Severe Media Storage Stutters

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Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
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The other day I assembled a new media server using an ASRock A75 Extreme6 board, an AMD A4 Llano APU at 2.5Ghz, 4GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, and six 2TB drives.

First I installed Windows Home Server 2011 with Stablebit Drive Pool. It almost worked great. Movies populated on the media center instantly, and they all played instantly too. Only problem was at the end of every chapter, the movie freezes for 10+ seconds, then fast forwards to catch up. My initial thought was that it was caused by Drive Pool separating all of the VOB and MT2S files on all or some of the six drives, so when the media center looks for the next chapter, it has to wait until the next drive spins up and locates the file.

So I removed Drive Pool and left files on single drives (took me 3 days to move the files out of the pool onto individual drives as I have 4+ TB of movies). When I did that, it was worse. It'll lock up the media center for several moments, then struggle to play the movie at about 1 FPS.

So I formatted the OS drive and installed Windows 7 just to see if I had a bad WHS 2011 install. Same result - the media center would freeze and then struggle to play movies at 1 FPS.

It's not the media center that has problems. The same thing happens on all 5 computers in the house.

The movies are fine. I copied one to my game computer and played it to see if WHS 2011 somehow corrupted all of my movies, but it played flawlessly.

I keep thinking that perhaps the A4 Llano APU don't have the strength to handle the transfer, but it certainly has a hundred times more power than the Marvel chip that was in my old NAS. Why wouldn't it handle it? On the other hand, the Marvel chip didn't have to push Windows 7 and Windows Server while working the drives and network. It had very little overhead.

Any suggestions for me to try? All of the drives are in NTFS. I'm hesitating to install FreeNAS because then I would have to put all six drives on my gaming computer and transfer the files to the FreeNAS server one drive at a time to prevent losing my movies since FreeNAS will probably convert NTFS into ZFS or EXT3.
 
Are you using green drives? I believe they park the heads after a period of inactivity.
 
Fooshnik said:
Are you using green drives? I believe they park the heads after a period of inactivity.
Click to expand...

Right, which was why I got rid of Drive Pool and placed movies on their own drives. So the drive playing the movie would not need to bother the other 5 drives when it parks. That doesn't explain why the movies doesn't play when another computer calls for them.

But regardless, no they're not green drives.
 
I think you need to break this down to identify where the problem lies.

Benchmark just the network connection, can you saturate your network (assume this is gigE?) between the NAS and your media centre?

Are you getting consistent high transfer speeds copying files from the NAS to the media centre?

Which media centre software are you using? Are you able to increase the buffer size?

Have you checked the CPU load on the NAS using top/windows resource monitor during transfers?

Sorry if i'm teaching granny to suck eggs, but sometimes you just need to go back to basics and test everything in logical chunks to narrow down the problem. :)
 
check your network connection or NIC or driver conflicts

I always pick Intel or Broadcom NIC :D...
my first pick is 1gb dual NIC Intel NIC that can be bougt from $25-$35 on 3bay,
 
cantalup said:
check your network connection or NIC or driver conflicts

I always pick Intel or Broadcom NIC :D...
my first pick is 1gb dual NIC Intel NIC that can be bougt from $25-$35 on 3bay,
Click to expand...

I would second this. It's doubtful there is a CPU problem. There's Atom and Brazos media file servers galore around here. While file serving can be performance intensive, this is not the case with your setup.

Try this....

Grab a Ubuntu Live CD and use that to test the file transfer. If things are OK then you've got a driver problem. If you still experience issues then I would look at your network.
 
kac77 said:
I would second this. It's doubtful there is a CPU problem. There's Atom and Brazos media file servers galore around here. While file serving can be performance intensive, this is not the case with your setup.

Try this....

Grab a Ubuntu Live CD and use that to test the file transfer. If things are OK then you've got a driver problem. If you still experience issues then I would look at your network.
Click to expand...

CPU A4 is powerful enough..
the on-board NIC is always a bottleneck where most desktop mobo use Realtek (ehem.... poor performance).

I'm suspecting Driver issues/NIC at the moment since OP already try win7.

