- April 5, 2009
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United States of America
Skips or stutter in recorded TV, slow SATA transfer rate
This post is a solution to a difficult to find (for me) issue I had, hopefully someone else with the same problem will stumble on this post.
The symptom:
Recorded TV shows, US over the air ATSC HDTV, would occasionally skip or stutter.
I recently upgraded my HDD to a WD Black 750GB. My OS is Win XP SP3
I was doing some drive testing and ran HDtune (free version, not pro HD Tune website ) to look at transfer rate. I discovered that my max and average disk transfer rate was 7.8 MB/sec and the CPU load was 48%! Something is defiantly wrong. A little searching and I found this:
Very slow SATA connection
Link to MS KB answer
IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur
Sure enough the “active” transfer mode was PIO, easy fix. Honestly not sure when this happened, or how it happened. I had used Hdtune to do some disk benchmarking just after the new drive install and I know the x-fer rate was great then. I have imaged the drive and restored it since, so who knows.
I am amazed the system worked at all at that rate and will watch for any degradation in performance and keep an eye on the transfer mode.
This post is a solution to a difficult to find (for me) issue I had, hopefully someone else with the same problem will stumble on this post.
The symptom:
Recorded TV shows, US over the air ATSC HDTV, would occasionally skip or stutter.
I recently upgraded my HDD to a WD Black 750GB. My OS is Win XP SP3
I was doing some drive testing and ran HDtune (free version, not pro HD Tune website ) to look at transfer rate. I discovered that my max and average disk transfer rate was 7.8 MB/sec and the CPU load was 48%! Something is defiantly wrong. A little searching and I found this:
Very slow SATA connection
Link to MS KB answer
IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur
Sure enough the “active” transfer mode was PIO, easy fix. Honestly not sure when this happened, or how it happened. I had used Hdtune to do some disk benchmarking just after the new drive install and I know the x-fer rate was great then. I have imaged the drive and restored it since, so who knows.
I am amazed the system worked at all at that rate and will watch for any degradation in performance and keep an eye on the transfer mode.