Harddrive management

[mayamaniac]

I have 3 tuners (PVR-350 and two 150MCE) and 3 recording folders under 3 different harddrives (Seagates IDE Barracudas). All working fine under SageTV 2.1.

But recently, I ran into problems when having all 3 tuners recording at the same time. The recordings would have skip frames and audio sync problems, all 3 of them. My guess, I think the problem is hard drive management problems in SageTV. I know that Sage will record on the drive with the most free space available, but this is bad if it decided to record all three shows at the same time to the same drive, which is really pushing beyond the drive's transfer limit.

Is there a way to tell sage to not record more than 1 or 2 shows at once to the same harddrive? I do have Intelligent Recordings turned on so it can easily delete Watched/Dont Like IR shows on any of the harddrives.

Basically, the way Sage manages simultaneous recordings for multiple tuners setup should be to always put each recording on a different drive for maximum performance. Is it already doing this or does this need to be configured somehow?

I know my other option is to RAID the drives or maybe format them with 64k.

[JasonJoel]

No, there is no way to tell it to only record X shows max.

However, I've tried recording 5 shows at once on one drive with no problems before... I am suprised you had iussues at 3. Actually, I record 3 at a time while watching one off the same drive all the time with no issues.

In any case though, you may want to submit that idea as a formal bug/request from the website.

These forums are more for support than official bug/request filing.

Jason

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by JasonJoel

No, there is no way to tell it to only record X shows max.

However, I've tried recording 5 shows at once on one drive with no problems before... I am suprised you had iussues at 3. Actually, I record 3 at a time while watching one off the same drive all the time with no issues.

In any case though, you may want to submit that idea as a formal bug/request from the website.

These forums are more for support than official bug/request filing.

Jason

Well performance is really dependent on video/audio settings and harddrive speed. I record all shows at high DVD quality. If you can record 5 shows at once with high DVD quality, then you must have really fast harddrives, or maybe something else is screwed up with my system if its not the harddrives.

I will submit this topic to official sage support. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

or maybe format them with 64k.

What is the current cluster size? I'll bet this is the entire problem: the drive probably can't seek fast enough for the smaller clusters to keep up with the amount of data to save. Switch to 64k clusters & it will probably work just fine.

Edit: I missed the comment that 3 simultaneous recordings used to work. I would still try to use 64k clusters, but obviously there may be somethign else going on.

- Andy

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

Well performance is really dependent on video/audio settings and harddrive speed. I record all shows at high DVD quality. If you can record 5 shows at once with high DVD quality, then you must have really fast harddrives, or maybe something else is screwed up with my system if its not the harddrives.

The max recording quality possible with the 250s is 12Mbit/sec, the average HDD today can do >50MBytes/sec, or >400Mbit/sec. Your HDDs should have no trouble keeping up with a lowly 20Mbit/sec (for 3 DVD Standard Play recordings), that would be 2.5MBytes/sec.

Just out of curiosity, what's the HDD controller you're using for these drives? Also what model are the drives (Manufacturer, Size, RPM)?

[DFranch]

You might also want to verify that ultra DMA is enabled. Also, I experienced a problem once with 1 fat32 drive in a system with a ntfs drive. the whole system became very slow.

[stanger89]

Just for kicks, if you run this, what does it tell you?
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/hdspeed.html

[jptaz]

I have been having the same problem at times on the latest releases. Something changed in 2.1 that started causing these problems. Cayars and other have had similar problems.

John

[teedublu]

you're beatin your head against a wall til you reformat your video partition as NTFS 64K clusters. You don't have to wipe your boot disk -- use partition magic (or equivalent) to create a separate partition for video (always image backup first!).

There's no problem with a FAT32 system partition. In fact, it may make your system a tad quicker. Just don't try FAT32 for video because of 4GB filesize limit (not to mention XP won't do a large FAT32 partition anyway -- for some reason).

Most of the AMD SocketA - VIA chipsets have poor IDE performance (at least up thru the KT400).

[jptaz]

I agree that 64KB clusters is important, but these problems showed up with the new SageTV and has been happening on many peoples PCs that do not have VIA chipsets. Alll my video drives are 64KB sectors all my drives are plenty fast enough.

I have been working with support and it has to do with the way SageTV is prioritizing tasks. When I boasted the priority of SageTV to high the problem mostly goes away, but certain SageTVClient activities will cause data not to be stored. This is not a disk performance, but a buffering issue. If the buffer that windows uses to send the data from the PVR card to the file writer is not written in time it will be overwritten before SageTV handles the disk write.

Ultimately SageTV needs to do a better job of not swamping the CPU to service Client/GUI which causes these hiccups. Maybe a faster CPU would fix the problem, but seeing as we did not have the problem in previous versions I think it is a software issue.

John

[mayamaniac]

Interesting, I will have to do some tests to see what is the problem here. Whether its a caching issue in sage or a harddrive related problem. I do have the VIA chipset running athlon64 processor, hope this isn't the problem. But if anyone know any specifics of why this is a problem with the VIA chipset, please post.

My drives are all Seagate Barracudas IDE 200Gig 7200RPM 8M Cache. I will also try the 64K cluster option to see if the problem will go away. But still I prefer SageTV to record to different drives when multiple shows are recorded at once, rather than making one drive work so hard trying to write so much data at once. I will request for this feature for future updates.

[DFranch]

I have seen a similar problem. When I record football games on Sunday, if I record 2 games at the same time and start watching one of them it gets very choppy. I was using 3Gb/hr setting. I had to drop it down to 2 Gb/hr to make the skipping go away. I have a rather old ECS motherboard with a SIS chipset in it. I am hoping when I swap in my Nforce 2 board next month that will take care of this problem. Also, I have 1 160Gb and 1 80 Gb drive. The 80 Gb drive never gets used because the 160 Gb drive almost always has more space then the 80 Gb. If I could specify that tuner 1 use the 160 Gb drive and tuner 2 use the 80 Gb drive (unless there is no space left on one) That would help the problem.