I did troubleshooting with my random jerky connection( that happened after a burst transmit or received ) on my new build linux server with AM3+ mobo-proc.
the problem was on the NIC, I just replace with intel dual NIC, the problem went away instantly:). the onboard NIC is a mighty realtek :)
 
I have several machines with Realtek NICs, and generally they work fine.
Probably wouldn't use them commercially, but they should be OK for home use.

Heres a few things to try to narrow things down a bit:

Find a movie which plays fine from local hard disk and copy that to the media server (so you know you are dealing with exactly the same movie). Then copy it back again (observe the transfer speed in each direction)
Observe the CPU load when playing the file locally, and compare that to the CPU load when playing the file from the media server. At the same time, observe the CPU load on the media server.

You haven't stated what your media center is, but it could be that your media server is attempting to transcode the movies to a format which your media center likes over the network (with some file sharing methods, the media player might treat the same movie differently depending on whether it's coming over the net or is stored locally). The transcoder built into Windows7 is fairly crude TBH - it probably works fine on a powerful PC, but your Llano might struggle, especially with HD content.
 
Last edited:
USF-Nealio said:
What hardware are you using for switching and routing?
Click to expand...

D-link DIR-655 router and Netgear ProSafe GS108 switch. Been perfectly fine streaming BDMV and Video_TS from my two BlackArmor NAS 220 to all 5 computers in the house, even simultaneously.

I'm using the on-board Realtek RTL8111E Gig-E ethernet. I'll try running bandwidth tests. Any recommendations on how to go about that?

I think I'll grab me one of these too: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106036

As for those who think A4 is fast enough, I have to agree. I picked it up knowing that FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault forum members were discussing fast Atom, ARM, and E-series builds. My A4 run laps around these processors.
 
Billy_nnn said:
I have several machines with Realtek NICs, and generally they work fine.
Probably wouldn't use them commercially, but they should be OK for home use.

Heres a few things to try to narrow things down a bit:

Find a movie which plays fine from local hard disk and copy that to the media server (so you know you are dealing with exactly the same movie). Then copy it back again (observe the transfer speed in each direction)
Observe the CPU load when playing the file locally, and compare that to the CPU load when playing the file from the media server. At the same time, observe the CPU load on the media server.

You haven't stated what your media center is, but it could be that your media server is attempting to transcode the movies to a format which your media center likes over the network (with some file sharing methods, the media player might treat the same movie differently depending on whether it's coming over the net or is stored locally). The transcoder built into Windows7 is fairly crude TBH - it probably works fine on a powerful PC, but your Llano might struggle, especially with HD content.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure why the server would perform the transcoding. All I need it to do is deliver the media to all 5 computers in the house and let TMT3 on each computer play it. My computers are all different. One's a Core i3 with 4GB RAM and a Geforce 480. Another's a Core i5 with 4GB RAM and HD4000 video. Still another is an Athlon64 x2 4200+ with 4GB RAM and Geforce 210. One's a Phenom II x3 720 with 8GB RAM and AMD HD4890 video, and finally one's an older Pentium Dual Core with GMA 4500 and 4GB RAM.

Every computer except the Pentium Dual Core could play Blu-ray contents from the BlackArmor NAS in the past. The BlackArmor NAS is a hundred times weaker compared to the new AMD A4 media server build, but I dunno what NIC it had except that it's a Gig-E network.

Is it because I was running Windows as the storage OS? It doesn't simply hand off the media to play on respective computers? It tries to transcode them on the fly? Would I be able to get around that by putting FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault on it to make it delivery-only?
 
Billy_nnn said:
If ever there was a phrase coined to describe DLNA/Windows media sharing.......:D
Click to expand...

hehe yeah. I say that because after I threw everything together and connected MediaBrowser to the shared drives on WHS, it populated in Media Center much faster than my BlackArmor did, and I was so elated. The movies played immediately without the usual 4-5 second delay and everyone in the house went yay!! But that wore off when it kept freezing between chapters.

That's why I'm thinking it's not NIC and drive and AMD A4. Maybe its like you said, Windows took over transcoding the media instead of simply delivering the content to computers elsewhere to let it do the work.
 
Have you tried just turning media streaming off on your media server?

