ultrabay hard drive videos choppy

all videos run fine from my main ssd in my t400. i purchased a wd scorpio black for the ultra bay and the videos will run choppy from the second hd. I RMA it and same problem. I formatted NTFS and defragged but still same problem. any ideas? also running from external hd was fine as well through usb.

 

Have you tried benchmarking the hard drive to see whether there's evidence of any sort of bottlenecking? HDTune is a simple and informative benchmark to try.

 

ran benchmark
stayed around 111 but had some nasty mins around 11. steady at 111 then big drop and back up, probably where the jumps are coming in the video.

my main hd was smooth.

 

I don't think your HDD is the problem, a WD Scorpio Black is more than quick enough for video, it can put out over 100MB/s sustained which is more than enough throughput for any HD video. The NTFS cluster (Allocation Unit) size also shouldn't be any issue, though some will recommend you use a larger size like 16 or 32Kb if only using the drive for large files like videos/movies - it can help squeeze some extra performance. I wouldn't recommend using a 32Kb cluster size if you are going to have lots of small files, if it's a mix of large and small files then just stay with the standard 4096 byte size. However, in the end I highly doubt cluster size is the cause of your problem.

I know I've had issues with videos when my ultrabay drive has gone to sleep after I started watching a movie. I may have paused the movie, only to continue at a later time. The movie is buffered for a few minutes in advance and if the HDD doesn't wake-up, the movie stops playing after those few minutes. Check your power options.

To me it sounds like a IDE driver or caddie interface/SATA interface issue. I don't think it's the HDD, not if it's happen to both new HDDs.

Go the Device Management in windows and select properties for your ultrabay drive. Check under "policies" for the drive that "write-caching" is enabled and the removal policy is set for better performance, you can also try unselecting them if you want to experiment but normally they should be selected for best performance.

You could also try update the IDE ATA Intel Chipset SATA controller driver.

Edit: - Also I just remembered I had a very similar issue when I used to watch movies while on battery, the movie would be choppy. For me this was caused by the Intel integrated graphics card switching from 60Hz refresh rate to 50Hz when on battery. I fixed it by making sure it never switched to 50Hz. You can check the refresh rate by right-clicking your desktop and selecting "graphics properties" - Again I doubt this would be the issue if it's not happening with USB external drives. However it is worth a look.