Defrag Needed Even with 64KB Clusters

[lonndoggie]

Oh--and I'm running XP SP2, and as it keeps remiding me, I don't have any virus scanner running. :-o

[stanger89]

Do you have the latest drivers for your chipset installed? What about IAA?

[jptaz]

Well I am still having pausing problems with my setup so I am not looking at only having one drive per IDE channel. I can ditch several drives as they are small, and I think I may get another 2 channel ATA 133 Card at compusa just see if that solves the problem. I am also begining to suspect that one of the 80GB drives maybe going bad. If they are all on isolated channels then one flaky drive should not cause pausing, but more importantly I will be able to isolate it. I think I may setup an extended IO test one drive at a time with IOmeter to see if I can figure out if any of the drives are going bad. So far check disk has not shown any errors. But the other day the system reported a error writing to disk, but I could not for the life of me figure out which one it was as it was listed as device0/disk0/D or something like that and I coould understand what controller or device it was and D is not the drive letter as that is my CDROM that has no media in it.

Oh well. Here is hoping I can figure out which disk is failing and that a second controller will help.

John

[stanger89]

device0/disk0 should be Primary Master.

[jptaz]

Actually it happened again and it was device/hardisk1/D and again it is pretty vage in the context that I have 6 IDE Channels (VIA onboard, Promise Onboard, New SIIG PCI ATA133)

This time windows showed another error that there was a delayed write on f: for a file I was recording.

Maybe I am dense, but I am not seeing how the line device/harddisk1/D translates to f: which is on the third IDE controller (SIIG PCI ATA133 2 channel).

But at any rate thanks to the second error I was able to stop using the drive and remove it from the video directories for sage...Oh yeah and this error happened at the same time as a brief pause on the file it was in writing.

I am hoping that it is just an error on the one drive and once it is removed the pausing will stop.

We will See.

[lonndoggie]

Originally posted by stanger89
Do you have the latest drivers for your chipset installed? What about IAA?

Yes on the latest chipset thing--I check the ASUS support site fairly often. And--of course--I haven't been able to find anyone complaining about SATA drive performance with this motherboard (or those drives).

And what about IAA? Er...what's IAA?

[stanger89]

Intel Application Accellerator, not really sure if it helps or anything though.

[jptaz]

I remembered something that I saw posted on the forums that so far seems to have addressed my pausing issues (Several hours with no pausing).

open regedit and check the BufferSize and NumBuffers keys under the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common\DSFilters\MpegDeMux

So far I kept my BufferSize at its initial size of 64KB, but moved the NumBuffers to 352(hex 160).

John

[Opus4]

Now you'll have to see whether defragmenting the drives really was needed after all!

- Andy

[jptaz]

I turned it off after I removed the one drive that had write failures as it did seem to fail part of the time. I suspect that in the end defrag was not needed.