TV freezes for short time, disks heard spinning up (1 Viewer)

hoverdonkey

Portal Member
October 19, 2008
32
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United Kingdom United Kingdom
Hello


First I would explain that my system has 3 HDDs. MP is installed on the OS disk (which is also assigned to for timeshifting & recording) plus 2 data disks.

Once or twice an hour, TV playback (both image & sound) will pause for a few seconds and then a disk will be heard spinning up. TV will then resume as normal for a second, then will pause again and a second HDD will be heard spinning up. TV will then resume and carry on normally until the next recurrence, always in pairs. NB I always run in timeshift mode.

I could work around the problem (i.e. by setting the disks to never spin down) but this would defeat my objective of using quite and efficient hardware. I understand that it is normal behaviour for Windows 7 to access drives when it feels like it, thus causing them to spin up.

I recall this only being a problem after installing stable release 1.0 - but I also would also have refreshed drivers at this point so it may not be a MP problem. However, I would be grateful for any ideas, as it is driving me nuts!

Thank you




MediaPortal Version: 1.1.0.0
MediaPortal Skin: Blueskin wide
Windows Version: Windows 7, Home Premium, 64 bit
CPU Type: AMD 4850e (2.5GHz dual core)
HDD: Boot = Western Digital 512GB, Data #1 = Western Digit512GB, Data Disk 2 = Samsung 1.5TB
Memory: 2GB DDR2
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Rev. 1.0
Video Card: Integrated (AMD 780G chipset, HD 3200)
Video Card Driver: 8.782.0.0
Sound Card: M2Tech HiFace USB-SPDIF adapter
Sound Card AC3: no AC3
Sound Card Driver: 1.0.3.140
1. TV Card: PEAK 221544AGPK DVB-T Digital TV PCI Card Dual Tuner
1. TV Card Type: Dual DVB-T
1. TV Card Driver: AF9015 BDA Device v. 9.603.1.630
2. TV Card:
2
. TV Card Type
:
2. TV Card Driver:
3. TV Card:
3. TV Card Type:
3. TV Card Driver:
4. TV Card:
4. TV Card Type:
4. TV Card Driver:
MPEG2 Video Codec: Cyberlink SAC Video Decoder (PDVD7 HomeNetwork) SAF4
MPEG2 Audio Codec: Cyberlink Audio Decoder (PDVD7 UPnP) SAF4
h.264 Video Codec: ffdshow DXVA video decoder SAF4
Satelite/CableTV Provider:
HTPC Case: Antec NSK2480
Cooling: Mini Ninja, Nexus 120mm fan
Power Supply: Silverstone SST-ST30NF 300W
Remote: Gyration MCE
TV: Dell 2707WFP
TV - HTPC Connection: HDMI to DVI
 

arion_p

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  • February 7, 2007
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    When disks are spun down it is not possible to read or write to them. When an application requires disk access it stall until disks spin up to proper speed. That is normal behavior of Windows and no application can do anything about it (in fact disk spin up will stall all disk access and as a result the entire system appears to be frozen).
     

    hoverdonkey

    Portal Member
    October 19, 2008
    32
    2
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    Thanks for the explanation, that is a surprisingly fundamental flaw for an OS! I guess will have to leave the 2 data disks spinning if I want to keep using the HTPC as a server (or else move to NAS).

    I do not have the problem when watching videos in MP. Is this because the video is buffered in RAM?

    SSD Works a treat :D
    Too expensive to replace my bulk data storage with SSD. But would changing the system drive to SSD overcome the bottleneck? Maybe using PCI-E not SATA would make the difference?
     

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