Which Hard drive to purchase

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

So what, if anything, do you think would cause the drive to pause for one minute? That's what it does, practically to the second: the recording freezes, and one minute later, continues. Is this the IntelliPower messing up somehow, i.e. it's doing some kind of check for a minute? WD second tier tech support had no answer, other than to repeatedly say "is the drive installed in something on the "compatible" list?"
that left me with no confidence.
The drive passed the basic HD Sentinel test, as well as WD's drive diagnostics.
I've never had a drive in my Sage system do this before.
I'm trying to rule out physical connections, MB Bios compatibility, etc, or maybe it's just a bum drive - it's never happened to me before, but there's always a first time

Do you have another drive you can swap it with, so that everything else is identical (SATA and power cables, SATA port, etc)? If so, do that and see if the other drive exhibits the same issue. If it doesn't, you know it's the drive.

[JustFred]

@tvmaster2: It would be useful to rule out the hard disk itself (e.g, bad sectors, read-retries, thermal re-calibration, etc). HDSentinal and the WD diags don't tend to identify latency-related issues.

Try doing a large file copy across the network while you're playing back video. Copy from the drive that contains the video you're trying to playback. Choose a large enough file (or bunch of files) so that the copy operation is certain to be still progressing during the playback pause. Ideally, include the exact playback file itself (multiple times, if need be) as part of the copy operation

While the copy & playback is taking place, observe the Networking tab in TaskManager. You should see a fairly constant network utilization while the file copy is taking place. If you don't see it drop dramatically (during the playback pause), that would tend to rule out the hard disk itself.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by wayner

SPCR has a review of the WD BLue drives. One interesting thing:


The conclusion for these drives is not promising:

Wow. BTW, My "main" machine doesn't have any Blues, they are Blacks, I just forgot.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

So what, if anything, do you think would cause the drive to pause for one minute? That's what it does, practically to the second: the recording freezes, and one minute later, continues. Is this the IntelliPower messing up somehow, i.e. it's doing some kind of check for a minute? WD second tier tech support had no answer, other than to repeatedly say "is the drive installed in something on the "compatible" list?"
that left me with no confidence.
The drive passed the basic HD Sentinel test, as well as WD's drive diagnostics.
I've never had a drive in my Sage system do this before.
I'm trying to rule out physical connections, MB Bios compatibility, etc, or maybe it's just a bum drive - it's never happened to me before, but there's always a first time

It sounds like some kind of buffer overrun. Are the drives asleep? Maybe a windows tweak to reduce the Windows buffers? That one of the reasons I switched to 8GB RAM in my machines. I then set the drive buffers to use all RAM. (registry tweak)


(Funny story on that, just after I made the change, I started a move of a large file, then tried to launch a program. Took maybe 3 minutes to release enough RAM to launch the program!!!)

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

It sounds like some kind of buffer overrun. Are the drives asleep? Maybe a windows tweak to reduce the Windows buffers? That one of the reasons I switched to 8GB RAM in my machines. I then set the drive buffers to use all RAM. (registry tweak)


(Funny story on that, just after I made the change, I started a move of a large file, then tried to launch a program. Took maybe 3 minutes to release enough RAM to launch the program!!!)

I don't know if the drive's asleep, but it doesn't make sense, since the 'pause' happens during the recording process, hence, while the drive's being written to. I run 32 bit, so 4gb ram is max. Since the last drive didn't have this problem, I gotta error on the drive side.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Do you have another drive you can swap it with, so that everything else is identical (SATA and power cables, SATA port, etc)? If so, do that and see if the other drive exhibits the same issue. If it doesn't, you know it's the drive.

yup, I think that's my next plan

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

It sounds like some kind of buffer overrun. Are the drives asleep? Maybe a windows tweak to reduce the Windows buffers? That one of the reasons I switched to 8GB RAM in my machines. I then set the drive buffers to use all RAM. (registry tweak)


(Funny story on that, just after I made the change, I started a move of a large file, then tried to launch a program. Took maybe 3 minutes to release enough RAM to launch the program!!!)

That's why that's only a registry setting - has to be done in a specific controlled environment to not majorly affect memory management. Better option is to use a 3rd party cache that is simply more configurable than the built-in windows one. FancyCache has been great to me for many years - highly recommended.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by JustFred

@tvmaster2: It would be useful to rule out the hard disk itself (e.g, bad sectors, read-retries, thermal re-calibration, etc). HDSentinal and the WD diags don't tend to identify latency-related issues.

Try doing a large file copy across the network while you're playing back video. Copy from the drive that contains the video you're trying to playback. Choose a large enough file (or bunch of files) so that the copy operation is certain to be still progressing during the playback pause. Ideally, include the exact playback file itself (multiple times, if need be) as part of the copy operation

While the copy & playback is taking place, observe the Networking tab in TaskManager. You should see a fairly constant network utilization while the file copy is taking place. If you don't see it drop dramatically (during the playback pause), that would tend to rule out the hard disk itself.

thanks, I'll try that. All things being equal, since the only thing that's changed was the drive, I think the answer lies within its platters. Maybe it's as simple as it being a dud