Are there tweaks or hardware considerations to make when building a WHS?

[Meester.Rip]

Sometimes when I watch a BluRay movie or when I had MC move its recorded TV to the server I would get artifacts and a few freeze ups during playback. The other day I was watching a movie and about 30 minutes in it started hanging up. If I pressed pause or rewound it a second it would play fine for a couple minutes. After doing that a couple times it ended up playing just fine. I have a mix of WD green drives and maybe a a couple 7200 RPM drives. I hope to start upgrading next year with some 3Tb drives to replace the smaller.

Because of a lack of SATA ports I am running a SATA card to give me addition ports. I thought I might try a better NIC first. Or are there tweaks that would help.

The CPU is a tricore and the box has 4G of memory.

[RehabMan]

It sounds like you’ve thrown plenty of hardware at it.  I have a HP EX495 (Pentium E5200) and I see the same issue.  I think it has to do with the drive extender tech in WHSv1.  When that thing kicks in, it tends to drive streaming performance down.  I have all Caviar Black drives (except for the original Seagate shipped with the system) and I still see it, so it is not really something that can be fixed with faster hard-drives.

My thought is this will all be fixed with Vail, the next version of WHS.  It uses a completely redone version of drive extender where it is accomplished at a much lower level than the current DE.  I plan to build a new machine to run Vail… unless HP provides some sort of upgrade path…

Another thing to watch out for is network drivers.  I found the latest RealTek drivers to be really bad… had to rollback after updating as streaming performance was absolutely horrible after a recent update.  If I build a machine for Vail, I’ll be sure to choose a motherboard that has Intel GB ethernet on-board.

[mikinho]

I agree with RehabMan, the two biggest culprits here are 1- the network performance; 2- drive extender.  A combination of the two is the reason I never used WHS for more than backups.

For the network performance there are quite a few tweaks you can do but WHS is still limited to SMBv1 so file share performance will always be mediocre.

When you do get around to looking at new hardware.  I can highly recommend the [url=http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/atom.cfm#MB]Supermicro Atom motherboards[/url].  They all have dual Intel NICs, IPMI 2.0 and typically at least 6 SATA ports.  I have three of them running at home.

The Intel Atom D510, Intel Atom D525 and AMD Zacate will be your goto Vail processors.

[mikinho]

I forgot to mention, if you are having issues with MKV playback and you use Haali Media Splitter try increasing the “Input buffer size”.  It helps for network playback performance, especially against WHS v1.

[Meester.Rip]

Well it looks like I should hold off until Vail is released. If I still have issues with Vail, I’ll look at an Intel GB NIC.

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I’m going to be the dissenting opinion here and say that it may be your drive speed.  Use an I/O monitor (Process Explorer is a good one) to keep a log of disk activity so that you can see if that really is the culprit.  You can also check network activity using that, so you may be able to determine exactly where the issue is.  If WHS is moving a lot of data across your drives, then the disk speed will certainly impact performance.  But, if it’s fairly balanced (each drive with identical free space) and you have a good amount of free space (so you aren’t hitting the OS drive for temporary storage and it’s not constantly rebalancing), then the drive extender tech shouldn’t be causing you issues.

I do agree that it could be network drivers causing this, however.

[RehabMan]

Funny thing is my problems only start when I go to demo the system to somebody over at the house… or when my wife tries to use it… It works fine when I’m testing it.

It pains me when I consider that the only box on my network still running a “Windows XP era” OS is my server.  Ouch.

[Crim]

I’ve been having issues with WHS recently too. It’s becoming a major PITA for me. From studdering (which goes away once I rewind a tad) to WHS just randomly shutting down a few times a day! It had been working fine for nealy a year and then I think one of the Win updates killed it or something. Oddly enough I think it doesn’t like WMC much cause if I close it on my HTPC it’ll run much smoother through out the day…

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I haven’t seen any of this, so maybe it’s specific to WMC?  (Edit:  Noticed that Crim did pretty much say that.)  Maybe it was a recent update or something?  Have you tried uninstalling any updates?  Feel free to come to the green side that is SageTV.  😉

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