Sound and Video stutter.

michielecker

New Member
Messages
3
Hi,

I'm experiencing fairly regular stutters while playing either video or audio files when these are saved on my HDD. I have both a SSD and a HDD. I keep all my video and audio files on my HDD because my SSD obviously has a lot less space on it. It seems these stutters occur because the HDD goes into what seems to be a sleep mode because when these stutters occur, the audio and/or video stop and then play further when the HDD starts up again. I noticed this because I can feel the slight "vibration" when my HDD is running. These stutters are seem to happen when watching videos like series/movies with a long playing time as well as long recordings. Short songs for example usually don't stutter.

General info about my computer:

Processor: Intel core i7 4710HQ CPU @ 2.5Ghz
Ram 16GB
System 64bit Windows 8.1
I have a 125GB SSD and a 1TB HDD

I hope that's enough info. I looked around for similar issues around the web but for most people it was a driver issue and I keep mine updated so I don't think that's the issue here.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    windows 8.1
Control Panel > Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Change advanced power settings.

In there you will find Sleep options and indeed many others, like Hard Disk options.
 

My Computer

Doesn't help. It seems it's not actually some sort of "sleep". The stutter is sometimes after less than a minute, sometimes only after a couple of minutes..

EDIT: when for example the audio stutters, it's like the song "pauzes" and then continues. So it seems it stops reading the data from the HDD.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    windows 8.1
Update:

I found a solution, apparently it was the "Link Power management" from the Intel Rapid Storage technology. I disabled this and the problem is gone.

"Link Power Management (LPM) is a power-saving technique that helps the SATA device save power. The SATA link to the device is set to low power during idle time when there is no I/O activity or devices are absent or unused. LPM automatically sets the SATA link back to an active power state once I/O requests are queued to that link when there is work to be done."

So it was as I thought. I guess it allows a queue to become to large before going active again. I'm surprised that they could allow such a mistake in there...
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    windows 8.1
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