You can tell if your media server is transcoding - just look at the CPU usage (on the media server) while you try to play a movie on your media center - if it's flat out, it's very likely attempting to transcode, and your A4 probably doesn't have the power for that, especially if it's HD.
 
Another thing you could try, is using a different media player (other than media center or WMP).
Try something like VLC or MPC-HC.
 
Yes media streaming is disabled in Windows 7. Never checked when I had WHS 2011 installed. Windows 7 is installed as Home Network with password-less sharing enabled, homegroup disabled, and media stream disabled in the advanced sharing settings. I've also tried media player classic, VLC, and TMT3 with the same result.
 
I use PFsense for DIY routers, and a large number of PFsense forum members not only prefer Intel NICS over RealTek, they outright refuse to use RealTek NICs at all. Besides having lower throughput than Intel NICs, they often lockup or drop connection. So I'd definitely start by installing a dedicated Intel NIC, and retesting.

You can try using Iperft to test throughput of your network. http://linhost.info/2010/02/iperf-on-windows/
 
Azhar said:
Yes media streaming is disabled in Windows 7. Never checked when I had WHS 2011 installed. Windows 7 is installed as Home Network with password-less sharing enabled, homegroup disabled, and media stream disabled in the advanced sharing settings. I've also tried media player classic, VLC, and TMT3 with the same result.
Click to expand...

In which case, it's probably nothing to do with transcoding :)

What's the CPU loading on the two machines when you attempt to play a movie from a network share?
If you copy the movie between the two systems, what's the transfer speed each way?
 
I'll try the transfer speed when I get home from work tonight. Everything I've answered thus far are things I've already tried the past 3 days.

Hell, I've even tried installing TMT3 on the A4 machine itself and it played my Blu-ray collections just fine. Maybe some of you guys are right about the Realtek NIC. I hope that's all it is!
 
Could be.....I take it you've changed the network cable and checked that the server does connect to the switch at 1Gbps.
 
I don't know if it is relevant to this particular issue but it might: I have had problems with some Asrock boards in the past that used third party lan controllers (Realtek and AsMedia). The problems manifested themselves in a very specific way: SMB traffic was generally fine but streaming over HTTP was hideous, buffered after 1 frame and then eventually failed completely. What made things somewhat better was using the latest official drivers from the respective controller company (Not from AsRock's site. Latest drive for your board is 7.044 on the AsRock site, 7.058 on Realteks site). It made it better but not perfect, and I eventually just shoved some cheap Intel PciEx1 adapters into the machines.
 
mwroobel said:
I don't know if it is relevant to this particular issue but it might: I have had problems with some Asrock boards in the past that used third party lan controllers (Realtek and AsMedia). The problems manifested themselves in a very specific way: SMB traffic was generally fine but streaming over HTTP was hideous, buffered after 1 frame and then eventually failed completely. What made things somewhat better was using the latest official drivers from the respective controller company (Not from AsRock's site. Latest drive for your board is 7.044 on the AsRock site, 7.058 on Realteks site). It made it better but not perfect, and I eventually just shoved some cheap Intel PciEx1 adapters into the machines.
Click to expand...

Good to know. ASRock's been known for overhyping features, I'll grant that, but they've also been pretty good about making stable boards the past several years. I picked this particular board because it has 8 SATA ports, not because of the ASRock name. I'll swing by Staples on the way to my train and see if they have a PCI-E Intel card. Yeah it's $39 on NewEgg, but my 6 and 12 year olds are getting antsy with me for taking their movies offline!
 
I'd suggest using "XBMC live" (a live version of the XBMC media center) to test on various machines to connect to the server. You got a lot of help here and I'm sure it's a simple problem that's gonna be solved by all the brains here assisting. I can only imagine how rotted you are with the whole thing :) been there.
 
With Windows 7 to Windows 7 networking - streaming off, homegroup off, password check off, guest account on - a 24.9GB Blu-ray file copies from my gaming computer to the media storage at between 75-82 MB/second using the on-board Realtek RTL8111E

I remember my BlackArmor NAS 220 having a copy transfer rate of around 20-25 MB/second.

