Morning Bit of a long winded one this. Bloody annoying though. Recently I swapped to a new server / workstation - Ryzen 1700, Asus X370 Pro etc - and I'm having an odd issue streaming videos from it. The video began freezing for a while when played on another PC before catching up at high speed - both on wired connections and wireless. The videos were stored on a RAID 1 array connected to the motherboard SATA ports - it was a windows software RAID array created on another PC through disk management and then imported via disk management. Things I tried Update network drivers on server Update chipset drivers on server Update GPU driver on server and client Update kodi and VLC on client Uninstall anti-virus on server Check router CPU usage & reboot Check for abnormal CPU / RAM usage on both server & client At this point I realised that videos streamed from the same server to the same client but from a different RAID 1 array weren't having the same issues. Assuming that something had gone a bit iffy with the import of the array I then did the following: Copied all files onto another hard drive (no RAID) Wiped both disks (4TB WD Red) Created a mirrored storage space Checked SMART data for drives - no problems reported Copied files back across This has not sorted the problem however - it seems to happen less frequently but still happens when files are played from the new storage space. Files played from the single hard drive (just a 3TB WD green iirc) work fine - no freezing etc. I decided to run a HD Tune Error scan but noticed a weird problem. It reports both drives as being 2199GB not the full 4GB - this is the same with 2 3TB drives attached in the same way. They are reported as being the correct size by other HDD monitoring software (crystaldiskinfo etc) as well as in disk management, storage pool management etc. Questions Is this size discrepancy a limitation of HD Tune rather than HD Tune Pro? Is there another way to check for errors instead of using HD Tune (like chkdsk)? If I use chkdsk then how does it cope with storage spaces? I've thought about running it just to check for, but not fix errors (chkdsk D: ) but windows sees D: as just one drive not the two that are actually there. Will I need to delete the storage space to run chkdsk? Have I overlooked something - could something else be causing this issue? The drives are in warranty but all the software checks I've tried so far shows there being nothing wrong with them so I don't think I'd get very far sending them back. Thanks in advance GK
I think I have looked at power options but maybe not for the drives themselves - I'll look into it. It doesn't seem to be happening at a consistent time however. The other day, for example, I was watching an episode of doctor who and it froze about 25 minutes in but when my little 'un was watching an episode of postman pat it froze after about 5 minutes or less. Edit: Just checked - hard drives are set to not spin down in power settings.
HDTune (the free one) is a complete waste of time for large capacity drives. Try gsmartcontrol. Runs the HDDs built in industry standard tests. Run the long ones and see what happens. Having said that, it sounds more software related than anything else. What happens if you use one of the drives by itself, setup as a GPT disk not a dynamic disk?
Thanks for the link - I'll give that a try. I haven't tried the disks separately from each other as I thought it was the RAID array so just went for another mirrored solution, possibly stupidly, before trying them by themselves. That'll be the next step I think if gmartcontrol shows up nothing. Edit: Do you mean the 'extended self-test'? Edit: Hmmm - so the extended test got about 45 minutes in and then stopped with a Status of "Interrupted (host reset)". I wonder if it could be the sata cables / power to the drive?
