2010-05-09, 02:34 PM
This is just a follow up for anyone that might be interested in the above problem... A while ago there was a thread on the WD eco green drives and the odd stuttering problems they caused for HTPCs. I had a 1.5TB drive and had these issues, esp if recording and playing back HD 1080i H264 at the same time. So I recently replaced the drive with a 1Tb WD black drive and was gutted when it did the exact same thing - if even worse than the green one. I have a Gigabyte 780G mboard and a PCIe HD4660 card (the onboard HD3200 caused too many stuttering problems of its own) running win7 x64 pro. So I upgraded to the latest Gigabyte chipset drives (which are dated 2009/08/14 on the gigabyte site) and 10.4 ATI drivers for the 4660 card. Now everything works perfectly, I've not had a single stutter regardless of what I'm recording/playing back. The weird thing is I'm sure I've installed this gigabyte driver since the date it's listed but it claimed I needed an SATA driver update. So I have no idea what was really causing the old stutter problem. I'm reluctant to put the green drive back in as everything is working so well although am curious to see if it'd now work perfectly or still cause problems....