Stuttering when playing tracks from 2nd drive

G

gordone

Well-known member
I am setting up my new Dell 4550 (2.53ghz, 256 RAM) and I have 2 drives. The c:\ drive came installed with the machine, it has XP Home on it. I have a Delta 44 card which I installed without any problems. I transferred the 2nd drive from my old machine to my new machine so I would have all my old data on the new machine. This worked fine. The problem is whenever I try playing back tracks (wavs/mp3s, from either Media Player or N-Track) from the 2nd drive (E:\ since D:\ is my CD/RW) they stutter really badly. When I play the same files from the c:\ drive they play back fine. What could be causing this? Both drives are 7200 RPM, and I had no problems with the 2nd drive on my old machine which was a klunker at 450 mhz (running Windows 2000). Could it have to do with the buffer settings on the M-Audio control panel? I've never played with these settings before.

At least I've been able to work on some mixes by copying all the files to my system drive. They play back much better than on my old machine. I'm still working on getting my Waves plug-ins working (copy protection sucks!) so I haven't been able to test out the CPU power too much.

Thanks for any suggestions!
 
I would suspect you've added the other drive as a Slave rather than Master. I would put in on the Secondary IDE channel as master and swap whatever other drive there is (CD/DVD?) to be its slave.
Oh yeh, make sure both IDE cables are the 80 wire variety. I've seen pcs with 80s on the hard drive but still a 40 on the CD. The CD will work on an 80 wire cable.
 
Having it as slave or using a 40 pins cable should not result in stuttering.
Playing an mp3 @ 128kb/s requires such a rediculously low transferrate that I think even a floppy drive can keep up.
I suspect it's a faulty secondary IDE controller (driver). From what I can make out of your post, gordone, is that you have the second drive on the second IDE controller as master. Try it as slave on the primary controller and move the cd-rw to the secondary controller. Now check if playback still stutters. And also if the cd-rw is still working properly.

Jim Y. By the way, a 40 pins cable on a cd-rom drive is sufficient. I haven't seen a cd-rom drive that is ATA-66 or even higher yet. 40 pins cables work fine for ATA-33. The 40 extra wires are just ground wires. They don't carry any data.

ATA-33 and lower -> 40 pins
ATA-66 and higher -> 80 pins
 
check the IDE cable and your 5v rail, your PSU might be struggling to power all the hardware on the system in question... just a thought...

i'm don't know much about dell products but they most likely use OEM grade hardware on the hole system... or get a controller card with 2 more IDE inputs...
 
First of all, I never said that the CD/DVD has to be on 80 wire. But the extra HD is 7200rpm and therefore very likely at least ATA66 and does need 80wire.
80wire has been proven to improve transfer rates even with ATA33 drives.
The audio stream off the extra drive is obviously being interupted. No matter how fast its transfer rate, it will have no defence from interuptions if it is slave to another drive as the master has priority. If the master is a CD/DVD drive and Auto Insert notifiation is enabled, there will be constant interuptions on that IDE buss as Windows polls the CD to see if a new disc has been inserted. This is why the hard disc MUST be a master.

It's also a very good idea to get the TWEAKUI powertool from Microsoft and use it to disable Auto play on all removable drives as it also disrupts recording.
 
some dude at the pc-shop told me that putting a HD onto the same string as a CD-device can slow down your HD because of the different ATA-speeds.

cd-drives (-writers) mostly are ATA-33.
 
The guy at the "pc shop" was talking bollocks. The CD will not slow down a hd as long as the hd is the Master. They are probably too lazy to change the jumpers on CD drives when adding second HDs.
I have. . .
Primary Master - ATA100 HD (system and general files)
Primary Slave - CDr/w
Secondary Master - ATA100 HD (audio files and backups)
Secondary Slave - CDrom
All drives give the performance I would expect. This arrangment is not an invention of mine. It is the recommended way.

Putting the second HD as a slave to the original will slow it down as it is slave to another hd. The fastest drives should always be masters if possible.
 
Thanks for all your comments. I'm pretty sure I have my c: drive as Primary Master, and then my 2nd HDD as primary slave. The internal CD/RW is the only drive on the Secondary controller. I'm pretty sure this is how my 2 HDDs were configured on my old PC and it played files fine, so I'm a little confused. My other PC also had a Zip drive and a floppy, and I don't know how they fit into the picture.

I think when I get around to it I'll put the 2nd HDD as Secondary Master and then have the CD/RW as Secondary Slave. I'm a little green when it comes to installing HDDs and Primary/Secondary/Master/Slave issues so this is a learning experience for me. Quick ?, is the end of the ribbon cable the Primary? and them middle connector the slave? Thanks!

PS - the new 2.53 ghz CPU kicks A*S! I can actually have a ton of Waves plug-ins on a bunch of tracks and be able to playback without stuttering and I can move the faders and have it respond right away. My wife said while surfing the net on the new machine, "why isn't this any faster?" and I had to explain to her that the DSL connection isn't any faster and that is the bottleneck in the system. Office apps actually are slower than my 450 mhz, because the older machine has a clean (non-Dell cr*p) install of Windows 2000 on it!
 
I found an interesting discussion on my exact Dell model (455) on Usenet:
http://tinyurl.com/crce

I'm going to try this tonight. The short version is that the BIOS doesn't detect the new drive, but XP does, but it makes bad assumptions about it, so the drive doesn't perform as well as it should. The posters give you the secret keystrokes to have the BIOS detect the drive.
This may or may not apply to other machines.
 
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