall all your apps/add-ins but all your data is drawn back into the storage pool properly.


Removing drives from the WHS pool:


In all the time I have removed drives from the pool, that stupid progress meter almost never moves and even smaller drives that are only 50% usage take FOREVER to drop from the pool.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by que3jxp

WHS Boot Drive Changing:

BIG no no. Do not try cloning your system drive. It will know and it will not like it. I tried and it is a messy road. You are better off to just set all your shares to duplication and then when it is all duplicated, shut down, pull the boot drive, replace it with your new one and then reinstall with all the drives connected so that the WHS installation detects that you are rebuilding an existing server and not doing a from scratch install. I have done this and it works fairly well. You still have to reinstall all your apps/add-ins but all your data is drawn back into the storage pool properly.

Thanks for the answers.

I am first trying to remove some of my Seagate drives and replace with WD or others.

I did have to change my WHS system drive in the past but for some reason I never got the reinstall option. I don't know why but that ended up being a pain in the butt as I had to manually copy over several terabytes. And then there is the issue of having to reinstall Sage and all of my drivers.

I am thinking of building a separate machine running XP or W7 as my Sage server while still keeping a WHS machine. I would use software to have duplicates of my important files, such as photos, music, videos, on both the WHS box and the Sage box.

That would be less necessary if I move to the Vail version of WHS as you are supposed to be able to back up the system drive but if I do that I can't use firewire for changing channels, since this will be a 64 bit OS and there are no 64 bit firewire Tim Moore drivers, which is a big loss for me.

[frontlinegeek]

Originally Posted by wayner

I don't know why but that ended up being a pain in the butt as I had to manually copy over several terabytes. And then there is the issue of having to reinstall Sage and all of my drivers.

I can imagine. When I did my giant reassignment/realignment of hardware a month ago, it was a royal pain to migrate 2.5 TB of data but in the end, where I was effectively correcting for experimentation and in effect still recovering from my debacle with Seagate drives, it was all well worth it to get to a well crafted state in one big push.

Originally Posted by wayner

I am thinking of building a separate machine running XP or W7 as my Sage server while still keeping a WHS machine.

Something you could look at is using VMware server 2.x on your WHS server and burry your SageTV server installation into that so if you ever need to transplant things, all you need do is copy the VM from the server to a backup drive/external drive and then run it from any other PC you want till your server is rebuilt. I use VMware at work for a great deal of things and love it to death.

Originally Posted by wayner

I would use software to have duplicates of my important files, such as photos, music, videos, on both the WHS box and the Sage box.

If you go that route, Microsoft's SyncTool is a great utility for keeping files and folders on two systems sync'ed.

Originally Posted by wayner

That would be less necessary if I move to the Vail version of WHS as you are supposed to be able to back up the system drive but if I do that I can't use firewire for changing channels, since this will be a 64 bit OS and there are no 64 bit firewire Tim Moore drivers, which is a big loss for me.

Ya, if I was still on Rogers, that would be a show stopper for me too. Compromising firewire functionality/stability is a big no no. Actually, other than the ability to back up the system drive and the ability to deny Vail from using the system drive for storage pool use, I am not really seeing a giant reason to move to Vail.

Oh, the one downside to separating your SageTV server from WHS is that you would lose your free placeshifter license when you install Sage on WHS as an add-on.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by wayner

I tried that and my console died on the server where I had initiated it. I will leave it for a day or so and see if it appears to end. Right now the whole backup service is stopped, which is required to remove a drive, so hopefully it restarts itself in a few hours.

It looks like the disk removal process is hung or it is taking a very LONG time. It has now been running for about 34 hours and I can't log into console from any PC, including the server, and I cannot connect to any of the shares. I will leave it overnight and if there is no change I will perform a reboot. Hopefully my shared volumes won't be hosed!

[wayner]

Originally Posted by que3jxp

Something you could look at is using VMware server 2.x on your WHS server and burry your SageTV server installation into that so if you ever need to transplant things, all you need do is copy the VM from the server to a backup drive/external drive and then run it from any other PC you want till your server is rebuilt. I use VMware at work for a great deal of things and love it to death.

That is one option but I like the idea of having totally redundant hardware and having almost a total duplication. I have two Sage server licenses so I can install and run Sage on both. Assuming that I sync all files except RecordedTV between the two boxes then even if I have a catastrophic hardware failure I can get most things up and running by simply power cycling the HD-200 and connecting to the other server. I could then move my tuner devices over as well. All that I would lose is my TV shows which I could live with as anything that I really want to keep I move over to my Videos shared volume.

[wayner]

A quick update on my status - my drive removal did fail part way through as my 1.5 TB Seagate is down from 98% full to 73% full. My system does seem to be a bit better, but it still has issues, inclduing playback that has hiccups or that totally freezes for a while. And now it looks like I may have other issues with wiz.bin as my "My Videos" library now contents a bunch of Recorded TV that wiz.bin seems to have lost.

[rlvogel322]

Sorry to hear that. With the one drive being fairly full have you ever tried to run Drive Balancer? It's a great tool for evening things out after a new drive is installed or removed. It can take a while depending on how much stuff you have.

Also, I'd be curious what the drive temps are when you do this. Maybe that is why the removal failed part way through.

[wayner]

I am going to try again in a few days - part of the problem is that it complains about files being open from other PCs on my network even though I have closed all apps on the other PCs. So it seems kind of like you have to shutdown, or at least reboot, all other PCs on your LAN. And then while I was doing the removal I was not able to connect to any network shares. That means (1) you can't record with Sage, and (2) no one can use Sage for playback.

It is possible that the drive overheated however I specifically bought a case that has two 120mm fans at the front that blow right over the hard drives. During normal usage the drive temps are 30c or below.

[toricred]

You really should have Sage and anything else that is using a share on the server shut down while removing a drive. I typically do it overnight so that I only miss a few recordings during the night.

[wayner]

FYI - I was able to successfully remove the drive over the weekend. I was removing a 1.5TB drive that was 74% full to start with and this took about 39 hours. Therefore my rate of disc removal was around 28 GB per hour. I am not at home so it is hard to say if my Sage system is performing any better.

My system is now free of the 1.5TB Seagate but I still have three 1TB Seagates in the system. In order to remove those I will either have to buy some new drives, remove files or turn off duplication. But I still worry that my problem could be the system drive.