crawling menus and video freezing

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Folks,
I'm hoping to get some input from your experience. I have a dsr6000 running 25extreme. I am subbed and totally valid with Dave. The unit has the original A drive and I added a B drive as well. It's a Maxtor 60G 5400rpm. The B drive was in my hdr212 before I got the dsr6000 I've been running the above unit on 25extreme without incident for probably 3 weeks. Until a few days ago, that is. Now the TiVo menus just crawl when accessed. It rebooted this morning when I tried to go to "system information". Sometimes, it just locks up altogether. Additionally, the video is skipping, and a few times the audio and video were out of sync. It sure seems like a sick puppy. I'll attach a .txt file here with the output of some vmstat and ps requests. If anyone can glean any issues found in these outputs, I would be sooooo appreciative. Please have a look and see if anything jumps out at you. I've been really immersing myself in this "Unix performance and tuning" book I have, but it's pretty slow going. In reading here, it seems that this is not an unusual problem, yet I have found no posts really identifying specific problems associated with these symptoms. I hope you can help. Thanks all. I could have NEVER gotten this far without this cool board.

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Just a guess here, but I had similar problems with a S/A TiVo and it was a hard drive going bad. Since you've got 2 HDs try using only one or the other. You'll have to reinstall v25Xtreme of course. And try running the Maxtor and Quantum diagnostics.

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I was having trouble making the ide cable reach both drives, so I had to use an ATA IDE cable instead. Do you suppose that could cause a problem of this nature (after having run fine for the first few weeks)?

[superzap]

Not likely to be a cable problem, but it wouldn't hurt to try another. 9thTee has extra long cables.

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That second 60G Maxtor was bad. Got E05 error code on Powermax. I took it out, restored it to a single drive unit. Now video/audio doesn't freeze and lock up anymore...sweet. BUT, the menus are still unbearably slow. I missed 20 minutes of the nat'l championship the other night just trying to get it to record. Now that I have just the original quantum 40G drive. I ran some hdparm tests against it and the performance was horrific. It was reading around 15.8 MB/s cache, and a pitiable 1.86 MB/s disk AFTER I tried some hdparm tweaks. It started out around 1.34 MB. What the heck! I don't get it. Any thoughts? I ran the quantum diags on it again last night, and it passed. All of my linux servers at work have scsi drives, so checking their performance would serve no usefull purpose. I had my friend run the hdparm tests on his linux box at home and he was getting 140 MB/s cache and almost 14 MB/s disk. The upshot here is that the longer it doesn't work right, the more I learn :o) I borrowed a 40G Maxtor from my friend at work. I'm gonna 25xtreme it tonight, slam it in there and see what da dilly-o. I wonder about something else. A week and a half ago or so, I kept hearing pops and buzzes through the audio. I wonder if whatever caused those could've damaged both drives....