Severe Media Storage Stutters

Any time that I buy for myself or recommend a motherboard to someone else that for whatever reason does not have an Intel LAN chip, I always spec out an Intel LAN card to go with it.
 
Awesome, glad you got the problem fixed. If i was using the ASrock board for my server i would be picking up a Intel card myself, but right now its my gaming pc and the updated drivers fixed my issue for the most part.
 
Have you tried disabling tcp offload on the NIC, you will have to do it for IP4 and IP6, this may resolve the issue.
 
One thing you might want to do if you don't use drive pool, is setup NFS on your server. Then have your pc client and media devices that connect from your player using NFS. tend to get less stuttering with that turn on. But currently, I have yet to find a way to get it to work with the different Drive Pool Software.
 
I found a second cause of the severe stuttering. The two drives that were in one of my failing BlackArmor NAS 220 stutters very badly when playing movies off of it, even with the new Intel PCI-E x1 NIC, but the other four 2TB drives I have (two new ones and two from another BlackArmor NAS 220) played fine.

I guess my initial verdict that just the IO board in the failing BlackArmor was incorrect. It appears that the drives were too. Chkdsk and SMART test showed no errors and bad sectors, but they're behaving poorly anyways. Any more in-depth tests I should perform on the two bad drives or should I consider the choppy playback of movies a fair indication of the drives failing?
 
i am sure you could use a trial version of hard drive sentinel. I use that program, and it seems to give me way more information then windows does.
 
What model are the failing drives?

On windows, HD Tune allows rudimentary benchmarking of drives - the basic version is free.
Atto disk benchmark is another free alternative!
 
I'll get the model number as soon as the transfer of all my data on those two drives are moved to a the two Samsungs. I'm not going to bother with a drive test. A 665GB transfer of movies from the Seagate to the Samsung has been taking over 7 hours so far at 10.6 MB/second. I think we can safely say the drive is on its last leg. Blech.
 
Streaming movies is nothing for a wired connection.

Even a Bluray rip at 24Mb/s is only about 3 MEGABYTES per second....remember divide the encode by 8 to get megabytes. Even a 100mbit network will handle that (about 11MB max transfer speed).

Every harddrive and network even remotely available today can handle those speeds.
 
Azhar said:
I'll get the model number as soon as the transfer of all my data on those two drives are moved to a the two Samsungs. I'm not going to bother with a drive test. A 665GB transfer of movies from the Seagate to the Samsung has been taking over 7 hours so far at 10.6 MB/second. I think we can safely say the drive is on its last leg. Blech.
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Is this on a 100mbit NIC? Thats the speed you would expect to see on a 100mbit NIC.
 
westrock2000 said:
Is this on a 100mbit NIC? Thats the speed you would expect to see on a 100mbit NIC.
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Nope, he's got the Seagate Black Nas 220, which is GigE. If it negotiated down to 100 the speed would be right, but not the stuttering.
 
It's not over network. The drives are FROM a Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220. It's pulled out and put into a file server because the NAS unit kept shutting itself off at random. I initially thought the IO board in the NAS was going bad, so I transferred all of the files from that NAS to another drive and then pulled the drives out and put it in a file server. But it turned out the drives that was pulled out of that NAS unit was failing too.

This is pure SATA to SATA transfer from the same motherboard. From the dying drive that was pulled out of the NAS to a new Samsung drive. The speed degraded to 5.39 MB/second overnight. The files are still transferring over. Almost done.

There's no issue with the motherboard itself. Transfer from two Samsung drives and from the Samsung to two other Seagate drives from my second NAS (that was working fine) runs at about 80-110 MB/second. It's only 5-10 MB/secong on the bad drive from the failed NAS unit.
 
The other two remaining drives pulled from another Seagate NAS leaves much to be desired too. The four BlackArmor NAS drives are Baracuda LP 2TB, product number 9TN158-568, firmware CC94, date code 10126, site code WU.

The way they all are performing on the ASRock build tells me they've never intended on letting you use the drives outside of the BlackArmor boxes.
 
Sounds to me like 4K drives emulating 512b... and it's an alignment issue... with speeds slowing down like that.

.
 
Stanza33 said:
Sounds to me like 4K drives emulating 512b... and it's an alignment issue... with speeds slowing down like that.

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When formatting the drives, 4k is selected. Should I reformat the drive as 512b?
 
I think you have the earlier Barracuda LP drive (ST32000542AS), which is a 512b sector model AFAIK.

There is an updated firmware available - CC35 (I read somewhere that the 90 series of firmware indicated that the drive was originally in an external unit, and so CC94 is the external version of firmware CC34 - can't vouch for this info though)
 
What would you recommend I do at this point? Ditch it and get a newer 4k drive?
 
Problem solved. Ran across this article this afternoon regarding A75 motherboard round-ups and noticed that the last two of the 8 SATA controllers use ASRock's ASM1061 controllers instead of the AMD Hudson D3 controller. Having learned how badly ASRock's rewrite of Realtek NIC drivers were, I removed the SATA cables and drives from the ASM1061 ports, and lo and behold, all movies are playing perfectly on both Samsung and Seagate drives.

Looks like I'll be expanding beyond 6 ports using SATA controller cards in the future - which is fine by me.
 
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