Second HDD borderline unresponsive for music

B

Briliu

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 19, 2006
Messages
269
Hi all,

Hopefully this is the right place to ask this question!

Two weeks ago I built the i7 rig in my signature and have installed windows and all main programs on the SSD in the sig. I also have a Hard drive (HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000.D) in it. I am using windows 7 home premium (64bit) and I've routed all my user folders to (My docs/music/video etc) to the hard drive to save space in on the SSD.

My issue is that when I'm playing music and go to skip a song or find a song to play that WMP takes anywhere from 0.5 to 5 seconds to register my button presses. If left alone music plays fine and cycles through playlists without pause. It's only when I hit next and is MOST prominent after a few consecutive songs (5-10 minutes without me manually telling it to change songs). My thought is that the HDD is spinning down and has to spin up every time because it can load the whole song into cache.

Is there a way to prevent this or mitigate it's effect to me? I've already told windows in the power settings to not "power down" drives for 60 minutes, but that has clearly not been effective.

Thank you for any help!
 
A few questions, what file format, what bitrate, and have you tested the Hitatchi? And just for giggles can you try another drive temporaraly and throw some music on it?
 
Fileformat: mp3,
Bitrate: 128-256 (randomly distributed therein, really).
I have not tested the hitachi.
And i dont have access to a free harddrive :( I could throw a bit of it on the SSD and try it there, would that be helpful?
 
I did a run of HDtune and came up with this:
HDTune_Benchmark_Hitachi_HDS721010DLE.png

HDTune_Health_Hitachi_HDS721010DLE.png

HDTune_Error_Scan_Hitachi_HDS721010DLE.png
 
I do not believe this is a hardware problem. Have you tried disabling your antivirus or a different music player than WMP.

I also do not think it is a power down issue since the drive you show here has only been restarted 25 times in its lifetime 04 Start / Stop Count.
 
You shouldn't have to disable antivirus to do anything. I've never had to do that, once, ever. Try a better player.
 
You shouldn't have to disable antivirus to do anything. I've never had to do that, once, ever.
Click to expand...

The point was to see if the antivirus was causing the delay. At work, I have seen quite a few instances where an antivirus or a firewall causes considerable delay.

Try a better player.
Click to expand...

I certainly agree with that..
 
TomsHardware did a test on how antivirus crap affected systems, and they actually did nothing to impact performance, whatsoever. I never used them until lately, because they did used to make computers slow as crap.
 
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you all, I appreciate the comments though! A few answers:

I don't have any antivirus running other than MSE. I never had this issue on the old computer (vista) where the OS was on the same hdd as the music.

I was planning on getting winamp again to test if the issue is WMP. What would you all suggest for a good player? I like seeing album art, but really all i need is shuffle and g15 control. Oh, speaking of that, the WMP on this computer is v12. The wmp on my other computer and at work is v11, so perhaps if i revert to v11 it'd be better.

I do not have have any network drives mounted (to my knowledge, I only have the SSD, HDD and DVD as drive letters in my computer).

Is spinning down the same as turning off for hard drives? If they are, then I agree with you drescherjm. That can't be the issue :(

Thanks again!
 
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