In the last little while I noticed a strange problem.  About an hour into watching a film from my server, all of a sudden all the drives start spinning up, then they all start flashing back and forth for about 2min.  During this time my movie freezes up and stutters until the drives calm down.  Then everything goes back to normal.  This has now happened each time I watch a film.  I can't figure out why though.  It never happened before.  The last thing I installed on my server was Unmenu so I could run preclear and not have to leave my cmd prompt left open for 60hrs...which, now that I think about it, about the same time this problem starting happening.

 

I'm running 4.7.  My movies are played by my htpc via a combination of WMC, TMT 3, My Movies 4 on a Win 7 machine.

 

Another strange thing I noticed at the moment.  When I browsed my network, found the server and clicked on the flash drive to take a look at it, all my drives starting spinning up again.  Seems odd that accessing my flash drive would cause my drives to spin up.  I have Spin Up Groups set to No.

Forgot, one other question.  I noticed on my flash drive that there is a folder called packages with tons of stuff in there.  Is all that required for UnMenu or can it be deleted?  I noticed that off the root of my flash drive I do have a folder called UnMenu so was just wondering if I still needed the Packages folder once UnMenu has been installed.

 

Last question.  If I wanted to remove the unmenu and all packages so I can get back to what my flash drive looked like before I installed unmenu, how would I do that?  I may need to do this to see if this stops my drives from spinning up.

Well I uninstalled UnMenu and cleared my flash drive, then rebooted.  Watched a movie and sure enough, during the movie all my drives started spinning up and flashing.  This causes my movie to freeze and stutter until the drives stop spinning up.  I've decided to run a parity check to see if that resolves the problem.

 

I just can't figure out why this is happening all of a sudden.  Anyone have any ideas?  It's getting really frustrating that I can't watch a 2hr movie all the way through.

 

I've attached a copy of my syslog

syslog.txt

Did an error event occur during the course of the attached syslog?

Hmm not sure what you mean by that exactly?  As far as I know, there were no error events.  Anything specific you are referring to?

Hmm not sure what you mean by that exactly?  As far as I know, there were no error events.  Anything specific you are referring to?

I think what he is asking is whether the syslog you posted included the period of time where you experienced the symptoms.

Well the event with my drives spinning up happend Saturday evening...must have been around 10pm'ish when I was watching the new JAWS Blu Ray.  To be honest with you after the movie played I was looking around at various things, looked at the syslog, and unistalled UnMenu.  I'm no longer sure if the syslog i attached above was captured prior to rebooting or after...well I capture it both times but think I either may have attached the wrong file or overwritten it. 

 

As far as I recall I rebooted the server either late Saturday night or sometime Sunday afternoon.  I'm thinking I need to let a movie play and when the drives spin up, grab the syslog right away.  In looking at the attached syslog though, it does start off on Sat 16:57 which would be 4:57pm...which is odd since the server has been up for quite a long time.

Well the event with my drives spinning up happend Saturday evening...must have been around 10pm'ish when I was watching the new JAWS Blu Ray.  To be honest with you after the movie played I was looking around at various things, looked at the syslog, and unistalled UnMenu.  I'm no longer sure if the syslog i attached above was captured prior to rebooting or after...well I capture it both times but think I either may have attached the wrong file or overwritten it. 

 

As far as I recall I rebooted the server either late Saturday night or sometime Sunday afternoon.  I'm thinking I need to let a movie play and when the drives spin up, grab the syslog right away.  In looking at the attached syslog though, it does start off on Sat 16:57 which would be 4:57pm...which is odd since the server has been up for quite a long time.

Depending on your hardware, disabling spinup groups might lead to your movie interruption/stutter.  In other words, the groups make sure all disks on the same controller group are spinning, so if one does not spin up in the middle of a movie and block the movie while it comes up to speed.

 

If you have other PCs on the lan, all it would take is any one of them to scan the disk directories for changes.  If you are not using cache_dirs then the disks would have to spin up since playing the movie would have made all the least used (directory entries) disk cache to be re-used too cache the blocks of your movie.

 

It would not be unMENU... It does nothing to spin up disks when not being accessed.

 

You can use it to install the "Inotify Tools" package and then monitor the actual disk accesses to see exactly what is accessing your disks.  (They will spin up when accessed)    Of course, if you are having read-errors on the disk with the movie, unRAID would b spinning up all the others to re-construct the un-readable sector.  Those errors would be very evident in your syslog.

 

Joe L.

MyMovies can do a scan of all drives to download metadata and fanart.

It might doing that scan after you open it. I have mine set to only scan from one pc

and when it opens it will spin up all drives. It accesses all the drives to get new farart

and check what is still in the libary. you might try opening collection management first and let it run

to add all the new movies and fanart. When it is finised then try a movie.

 

John 

Well my parity check completed with no errors.  What's strange is that this only started happening about 2 weeks ago  Nothing has changed with MyMovies 4 and I didn't have any other pc's up on the network.  I've always had spinup groups disabled. 

 

I'll check a few other things in MyMovies...I did apply an update to it at some point.  With MM I always add the new movie to the collection management as soon as I copy the movie to my server so I know it's not that.

Well hear's something odd.  I had my HTPC shut down.  I powered it up and as Windows 7 desktop loaded up, 3 of my drives in my server started spinning up.  I'm not sure if this is normal.  I do have my server disks mapped through Windows Explorer.  But I have all disks, not just 3 mapped.  Would this be causing the drives to spin up even though I didn't open up Explorer?