I'm going to attempt FreeNAS on a USB 2.0 thumb drive and see if it helps.
 
Azhar said:
With Windows 7 to Windows 7 networking - streaming off, homegroup off, password check off, guest account on - a 24.9GB Blu-ray file copies from my gaming computer to the media storage at between 75-82 MB/second using the on-board Realtek RTL8111E

I remember my BlackArmor NAS 220 having a copy transfer rate of around 20-25 MB/second.

I'm going to attempt FreeNAS on a USB 2.0 thumb drive and see if it helps.
Click to expand...

this are my understanding:
you do not see when copying data over ethernet since the rate is an average value.
on linux, I wrote a simple script to calculate rate on certain duration (5-10 seconds) that would tell me the behavior of my system.

I do not know in windows well, on linux you can see how many packets send/received/failed..

on a good scenario, failed packages are minimal and not increasing very fast, assuming tc/ip connection

this is the reason you need a good NIC on server side.
 
Welp FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault will not install on the new system via DVD. It'll run the bootloader from the install DVD and then fail saying it won't detect the CD-ROM drive to complete the install. Windows have no problems detecting the drive. I surmise that FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault doesn't recognize the SATA chipset used by this new board.
 
I'm attempting to reinstall WHS 2011, this time making sure the SATA controller's in AHCI mode instead of IDE, and when installing the Realtek driver, I use the reference driver 7.058 instead of the ASRock driver (7.044). I also went into Device Manager and found a ton of settings I've never seen on NICs on other computers such as green ethernet mode and power efficiency mode, both which were enabled. I disabled them. In addition, I changed auto-negotiate to 1Gbit mode.

We'll see how things go when I add the drives to the server tomorrow after work. It's late.
 
Azhar said:
I'm attempting to reinstall WHS 2011, this time making sure the SATA controller's in ACHI mode instead of IDE, and when installing the Realtek driver, I use the reference driver 7.058 instead of the ASRock driver (7.044). I also went into Device Manager and found a ton of settings I've never seen on NICs on other computers such as green ethernet mode and power efficiency mode, both which were enabled. I disabled them. In addition, I changed auto-negotiate to 1Gbit mode.

We'll see how things go when I add the drives to the server tomorrow after work. It's late.
Click to expand...

Leave auto-negotiate at auto. If there is a cable or network problem, let it negotiate down and you will notice a problem there, and it will also slow down and remove (or at least mediate) that particular problem.
 
mwroobel said:
Leave auto-negotiate at auto. If there is a cable or network problem, let it negotiate down and you will notice a problem there, and it will also slow down and remove (or at least mediate) that particular problem.
Click to expand...

10-4. Will do that after the update thingy finishes.
 
a 24.9GB Blu-ray file copies from my gaming computer to the media storage at between 75-82 MB/second using the on-board Realtek RTL8111E


Is it the same going the other way?
 
Billy_nnn said:
a 24.9GB Blu-ray file copies from my gaming computer to the media storage at between 75-82 MB/second using the on-board Realtek RTL8111E


Is it the same going the other way?
Click to expand...

I haven't tried the other way. I wanted to put WHS 2011 back on the machine first since W7 and WHS 2011 acted the same way. I'll try it tonight when I plug all of the storage drives back in.
 
Azhar said:
First I installed Windows Home Server 2011 with Stablebit Drive Pool. It almost worked great. Movies populated on the media center instantly, and they all played instantly too.

>>Only problem<< was at the end of every chapter, the movie freezes for 10+ seconds, then fast forwards to catch up.
Click to expand...
I suspect that you have pinpointed the key symptom; if you return to focusing on that, I think you'll identify/cure the disease. I have no experience with Windows-based servers, or Windows media-players, so I won't take any guesses.
 
i just went through a similar issue with my HTPC/Mediaserver setup.

Blu-Ray Rips
HTPC would play fine (Intel board G620 processor, Nvidia 430, Windows 7)
My PC would play fine (Gigabyte Board, i3-2100, 5770 video card, Windows 7)
Wifes Computer (Asus Board, i3-2100, 6770 video card, Windows 7)
Media Server (HP40NL Microserver, WHS 2011, DriveBender, 4x2TB)

The HTPC and my pc play fine all the time, zero issues. My wifes computer would play fine some of the time but other times it would stutter. Copy the movie over to her internal drive, no issues and I would see 80-90MB/s transfer speeds.

