WHS unnecessary hard drive activity

D

DangerIsGo

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So my NAS has been running fine for a while then all of a sudden, in the past few months, things just went downhill. For example, when an HD movie (located on the NAS) is played on any comp on the LAN (gigabit LAN), it'll play fine for a while, then during it, it would stutter to the point of not-watchable. Why? Because one or two HDDs would have maxed activity. While its doing this 'thing', whatever it is (since nothing should be happening, no backup is running, no duplication is happening, just the movie streaming which that nowhere near maxes out the HDDs bandwidth) i cant watch movies, I cant access the shares, I cant remote desktop, I cant run the WHS connection utility, nothing. If i have a remote desktop session open and this happens, I can see the one or two HDDs maxing out (I'm not sure if the movie is located on them or not but my guess is yes). Anyone have this issue? Anyone know what it could be? I have 14TB capacity with 9TB used along with drive balancer used a few times so right now, each drive has the same %. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.
 
Drive balancer/extender. Happens at least every hour and also after you add new files to the machine.
 
Drive balancer, the standalone program thats out there, needs to be ran manually which I do like once a month (if necessary). Thats not causing this. What is Drive Extender and how does it affect this?
 
I believe that Antimatter was referring to Drive Extender and in particular the Drive Extender Migrator service. It's run under the following conditions:

The Drive Extender Migrator service is run under the following conditions:
• Every hour, or to be more specific – after resting an hour after the last completion.
• When the Drive Extender Migrator service starts up – typically when you first turn on your home server.
• When a shared folder is added or removed using the Windows Home Server Console’s Shared Folders tab.
• When duplication on a Shared Folder is turned on or off.
• When a hard drive is added to Server Storage using the Windows Home Server Console.

As for what is DE:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server#Drive_Extender

Microsoft has a technical brief on DE here:
http://www.microsoft.com/DownLoads/...CC-B85F-45FE-8C5C-F103C894A5E2&displaylang=en
 
You could open up the services.msc and change the DEMigrator server from starting up automatically.
Then create a scheduled task that will run demigrator at specified times. IE 3AM or whatever.
 
Yes, I have batch files for start/stop of DE. Then I have scheduled them, so demigrator is off every day during watching time.

DE is really heavy on drives and its trashing I/O, thats why high bitrated files like blu-rays are stuttering during streaming.
 
Wow, that's awesome. So far, everything's been working great since I disabled that. I have it turn on when I'm not home which is most of the day. The only thing is that when its disabled, my icon is yellow saying that migrator service isn't started. Is there a way to 'ignore this issue'?
 
Question on this old issue, I had the same problem and had to stop the drive extender migrator service to continue playing my movie. But my service was already set as manual startup, and also if I just stop the service it will just restart a minute later. I had to set the service to disabled to finish the movie. Obviously I don't want to leave it disabled but how do I schedule it for certain times if it is going to start by itself when the service is set to manual? What is stopping/starting it now, anyone know?
 
This is a good question. I stopped the service, and scheduled it to run at 3AM, but there is no way to stop the service. Maybe JonTa can share his batch file? Please?
 
Sure, just create .bat files with this and scheduled them when you like. This will keep demigrator disabled and not interfering with streaming.

Code: 
REM Batchfile to stop the WHS Drive Extender Migrator Service and set it to Disabled
net stop DriveExtenderMigrator
sc.exe \\localhost config DriveExtenderMigrator start= disabled

Code: 
REM: Batchfile to reset the WHS Drive Extender Migrator Service to on demand and start the service
sc.exe \\localhost config DriveExtenderMigrator start= manual
net start DriveExtenderMigrator
 
Thanks, I guess we are hoping that whatever is controlling this service normally doesn't interfere or take issue with this?
 
Ya, thats pretty much the same code I use in my batch files. Works very well, but I wonder if theres a defrag program that works with WHS?
 
Raxco and Diskeeper both have WHS defraggers.

I've used the DK but never really noticed any difference.
 
