Sound stutter during disk access

[white_rabbit]

Hi folks,

I was hoping that someone may be able to help me. I recently bought a new hard disk - Maxtor Diamondmax 80 Gig - to replace my old one, and ever since i cannot play mp3's or watch dvd's without the sound stuttering all over the place. My soundcard is a pretty simple onboard soundblaster PCI 128 which has served me very well until recently. I noticed that when the sound stutters the disk access light is blinking constantly and if I attempt to do something which requires further disk access eg. running another program the sound quality goes very bad indeed! Would very much appreciate any advice anyone has on the subject. Thanks.

 

[rookie1010]

perhaps there is a problem with the power going into the hard drive.

if you have a free power connector, use that instead of the one going into the hard drive. or swap the hard drive and cd rom power cables and let's see what happens

 

[white_rabbit]

I have just tried swapping the power connectors from the cd-rom to the hard-drive and still no luck.

I also downloaded and ran a maxtor diagnostic checker called powermax which performed a number of extensive integrity checks on the drive with no problems flagged.

I still think it must be something to do with the HDD as I had no such problems with my old drive.

I have updated the drivers for the onboard soundblaster PCI 128 card and still same problem. Weird!

Any other suggestions?

 

[rookie1010]

sound goes bad, because of electomagnetic interference. i read some place in could be because of the power supply or the hard drive.

can some one come up with some suggestions for emi shielding so that we could check if emi is the problem.

 

[cheerios]

Hmm I dont know what happened I'm not a technician and I have almost no experience

 

[ebolaosu]

does the computer get sluggish at all when the sound starts to stutter or when you add demand to the disk when the sound is already stuttering?

I had something like this at one point. The issue isn't your sound card but rather the new hard drive. I really can't remember how I fixed this, but I believe it was some setting about the disk... maybe power management or cache or something. My suggestion is to play around with the settings associated with the hard disk.

 

[rookie1010]

i have heard the sound stutter while playing civ2, the files were loaded onto the hard drive.
the sound does not stutter with any other game, perhaps it is a setting issue.

 

[white_rabbit]

I have sorted my problem!

The issue that was causing the breakup in sound was the PCI latency settings.

I downloaded a program called powerstrip http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm which allows you to adjust the latency settings of devices such as AGP card, sound card, ethernet card etc.. Seems that the latency was set far too high for my AGP card (248) and also my onboard ethernet (128) which were both hogging the PCI bus while my soundblaster card was set to a latency of 32.

I have changed the settings so my AGP is now 80, ethernet 32 and soundcard 64 and this seems to have done the trick. Will try the best possible combination in due time but it is working very nicely at the moment.

Check out these threads if you are having a similar problem
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=14693&st=0
http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?threadid=42268

 

[rookie1010]

is this program motherboard specific?

 

[white_rabbit]

Nope. Should work with all motherboards.