I put in a intel PCI-e 1x nic in her computer last week and so far this week no issues at all (knock on wood).

Both my wifes and my pc have RTL8111E network chips in them, but my machine never has issues with movies stuttering.
 
TType85 said:
i just went through a similar issue with my HTPC/Mediaserver setup.

Blu-Ray Rips
HTPC would play fine (Intel board G620 processor, Nvidia 430, Windows 7)
My PC would play fine (Gigabyte Board, i3-2100, 5770 video card, Windows 7)
Wifes Computer (Asus Board, i3-2100, 6770 video card, Windows 7)
Media Server (HP40NL Microserver, WHS 2011, DriveBender, 4x2TB)

The HTPC and my pc play fine all the time, zero issues. My wifes computer would play fine some of the time but other times it would stutter. Copy the movie over to her internal drive, no issues and I would see 80-90MB/s transfer speeds.

I put in a intel PCI-e 1x nic in her computer last week and so far this week no issues at all (knock on wood).

Both my wifes and my pc have RTL8111E network chips in them, but my machine never has issues with movies stuttering.
Click to expand...

Sounds promising! Thanks for this post.

If it comes to it, I'll just cave in and buy a 6-8 bay NAS enclosure and call it a day, and give the AMD A4 Llano build to my 12 year old :p
 
Azhar said:
Sounds promising! Thanks for this post.

If it comes to it, I'll just cave in and buy a 6-8 bay NAS enclosure and call it a day, and give the AMD A4 Llano build to my 12 year old :p
Click to expand...

You can get an Intel NIC for next to nothing. Just about any Intel NIC would be better. I would definitely try that first before ditching the machine.
 
mwroobel said:
I don't know if it is relevant to this particular issue but it might: I have had problems with some Asrock boards in the past that used third party lan controllers (Realtek and AsMedia). The problems manifested themselves in a very specific way: SMB traffic was generally fine but streaming over HTTP was hideous, buffered after 1 frame and then eventually failed completely. What made things somewhat better was using the latest official drivers from the respective controller company (Not from AsRock's site. Latest drive for your board is 7.044 on the AsRock site, 7.058 on Realteks site). It made it better but not perfect, and I eventually just shoved some cheap Intel PciEx1 adapters into the machines.
Click to expand...

I 2nd this, ASRock Nick drivers are crap. I was getting a lot of stuttering streaming video from my file server to desktop (the asrock board). Swapped out cables/switch/installed latest drivers(ASRock website) and none of it helped.

Went to Realteks website, downloaded the latest drivers from their website, and ive had no problems sense than. Try the new drivers, if that doesnt work, get a Intel NIC. You will get better performance either way.
 
Looks like mwroobel was spot on in post #21. The Realtek reference driver took care of the issue. I was able to stream movies to two computers without stuttering, but a third computer would cause it to stutter. Still better than stuttering on just one computer.

I went ahead and ordered a PCI-E x1 Intel NIC from NewEgg for $29. That should solve the remaining lack of bandwidth that the Realtek chip suffers from.

I'm curious what the hell ASRock did to the NIC driver to make it perform this badly - or why they would do that.
 
Azhar said:
I'm curious what the hell ASRock did to the NIC driver to make it perform this badly - or why they would do that.
Click to expand...

You really don't want to know. :( After being in embedded HW design for over a decade...you would be suprised what the SW guys will do to meet schedule.
 
Azhar said:
Looks like mwroobel was spot on in post #21. The Realtek reference driver took care of the issue. I was able to stream movies to two computers without stuttering, but a third computer would cause it to stutter. Still better than stuttering on just one computer.

I went ahead and ordered a PCI-E x1 Intel NIC from NewEgg for $29. That should solve the remaining lack of bandwidth that the Realtek chip suffers from.

I'm curious what the hell ASRock did to the NIC driver to make it perform this badly - or why they would do that.
Click to expand...

as I told you :p.... buy an Intel NIC and you would be glad!
 
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