I just discovered a problem with these, I noticed the services console says my drive balance last happened a couple of days ago so it wasn't running. I added a pause to the start bat file and saw this below. Looks like there is no "manual" option. I am thinking about just letting it go to auto? Does the start bat file work for others? Could be I have an old version of sc.exe somehow but I am legit and have all updates...

Demegratorbaterror.png
 
Posted on another forum, the correct bat file to start the service back up is this. Make sure you fix this otherwise your duplication isn't working.

Code: 
REM: Batchfile to reset the WHS Drive Extender Migrator Service to on demand and start the service
sc.exe \\localhost config DriveExtenderMigrator start= demand
net start DriveExtenderMigrator
 
Resurrecting this post because it is full of win. Had the same problem and I will try this tonight. Has anyone made a plugin that will address this yet?
 
MaxBurn said:
No plugin. Not really necessary IMO, just two bat files and a scheduled task works great. This is the thread that has all the info in it.

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/8335-demigratorexe-again/
Click to expand...

I don't like that disableing the service will cause WHS to throw alerts. While a plugin might not solve this, it would put all the controls into one place and be accessible from the WHS console. I don't like all my computers having access to Remote Desktop into my WHS server and I don't want to have to always go into the other room to change the settings from my command center. Thats why I think a plugin woudl still be great.

For what it's worth, This problem has gotten MUCH worse since adding 2 WD 1TB drives on an internal sata card. I think this might be the culprit for the major slowdowns. Before this I have been using 100% Samsung green 5400 drives. (it would still skip sometimes but not nearly as much).
 
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So I setup the scheduler and bat files to kill the drive extender durring the day. I am however still having some slow down durring HD playback. Although this has GREATLY reduced the skipping often, I still find a movie will eventually skip or judder. However now, pausing it for a min and they letting it continue to play seems to sometimes fix it. I'm starting to hate my plan and idea to use WHS for a Media server...

Is there another process I need to disable to eliminate this problem? Do I need to replace all 8 1TB Samsung/Western Digitial Green drives with 7200 RPM drives? I knwo a 5400 RPM drive SHOULD be fast enough, but maybe they really are not, or have some other problems?
 
Could add a RAID card if you didnt want to replace your drives.
But then you have to make sure they are compatible.
 
If you read the thread on wegotserved, your experience is not uncommon. For some, the 7200rpm drives were the ( only ) fix.
 
Unfortunately after purchasing 8 1TB drives for about $108-$200 each, it's hard to justify buying new drives to maybe fix the problem.

I do have some trusty (yea right) segate 1TB drives that are 7200 RPM that I can toss in there in place of the 2 WD green drives. I wonder if the 6 remaining Samsung Drives will work well enough? What a POS...I hope vail is better because I can't justify upgrading twice since I would have to buy another array of hard drives to backup my media server.

7200 RPM drives are a crappy fix for a machine I want to be energy efficient.
 
Look up the STR numbers on newer 5400rpm drives, they are still pretty good. 7200 shouldn't be necessary to stream a movie, access time isn't important for streaming. Most of the drives I put on my box were the 5900 ones from seagate, think they are pretty good tradeoff for this app.

Still there are other thing that will mess you up like window search indexer or my movies doing a scan to add titles. Demegrator is bad but isn't the only thing that can steal disk access.
 
I'll take another peak at mymovies, but I believe I have it set to do all the updating when mediaportal is first launched, It seems to be on the server side, because I don' see the HD light cranking when I get stuttering.
 
The only other " fix " that has been reported was reinstalling the OS. Not sure why that works, but there are reports it does.
 
The OS install is fairly old, but it was not in use for some time. Reinstalling the OS at this time is not really an option. I would need to spend an entire week working on that, not to mention the risk of losing everything. I really don't think its the problem though, it does seem to happen about once per movie but only if the movie is 8GB file or larger, and it goes away if I pause for a min and they let it resume. Just kind of annoying!
 
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