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External hard drive test

October 8, 2017 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

I’ve been trying to sort out why my Plex media server hangs occasionally or takes a while to load content. One of my suspicions was the access time to the hard drive with the media. It was an external hard drive on a shared USB bus. I just recently moved it off of that to a dedicated USB 3.0 input and ran the CrystalDiskMark program recommended by several sites including this one.

WD Speed Test

———————————————————————–
CrystalDiskMark 5.2.2 Shizuku Edition x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
———————————————————————–
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 139.284 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 124.293 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.530 MB/s [ 129.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.327 MB/s [ 324.0 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 134.639 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 118.700 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.354 MB/s [ 86.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.303 MB/s [ 318.1 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [G: 29.9% (836.9/2794.5 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2017/10/08 21:29:44
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

The sequential Read and Writes look pretty good, but the randoms are horrible.  I know sequential is the most important in my case, but still thats bad.

To compare I ran the speed test on a Seagate Drive still on the USB bus and on my C drive which is a RAID 0 2 drive system.

Seagate Speed Test

———————————————————————–
CrystalDiskMark 5.2.2 Shizuku Edition x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
———————————————————————–
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.838 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.812 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.275 MB/s [ 67.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.387 MB/s [ 94.5 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 0.838 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 0.629 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.211 MB/s [ 51.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.382 MB/s [ 93.3 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [F: 29.2% (816.9/2794.5 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2017/10/08 21:58:01
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

C Drive Speed Test

———————————————————————–
CrystalDiskMark 5.2.2 Shizuku Edition (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
———————————————————————–
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 87.041 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 61.630 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.862 MB/s [ 454.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.187 MB/s [ 533.9 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 60.815 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 61.664 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.856 MB/s [ 209.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 2.107 MB/s [ 514.4 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 66.0% (393.4/596.1 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2017/10/10 21:30:17
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

Both of these drives are showing a really poor performance which makes me start to wonder if there is something wrong with Windows 7 and/or the hard drive drivers.   Any suggestions where to go from here?

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Media Center: Giving up on Ubuntu, going to Windows 7

September 23, 2014 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

A while back I started converting an older laptop, Dell M1730, and had the best intentions to setup a media center with Ubuntu.  I stumbled into problems right away with the graphics card, but was able to overcome then. At least I thought.  I setup a VNC server, plex, and started into setting up a VPN account.  But no matter how little memory and processor throughput that I used the computer simply could not play a video without skipping.  After a lot of work I discovered that there where issues with the graphics card causing hardware interrupts.  After way too much time, I’ve finally tossed in the towel.

So rather than continue to eat up more time I’ve wiped the computer and loaded Windows 7.   With a fresh install I started updating all the drivers and wham, my pc started going so slow, unusable slow.  Again the culprit was the graphics card, specifically the Aegis physics processor.  Even after an uninstall the computer couldn’t recover.  Fortunately, I was able to revert back to all the defaults.  I also found out that one of my external USB hard drives had failed and was causing windows to lock up.  After some work on that I found out the drive really did fail and fortunately the drive was still under warranty and Seagate replaced it in 4 days.

Now I have a very simple pc setup as a media server with two 3TB external hard drives.  I used Plex to share my videos.  I have UltraVNC Server setup to remote into the laptop when I need to do something as I keep closed up and tucked under the entertainment center.  I use GoodSync to backup from our computers and cell phones to an external drive and mirror the content to the other external drive.  Finally, I have setup SoftEther for a VPN server so that I can get into our home network remotely.  I would have to say this setup was much much easier than Ubuntu and it is working.

 

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Ubuntu Media Server Update

February 5, 2014 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

I posted a while back that I had a good media server setup, but since then I’ve had a lot of problems getting things up and running on my PS3.  Many of my video files are in many different formats and UMS was having issues with some, but not others.  I don’t recall if I sorted out what was causing issues, but I was tired of the problems and looked for other options.

In my searching I came across Plex Media Server.  There is some type of pay service that they offer, but after reading about this a bit I found that the local media server is free and decided to give it a try.  Short story is I think I like it now, but it took a while for me to get up and going.

Issue #1: My first issue is that if you use the apt-get blah blah blah my source list wasn’t pulling the latest version as noted on the website.  The fixes seemed to point me to updating the source file with part of the source listing the ubuntu version I was running.  Now I tend to be forward leaning when it comes to updates and I’ve stayed with the latest ubuntu versions.  Having to update my source file didn’t seem too fun.  So rather I decided to just download the file directly from the website copy the link and install directly.  At the time I wrote this 9.8.18.290 was the latest version for me

$ wget http://downloads.plexapp.com/plex-media-server/0.9.8.18.290-11b7fdd/plexmediaserver_0.9.8.18.290-11b7fdd_i386.deb .

#sudo dpkg -i plexmediaserver_0.9.8.18.290-11b7fdd_i386.deb

Issue #2:  With plex installed I ran into some issues with it detecting my movies.  Plex really likes the movies to be in a specific format (see here) and I really didn’t care to rename my files.  So rather the way I did this was to create a Home Video Library and then add the folders that I wanted it to detect.  With using the Home Video library it will pull any video format regardless of the name.

Issue #3: The other thing is that I wanted this to play through my PS3 or to my android phone using DLNA.  Initially, Plex could see all the videos and added them to the library, but when I tried to play then I always go some errors.  The post on Ant Dicken’s Blog had the answer for me.  See my files are all on a USB external drive and ubuntu was adding them to my /media/<username>/<drivename>.  When it did this plex couldn’t get to the files.  So as the post shows I modified my /etc/fstab file to directly mount the drives to /media/<drivename>and things worked.  To get the needed information to do the modificaiton I used the two commands below.

$ mount
$ sudo blkid -o full -s UUID

Note, make sure you make a backup of the fstab table before you modify it. This saved me as after my first modification I had an error that was causing problems with ubuntu.

With those three fixes I was up and running.

A quick note about playing the videos on the PS3. Fast forwarding doesn’t really work, but if you hit triangle and then in the upper left choose scene selector you can jump forward through the movie.

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