xbox 360 locks up media center

[beav]

I have been running the media center listed below for about a month and it has been rock solid. I can record 4 hd shows one analog and play back a sixth with no issues, the system is solid and doesnt break a sweat. Over the weekend I went out and bough a new 250gig Xbox 360 to use as an extender. The setup worked fine but when using it everything gets unstable. Shortly after tuning a channel the first time it will almost always hang on both systems for several seconds and the video will cut out or give weak tv signal or service unavailble on the main system and/or the extender. It may start functioning after a short while or I might be able to restart it by stopping playback and reselecting a channel. Just connecting the Xbox seems to really bog down the system yet the CPU and memory usage is still well under 50%. Changing channels on the xbox is hit or miss, it might change fast or it might go to a black screen or one of the blue sevice errors. Pressing stop and then selecting the channel again might work on the next try. The main system is basically a bare minimal windows 7 x64 home premium load and is otherwise perfectly stable. All drivers are up to date and all windows updates installed. The hard drive is cleaned and fully defragmented. I have tried enabling flow control on the Network adaptor and forcing it down to 100mb per MS recomendation with no changes. Recording additional shows on the host system doesnt seemed to make it any worse but when it cuts it usually does affect the recordings as well. When the extender is playing you can usually watch the show for a while with no issues but it still may occaisionally hang and changing channels risks making it all hang up again. The hard drive light on the host system does seem to be pretty solid when it hangs but with tuners running it usually working pretty hard anyways and it doesnt have any trouble with handling 6 streams locally. I am thinking about trying a faster hard drive for the OS but it was fine on its own unless the extra remote session really adds that much overhead this green drive cannnot keep up. Any advice please??? I was already a little dissapointed about spending so much for an extender, now I am really dissapointed that it wont work properly and its just making things way to complicted for my family to even use.

Gigabyte 880GM-USB3
AMD Athlon X2 260 3.2gig
8 gig DDR3
2tb Western Digital Green drive(50 gig OS partition, the rest for data and recording)
Ceton InfiniTV quad cable card tuner
Hauppage 1250 tuner
zonet gigabit switch and TPlink gigabit router(i have tried both separately)
46" sony 1080p

xbox 250 gig
42" westinghouse 720p

[Scallica]

In my opinion, WD Green drives are best used for storage. I think most would agree they should NOT be used for the OS or DVR recording.

[richard1980]

I think most would agree they should NOT be used for the OS or DVR recording.

I don't recommend using a Caviar Green for an OS drive, but only because I recommend using an SSD instead. I used my Caviar Green as an OS drive before I got my SSD, and it worked great, although it wasn't as fast as other drives on the market. But that didn't cause any issues. If someone is in the market for a HDD as an OS drive, I don't see any reason not to go with the Caviar Green unless you just have to have more throughput.

As for a recording/live TV buffer drive, I highly recommend using WD Caviar Green or WD AV-GP drives. The drives are known to handle 9 streams without issue, and may even be able to go further, but I haven't seen anyone test a Caviar Green with more than 8 tuners. Missing Remote reported the AV-GP drive (which is based off of the Caviar Green but has different firmware which is optimized for AV use) can record 10 streams simultaneously without any issues.

Also, I think you'll find many people that run Caviar Green drives, as well as other similar low-power drives. It's one of the basic goals of an HTPC...low heat, low noise.

[adam1991]

But, then you have to consider more than just "how many streams can it record at once". You also have to consider how many instances of ShowAnalyzer are running at once to process commercial skip, plus how many extenders are going.

That can potentially be quite a bit of throughput happening all at once.

[beav]

I may have it solved, I not totally convinced yet but last night it was working good for almost an hour after I disabled the network throttling as recommended on other threads herehttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/948066. After making that change and rebooting it connected perfectly and I was able to change through about 50 channels in a row on the xbox while playing another channel on the host sytem and recording two more shows without incident. The xbox was also able to play some blu-ray rips it completely choked on before with all the recordings still going. I am going to run it like this for a few days without changing anything and if is stable hopefully I can get switch the Media Center back up to gigabit without issues.

I fully intended to purchase a SSD for the OS and use the green drive for data but I got all the other parts first and then held off because MCE was perfectly responsive as is and its handling as many streams as I can throw at it. MCE still boots much faster than the ceton tuner so there is not even an advantage there, I honestly cannot see a reason for a faster drive at this time assuming the XBOX still connects okay.

[richard1980]

But, then you have to consider more than just "how many streams can it record at once". You also have to consider how many instances of ShowAnalyzer are running at once to process commercial skip, plus how many extenders are going.

That can potentially be quite a bit of throughput happening all at once.

You make a valid point that overall throughput does matter, which should be obvious to begin with, but you are inserting hypothetical scenarios into this conversation (who said anything about ShowAnalyzer?). The point of looking at how many streams can be recorded at once is because it's a better indication of the capabilities of a drive than just throughput. Throughput figures fail to account for all the seeking that is done when recording/viewing multiple streams, and with any given HDD, the more you stress the needle, the lower max throughput you can expect. Recording/watching multiple streams is a perfect example of this. A typical Caviar Green drive can reach speeds of about 90 MB/s...but try getting one to record or watch 90 MB/s worth of TV streams. You can't. The needle simply can't keep up.

[adam1991]

I was simply putting some clarification to the generic and incomplete statement, "The drives are known to handle 9 streams without issue..."