Slowdowns - Resolved! - Please Read

[icon123]

This probably isn't in the right spot and maybe others are aware of this and maybe this is isolated to WHS, XP, 2003 but I want people to be aware of this. Here's my story...

I was running v6.x on a WHS box with a dedicated recording drive (not in WHS's storage pool) with the recommended 64k clusters with no problems what so ever for over a year. I could be recording (2) HD feeds and watching a third with no problems at all.

I decided to do some 'upgrades' and this is when the problems started. I upgraded one of my 1TB HDD to a 2TB and used that 1TB for my Sage recording drive. I also upgraded to beta 7 (I don't remember the version, but an early one). I did not format to 64k clusters as it wasn't needed anymore.

So after the upgrade, I was having a lot of slowdowns, pauses, hiccups, skips, etc. with playback. Primarly with HD feeds. Live was ok and SD shows were ok. It was especially bad if I was recording something at the same time. I imediately blamed v7 and started looking for a solution. However, no one else seemed to be expierencing these problems.

So I started looking at network bandwith issues and other WHS speed related items. I was also updating Sage to the latest betas without any improvements. I then decided to format my Sage recording drive with 64k clusters and that didn't help either. I was also having these same issues when playing HD movies from the WHS storage pool.

Then after a couple of months of trying to figure this out, my new 2TB drive was starting to give WHS errors. I started googling the problems I was having and I came accross an old article that said when Windows was expierencing errors with a HDD, it would automatically set the drive controller from DMA to PIO mode.

It hit me like a brick. I thought, OMG, this is probably what was happening to me and I bet my Sage recording HDD was sharing the controller with that problematic 2TB HDD. Sure enough, that is what happened. Windows nicely, downgraded my drive performance by switching my Sage recording HDD and 2TB HDD from DMA6 to PIO mode.

I have since swapped out the 2TB drive, restored the controller to DMA6 mode, upgraded to 7.21 and for once since this beta 7 has begun, my system is once again working flawlessly with no fault of Sage. I just wanted this to be a case study for anyone else that might run into a similar problem as me. Thanks again Sage developers for an excellent product.

icon123

P.S. - Sorry for the long post!

[aflat]

Son of a gun, that is exactly what happened to 1 of my drives too. I've been fighting the studders/skips for about a month now, really random. Thank you!

[jptheripper]

hmm.. is there an easy way to check what speed all your drives controllers are set to in WHS?

[icon123]

Originally Posted by jptheripper

hmm.. is there an easy way to check what speed all your drives controllers are set to in WHS?

I don't know if this is the quick way, but click on device manager and go to IDE controllers. Right click on one of the controllers listed and click properties then Advanced Settings tab. In there it will tell you what the current setting is and allow you to change it if need be.

[JetreL]

It's pretty funny, subconsciously the first thing I though of was a failing drive when I read the title. Amazing how something as simple as a drive on it's way out will not give errors but will certainly cause a life of misery till it really starts dying enough for windows to report it. Thanks for sharing!

[timg11]

This thread brings up a good point. I'm checking my drive settings to be sure that DMA is properly enabled.

In Device Manager, I see the drives in the Drives list, and a separate list of ATA Channels 0, 1, and others in the IDE / ATA/ATAPI Controllers list. Some of these have DMA enabled, and some do not.

However, I don't see any way to determine which drive corresponds to which controller. I have 2 drives and 8 ATA channel controllers, so all of them are not used.

How do I determine which ATA channel controllers correspond to my disk drives?

[Neo]

Originally Posted by timg11

How do I determine which ATA channel controllers correspond to my disk drives?

In device manager, choose "Device by connection" in the "view" menu. This is on XP, don't know about newer versions of windows