new Samsung 1tb hd causing slow mvp and stutter!

[mattrobo]

Hi all,

I have a new powerful machine which has been working with GBPVR for the last 6 months without a problem.

Last week I got a new Samsung Spinpoint 1000gb SATA HD. Being SATA of course I just plugged it in and formatted it in windows. That all seemed to go ok. I then copied my media over on to it from the old full drive (250GB IDE drive).

Then rebooted (now 10000 times after playing with services safemode, reinstall GBPVR etc). After rebooting the speed at which the .avi converts is slower than the speed the MVP plays. So ffmpeg is not converting fast enough and writing the xxxxxxx.mpg cahe file fast enough. When I map back to the old drive and run the same file. ffmpeg converts and saves at the lightning speed - about 1m20 after 20 seconds if not more.

So why wont it do it on the bigger, new, newest technology HD? What am I doing wrong.

Is there a bios setting? something is not right! The new super duper hd is useless.

I have 3 HDs.

C: is a Seagate SATA 160gb used for windows and programs and contains GBPVR
D: is a DVD RW. IDE old syle burner
E: is the old 250 GB Seagate IDE drive where the media is stored and works perfectly.
F: the new new super dooper 1000GB Samsung - which is not working with GBPVR or rather ffmpeg.

I dont have RAID setup and I downloaded the latest bios and have reset it to factory default. No overclocking etc.

I have an E8400 3gig duo CPU, 4gig ram etc. Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P with one IDE slot on it and like 8 SATA slots.

What should I test next?

Please help------

Regards

Matthew

[martint123]

Download a copy of hdtach and check the transfer rate of your drives.
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php

I had a problem with a 750gb Samsung where it set the transfer rate to to PIO mode and things really crawled.

[zehd]

Maybe something to do with where your temp directory is?

[mattrobo]

Thanks for the tip. How did you find out it was using PIO? And how did you solve it as it looks like you are still using the HD? I will go and google the answer as well.

Anyway the results of the short test dont help. The newest drive is the fastest but is the one which is giving me troubles. Mind you though the test here talks about read speeds... not write speeds.


C: - MVP is fine with this:45MB/s, 128 burst. just below SATA 150
E: - MVP is fine with this:64MB/s, 91 burst.
F: - MVP stutters: 98Mb/s, 250 burst and the graph shows it way above SATA 150 but not to the highest SCSI 320.

I am not sure if I have the same problem. Maybe I did not format it properly?

Anyway if you let me know how you fixed yours I will see if I have the same issue anyway. Right now I will try anything as I have just copied files over - so a refort will be fine or whatever.

I am going to burn the iso image from samsunghdd and see if that will help.

[mattrobo]

Zehd,

My user temp files are on my C drive as are my system ones. It is a SATA drive. My media were on an IDE drive and from the results of a speed test above the F: drive (the new SATA) drive the speeds seem ok.

grr..

Thanks

Matthew

[mattrobo]

after going to samsunghdd.com they have a bootable cd with an ES Tool for formatting their HDs. After running their diagnostic test and checking the obvious things (what are half of them anyway - acoustic sound something..) I found no problems.

I thought I would do a low level format so I am running that now for the next 3 hours then sleep... then a report back.

Should I have trusted the windows 20 second format? I will let you know. Hopefully I will have some good news.

Matthew

[martint123]

With your transfer speeds, It cannot be the problem I had, Mine was way, way slower than that.
I am struggling to think of what else might cause it.

[pBS]

it might be the increased cluster size when formatting large drives, it makes really large chunks which may be causing the slowdown..

try partitioning it into smaller chunks, like a 250gig partition and copy files over and try again, if it works, that's your problem...there are charts on the web that show what default cluster size is for given partition size, use as a guide and you can get max size that will work best for you...

otherwise make sure write caching is on [device manager/props on drive]
[also look at ide controllers to see if it's in pio or ultradma modes]
as write cache/pio can severly effect performance..

[mvallevand]

Maybe you have set <MvpHighPriority>true</MvpHighPriority> to overcome another problem (I rarely recommend this setting) and you are giving too much priority to ffmpeg?

Martin

[mattrobo]

@Martint123 - even thought it does not look like i have the same problem can you please tell me what you did to fix yours?

@mvallevand - I tried this but it did not help. ffmpeg was not using alot of the CPU or RAM but is at the top of the list. Both with the new HD and the old ffmpeg seems to use the same resources. I will look more closely though. Thanks for the tip.

@pBs- Where do I look at the IDE controllers to see this PIO mode? I can see that the disk cache is on. But funnily enough not on the IDE HD. So many variables.

So a summary of the last 24 hours -

I did the low level format and the hard drive check using the Samsung software and then did a normal format in windows which also took 3 hours. No partitioning. But the result is totally the same. It just does not make sense as when I copy files too and from the HD it flies. I think I did 150gb in 50 mins. So far the only problem is this conversion and play on the fly within GBPVR.... grrr

Next task is to break the HD into 250g lots and report back!