Low Hard drive sleep timer causing playback issues

[fdm225]

Hi all,
I believe I have solved my own problem but wanted to share this information and ask a follow up question. I have a machine running windows XP (32-bit) with 4 gigs of memory and 2 hard drives.

So I finally got the setup working great and then decided to improve perfection by turning on power management. In the power options I had the hard drives set to go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity, assuming that playback of the large, HD video files would be enough to keep them running. Well I was wrong! It seems that due to the large amount of ram in the machine the video playback was being cached into main memory and not reading from the disks. So about 15 minutes into the show I would see playback freeze (while the hard disk would spin up) and then randomly jump forward in time. At this point the playback would be out of sync with respect to the timeline shown by the UI.

When this first started happening (being that I made several changes at once) I was unsure of the root cause, so I tried different codecs, different mux options, different skins, different everything! In the end I upped the sleep timeout on my hard drive to 60 minutes and the issue goes away!

So here is my question, is there a way to have a low timeout on the sleep timer and not have this issue happen? Being that the computer is running 24/7 (well when it is not sleeping ) I want to try to make it as power efficient as possible.

Thanks,
dave

[martint123]

I don't have my drives go to sleep at all.
But I do let the whole machine go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity outside of evening viewing.

Just spinning a drive down won't save much power (unless it's an old 5.25" SCSI beast!)

[gEd]

same here. I keeep HDs alive and let pc go into standby after 20 mins.

I found it a pain having stutter problems whilst one of my drives span up, normally not the one with the recording on incidentally.

[martint123]

I found it a pain having stutter problems whilst one of my drives span up, normally not the one with the recording on incidentally.

Yes, Windows seems to freeze and forget all it's multitasking abilities when it's waiting for a drive to spin up

[rookie]

I found that System Restore was causing problems by checking the drives every so often. So I turned it off. However, of course I now have no restore points. Unless you know what you are giving, up you shouldn't turn System Restore off.

Have you tried using filemon to check what is causing the drive to spin up?

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