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[CountryBumkin]

I just rebuilt an older HTPC for my bedroom which is a MC client. I have not been able to get steady Video playback since the rebuild. The reason for the rebuild was to replace a bad MB. I reused everything else (CPU, Memory, pwr supply, etc.).

When playing a movie, with either RO-Std or RO-HQ, the movies will play for a few minutes then start to stutter. I checked all the settings in MC. Everything is set up as it was previously when movies played without issue.

I played a movie with "Windows Resource monitor" running and it looks like the Hard Drive is seeing 100% utilization at the time of stutter.

The drive is a Western Digital 1TB (green drive). Its a relatively new drive, but being "green" its more of an economy-minded drive rather than a performance oriented drive.

Should this hard drive be capable of steady playback? what else could be wrong?

This drive has only Win10 x64 and MC23 instaled on it. There is 900+GB of space remaining. I did the anti-virus exclusions for MC program, and file types m2ts and mkv.

The movies play fine on my other client HTPC in the Family room. All networking is hardwired.

[JimH]

It's probably a 5400 RPM drive but that should have no trouble serving a movie.

What is the connection?

[CountryBumkin]

By connection do you mean to network? If so, its a hardwired network with 1GB router. Although computer's internal network card is 1000MB speed.
The hard drive is Sata-3. I'm not seeing any CPU load or memory loading while playing movie.

Perhaps there is a hard-drive "testing program" I can get, that will tell me if there is an issue with the drive or controller.

JRMark score is:3076
Math 1757
Image 4384
Database 3093

[JimH]

I meant the drive.  Just wanted to be sure it wasn't a USB or network connection.

[jmone]

Have a Look at HDSentinel for some diagnostics.  Love this prog.

[kensn]

Check your network speed by just dragging a large file to it from a remote PC, could be a network driver problem...

Ken

[RoderickGI]

Have a Look at HDSentinel for some diagnostics.  Love this prog.

+1

I just played a BD on my Client and saw a maximum of about 4.2MB/s combined Read and Write on the Disk tab of "Windows Resource monitor" for MC related activity. Mostly in the Windows NetCache for the SSIF file, buffering the movie as it played.

That level of activity just shouldn't saturate a drive. So maybe your drive has some issues.

I sort by "Total (B/sec)" on the "Windows Resource monitor" Disk tab to see what is using the disk most. Is there something that looks unusual happening in there? There will be a lot of NTFS stuff going on, but the "SSIF" files should be at the top most of the time, at least until the video is fully cached... unless your MC Server crashes due to a memory leak problem that just doesn't want to go away. But that is for another thread. 

[CountryBumkin]

I downloaded HD sentinel. I'll run it later today when I'm back home from work.

I updated to latest MC version on all machines.
I was watch a complete DVD movie rip last night without any problems.

UPDATE: Ran hard drive Sentinel (all tests) and it did not find any problems with drive.