[mythtvnz] System freezes thrashing HDD

[Phill Coxon]

On Sun, 2010-04-25 at 21:41 +1200, Aaron Whitehouse wrote:

> It seems that, after all of that, it was a hardware issue. I have 
> replaced the hard drive (a WD Green 1TB) with a spare one that I had and 
> all is working really well. It's a pity that I can't get the hours back, 
> but I'm really glad to have found and solved the problem.

I'm a bit late into the discussion here but I think I can tell you
exactly what the problem is as I've just struck something very similar.

Take a look at this link:

http://www.greengecko.co.nz/node/21

"WD Green disks are formatted with 4096 byte blocks, not the usual 512.
While this shouldn't be a problem, it doesn't report this fact properly.
Also, if partitions aren't actually created on a 4k boundary, then
performance slows to a crawl."

It's possible to recreate the partitions on the new WD drives with 4k
boundaries and the performance jumps back to normal. Follow the links
back to the WD forums and read the discussion there. 


Here's another link to help identify & tweak HD performance:

http://strugglers.net/wiki/Linux_performance_tuning


Hope that helps.