Hard Disk Access & Stutter

[imnee]

OK... My server has ben very solid for a long time. All of the sudden I'm getting bursts of disk access that cause playback to stutter. Can't figure out what is causing the issue. The HD light goes solid for about 30 seconds and it seems to be random. It will go for hours and be fine and then it will happen two or three times in a row. There is nothing on the server outside of BTV, FireFly, & Event Ghost...

Here are some details:

XP SP3
64K Clusters On 3 Recording Drives
OS on WD Raptor
No AntiVirus
No Indexing Enabled
At least 20% Free On All Recording Drives
No Show Squeeze
Smart Skip After Hours Only
CPU Usage remains low when the issue occurs

[Nick Burns]

Disk failing? Try some SMART tools to diagnose.

[Jakesty]

Any recent auto updates of the OS?
For the sake of checking run an antivirus and/or Malwarebytes scan too.

[scottlindner]

Could be it automatic updates causing more churn on the drive?

Maybe the drive is heavily fragmented?

[gambitpvr]

My server did the same thing last month. After checking disk fragmentation, patching the system, rebooting and checking the transfer mode for the drives in the Device Manager, I finally decided it was a hardware issue.

Luckily, it was just a bad SATA cable. I replaced it and the system went back to normal.

[imnee]

OK, one of my Seagate storage drives is dying. I ran the seatools diagnostics and one disk never finished. I am currently copying all of the shows off of the disk at a snails pace! The drive is definitely the issue.

[scottlindner]

Wow, that sucks. I have never had a drive fail. I guess I've been lucky.

Glad you figured it out, even though the answer isn't a good one.

Scott

[Nick Burns]

When I first experienced stuttering/skipping/corrupted recordings earlier this year, I discovered one of my drives in my RAID started to fail. I now how the RAID software installed to monitor SMART and drive failure.

[imnee]

This is the third one in the past few years. The other ones were very obvious. This one still works fine outside of being very slow reading certain parts of the disk. When copying the files off of it, it would go from 7 minutes remaing to 300 minutes remaining and then back to 7 minutes... At least I was able to recover all data.

Originally Posted by scottlindner

Wow, that sucks. I have never had a drive fail. I guess I've been lucky.

Glad you figured it out, even though the answer isn't a good one.

Scott

[imnee]

I don't use raid although my disks are SMART capable. I'm going to look into why I didn't receive a warning. The Seatools could quickly see an issue.

Originally Posted by Nick Burns

When I first experienced stuttering/skipping/corrupted recordings earlier this year, I discovered one of my drives in my RAID started to fail. I now how the RAID software installed to monitor SMART and drive failure.

[DougPage]

Try SpinRite from Home of Gibson Research Corporation. It will more than likely get your drive running faster and let you know the state its in.

Great disk repair and testing utility. Can even do inplace re-formatting. I use it a couple of times per year on each drive just to measure their reliability and refresh the drive and data.

[Bigbird999]

+1 for Spinrite. Great for recovering data from a failed/failing HDD. But be aware that it dates back to the days when 100 GB drives were more the norm With today's 1 - 2 TB drives, it will take a loooooonnnnnnnnngggggggg time to run.

BB