Help: Frame drop on SATA not IDE

[FokeyJoe]

Hiya,

I'm finding I get frame drop when I write to my dedicated 80gb partition SATA drive, whereas if I capture to my dedicated 8Gb partition on my primary IDE(ATA100) drive, it's fine. Bearing in mind that my capture card is PCI, am I right in saying this is my PCI bus being maxed out?
Both the SATA and IDE controllers are on my mainboard, so I have no idea what bus they're connected to.
I'm using the latest drivers for everything. I've also tried various codecs, mainly huffyuv and divx5.1. All do exactly the same thing. I've checked various benchmarks which report the SATA write rate as 47M/s.

AMD XP2500+ (Barton)
512Mb PC2700 DDR
Abit AN7 (SI 3112A SATA controller, nforce2)
Asus V7700 Deluxe Geforce2 GTS Pro 64Mb DDR
Avermedia EZMaker with the NEC7130 chip (my capture card)
80Gb IBM Deskstar 120GXP 7200rpm 2mb cache (my IDE drive)
120Gb Western Digital Caviar 7200rpm 8mb cache (my SATA drive)

One thing I haven't done is upgrade the bios of the SI3112A controller, as the SI site says to use the bios of the mobo manufacturer. But Abit haven't released a bios for the controller. Does anyone know about this, and whether it might help solve this problem? Would I be safe to apply the latest one on the SI site?

[SaSi]

SATA is new and any new thing has it's problems in the beginning. Not to say that you can' t have a solution to your problem.

How many frames do you drop (say out of 1000 frames)?

What program do you use to capture? Have you monitored the CPU utilization during capture? If you have sustained utilization over 70%, you might be maxing at 100 at times and this, combined with an "issue" on the SATA drivers, may be responsible for the dropped frames.

Another possibility: You mention that you capture on an 80Gb SATA partition. You have a 120Gb SATA disk. Is the 80 Gb partition the first partition on the disk?

Note that the actual performance of any disk (IDE, SATA, SCSI) is double in the outer part (first half of size) compared to the inner part (second half size).

And, finally, fragmentation may by itself be the main reason for dropped frames.

I would recommend that you partition the 120Gb disk so that you use the first part of it (say 60Gb) for capturing and keep that partition clean and defragmented. The best thing to do is to format it periodically.

[FokeyJoe]

Okay... more info...
I'm not 100% sure it's an IDE/SATA problem, it's just a symptom I'm investigating. I've tried a lot of different things (including nearly all the stuff on the frame drop sticky) with ambiguous results. I can't see the wood for the trees and need some help to solve this..

Frames: I'm dropping about 7ish frames per 1000 - very noticeable on panning shots. The drop can be dependant on what I'm capturing (TV), some progs are still causing drop on my IDE drive. Oddly, all apps report my frame rate as 24.8-24.86, but it says the same whether it drops frames or not. One particular symptom I find is that every capture prog reports a frame dropped in the first 150 seconds of capture.
I'm finding there are 2 types of frame drop, those reported by the capture apps (I've not even spotted one of these - can get up to 6 in half an hour), and those which aren't reported but in VirtualDub they appear as D-frames (I've not seen this before). It's the 2nd unreported kind which I'm really suffering from, and I'm not 100% about how much frame drop I'm getting with these. What specifically causes these unreported drops?

Apps: I'm using iuVCR v4.8.4 for the mostpart. But I've also found the problem exists on neodvd (v4 standard & upgraded - came with the card), and in *some* configurations on amcap. It will happen with any res, though I'm typically using 352x288 or 704x576.

CPU: using huffyuv, 352x288 it's ~10%, 704x576 it's ~40-60%
Using divx, 352x288 it's ~10-20%, 704x576 it's ~60-75%.

Partitions: You are right, I'm capturing onto the 2nd partition on the drive. But are you saying this is right anyway, or should I be using the 1st part? The 1st part is data and my swap. I've never observed this to be a problem on IDE. My IDE capture part is right in the middle!

Other things I've tried:
- Disabling the soundcard whilst capturing. Made no difference.
- BIOS settings, things like PCI latency, bus mastering, Enhanced PCI
- Different codecs. No point, huffyuv and divx far exceed anything else
- Disabling apps, virus scanners, TSR's, etc. Made no difference.

[jtommyj]

The SATA bios is incorporated into the MB bios so as long as you have the latest MB bios you should be ok.

I have an NF7-S NForce2 board so hopefully your bios is similar.

Go into the bios, Integrated Peripherals, and change the value of EXT-P2P's Discard Time from 30us to 1 ms and see if that doesn't stop the frame drop.

Tom

[FokeyJoe]

The SATA bios is incorporated into the MB bios so as long as you have the latest MB bios you should be ok.

Yes, I do.

Go into the bios, Integrated Peripherals, and change the value of EXT-P2P's Discard Time from 30us to 1 ms and see if that doesn't stop the frame drop.

Tried it but it didn't make any difference

[jtommyj]

Sorry, that was my best hope....

Of course you are using the latest drivers from the Silicon Image sight I'm sure so that was all I could think of.


Tom

[FokeyJoe]

Well, the latest ABIT official drivers are 10028, which is what I've been using, which matches their latest bios revision.

I've tried the 10047 drivers from SI's site, and they make no difference

[FokeyJoe]

An update...

After messing about with tweaking my win2k setup (things like setting the page load limit, stopping unnecessary services, etc.), I've found that the IDE is just as unreliable... because it's nothing to do with the SATA or IDE controllers at all.

Basically if I reboot my machine and start capturing right away, it's fine and I get no frame drop at all, I even had success on the SATA drive tonight (though a short clip I must admit)... but after a few captures, or a few programs opening and closing it begins to get less reliable.

Anyone have any ideas about what causes this kind of symptom? Is it purely memory issues, or task switching??