Anyone experience this problem with SATA Drives.

[zewt]

On my home network I generally keep my movies on a server running XP Pro, and watch them on my HTPC(a 2nd PC) via the a Gigabit LAN.

I have been using IDE drives primarily and have never had a problem with any movie.

Recently I bought a 4-port SATA PCI card and hooked up some new SATA 150 drives.

Upon watching some movies fromthese drives I am experiencing stuttering video and pauses that get worse the longer I watch the movie. Something I do not get on my IDE drives.

I then ran some benchmarks on the drives and found that the overall read index from the SATA drives is slower then my IDE drives.

My assumption is that this lower READ speed is the source of my trouble.

The difference is not alot, but still is lower, for example anywhere from 3-10 Mbits/s difference.

My Motherboard has no SATA ports thus I have to use the PCI card, and my suspicion is that the SATA card is the limiting factor here.

I will check my other systems to see if any has a SATA port I can try with the SATA drive directly.

I am curious if anyone else has had this problem, or knows of any other areas I might investigate for helping drive access.

[stevenhanna6]

Just trying to help, I have no idea but sounds like its the SATA PCI card...maybe you need to update the drivers for it? possible irq conflict maybe?

I'm using an sata drive now on my main machine, no problems with it at all. Maybe look up that specific sata pci card in google for issues. You shouldn't have a problem though running 4 off a pci card from what I know.

[zewt]

First thing I did was update all the drivers, which did not help the issue.

I then found another of my PCs that had an onboard SATA port, moved one of the hard drives in question to it and tested.

It played perfectly without stuttering and pauses.

Then I moved the 4-port SATA card to the 2nd PC and plugged the SATA drives to it. Played with no trouble.

I have come to the conclusion it's the motherboard causing this problem.