Random glitching and pixellation

[d2tw4all]

Hello,
I have been using Sage for about 6 months and overall like the product. I've got a dedicated Windows XP based backend that does all the recording and have the HD200 STB's for my frontends. My recording is done with an HDHomeRun and an HD PVR connected to my FioS set top box via component. I've been having some issues all along though that are really starting to get to me. With the HD200 and recordings from both my HDHomeRun and the HDPVR, there are times when I select a show to watch, or live tv, and the HD200 just goes black and hangs up. Sometimes I can get it to come back by hitting stop a few times but not always, in which case I have to power it off/on. Also, especially with HDHomeRun recordings, the recordings have a tendency to glitch pretty bad sometimes, with pixellation and sometimes it will skip several minutes of video, or more annoyingly it will start playing fine and then hang up and freeze, sometimes resuming playback and sometimes requiring power off/on of the STB. Thus far I've been tolerating this behavior but my wife is getting sick of it and so am I so I'm hoping someone has a suggestion of some kind. The backend is a dual core box with 3GB of RAM and 2 drives, one that has the OS and one that is dedicated to recordings. I've tried defragging the recording drive (it was HEAVILY fragmented) but it doesn't seem to have made a difference. Anyone have any thoughts?

Tom

[d2tw4all]

Just an update, I upgraded to the new 7 beta and am so far seeing good behavior out of my setup. If this cures my problems I'll post and I guess the fix is 7...

Tom

[sic0048]

I would venture a guess that your recording drive was not set up with 64k blocks when it was originally formated. This would cause issues like you saw in v6 and earlier. Apparently they changed some things in V7 and they are no longer suggesting that people format their drives to 64k blocks.

[d2tw4all]

It's still happening but it's improved a lot. More annoyingly though is that my HD200 freezes all the time playing back downloaded media. Not sure what's up with it.
Tom