Hello all. I just upgraded from a ex480 to an ex490 to be able to use the e-sata port as a multiplier. I setup the unit on a brand new 2TB Seagate hard drive and everything seemed to work really well with the stock Celeron 450. I went out and bought a new E6500 CPU and installed it on the server. It seemed to work pretty good but I really couldnt tell a big difference and in some cases of switching menus in the home console it now seems to be slower then with the stop CPU. The only add-ins that I have installed currently are 1. Advanced admin console 2. WHS BDBB and 3. Diskmanagement. What would make this get slower? I will include pics of the server info to help you help me diagnose the issues. This was a clean CPU install with no bios changes.

I can't even stream a 720p mkv file to my Boxee without it freezing every other minute with the new server. My old ex480 streamed them just fine and has streamed them to 3 additional devices at the same time without a hiccup.

What could be going on?

Are any of those drives Advanced Format drives? Have you looked at Task Manager on the server to see what is consuming resources when the streaming hiccups occur?

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Alex Kuretz
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ST2000DL 003-9VT166 "Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB Hard Drive" does indeed have advanced format but per the manufacturer, it also has something called Smart Align that automatically aligns sectors to work on older OS such as Server 2003. This works on the drive level so the OS never sees this. Could this be the problem? I have read others have the same hard drive and are not having any issues at all.

I have not noticed anything out of the ordinary in the task manager that stands out or uses alot of resources.

Thanks

I don't think the Smart Align would cause the problem. I used AFDs with my EX490 when it ran WHS v1 and they never posed a problem...and they were USB 2.0 drives as well. Although, I will admit, I manually aligned them on a Windows 7 box and wrote up a process (available on this site) on how to properly align AFDs. Disks with Smart Align or WDC drives with the special AFD jumper should NOT need to follow this process since those technologies do just as you indicated--handle the alignment in the background and never expose that to the OS.

My next question is did you reboot the server twice? When you switch from a single core to a multi-core processor, Windows requires an extra reboot because it needs to switch from the uniprocessor kernel to the multiprocessor kernel. So if you booted up the server after upgrading the processor and haven't rebooted it since, chances are it's running in uniprocessor mode. Reboot again and then fire up Task Manager -- there you should see two CPUs, and you should also see two CPUs in device manager.

I see you have Twonky media server installed. That and the Media Collector can be CPU hogs--this was especially noticeable when I had the stock Celeron. If you've got some media collection and processing taking place, that'll slow you down until all that background processing is done. I was never impressed with the Twonky server and I wound up shutting it off.

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Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

I have rebooted the server many times since the CPU upgrade per instructions so I don't think that is the issue. Twonky comes pre-installed but is currently turned off. Under the System Status menu, the CPU Utilization never jumps past 40% and usually hovers between 0-4% when idle. I can have the Boxee running and see it skip while having teh console open and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Could I possible have a bad or corrupt CPU? I bought it brand new.

I highly doubt you have a bad or corrupt CPU. I would think that if there's something wrong with the CPU, at best you'd have data corruption, blue screens and odd freezes of the OS. At worst, you'd have a server that wouldn't even boot up.

This seems more like a "selective" problem that only affects certain things, in your case playback.

One item to note is that several folks disable the Drive Extender service when playing streaming content, especially high definition (and therefore high bandwidth) content. You may want to try disabling DE. Some folks use a scheduled task to stop DE during times when they expect to be streaming content, and restart DE at times when they're not.

_________________
Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

I put the original cpu back in and now I can stream a mkv movie to all my computers without any hiccups or slowdowns. What gives? The console speed seems to be faster as well.