Music skipping when played off new internal hard drive

[kre1987]

I've been scouring the net for nearly a month to figure out what the problem is. I recently installed a second a hard drive, a Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB internal. It works fine for the most part but for whatever reason music skips when played off of it, of any format (FLAC, mp3, etc.)

I actually even ran the WD Diagnostic program and the results of the tests were all PASS, and used the WD Align tool which said the drive was ready for use or something like that.

What's strange is that music plays fine for a while after I restart my PC, then music skips when played off the 2 TB OR the 500 GB Hitachi Deskstar that came preinstalled in the PC.

I've tried many troubleshooting tactics, I switched the SATA Cable from my original hard drive with the one for the WD 2TB to see if the cable was faulty, and also switched to Molex-to-SATA power cable I have on the WD 2TB with the straight SATA power cable on the original hard drive, all of which gave the same result.

I have a couple questions for you guys actually:
1. Can I fix this and how?
2. Are all Green drives like this? Should I have gotten the Caviar Black instead?
3. Why does music skip worse when I'm using Firefox? All my programs and Windows 7 all run off the HItachi and all my music/vidoes/etc. are on the 2TB green.

Here's my system specs should anyone need to know:
Motherboard: ASUS M3A78-CM
Processoer: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3.1 Ghz
4 GB RAM
Sparkle GeForce 9500 1 GB

 

[Desolation]

whats the wattage on your power supply your using. possible you dont have enough power to run everything. also are you overclocking your cpu.

 

[kre1987]

I am not overclocking.
My power supply is made by Logisys and the sticker on the side read:
Total Power = 330 W
Max Output = 480 W

 

[hmammen]

i assume your running 64bit windows 7 yes? also what program do you use to play music? Because you might want the program you use to play music to be located on the same drive as the music, sometimes theres latency between media for whatever reason due to this-

[FONT=verdana,geneva]Digital media processing is time-sensitive. Playback requires specific work to be performed by a given deadline -- otherwise presentation or data loss can occur. A "glitch" occurs when a deadline for time-sensitive processing is missed or when time-sensitive data is lost.[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva]For example, in Windows Vista/7, playing back music involves "work" that must be done at least every 10 milliseconds so that there can be a continuous stream of music out to your speakers. The "simple" task of playing back music consists of the following steps, all of which must be completed before a strict deadline:[/FONT]

1. [FONT=verdana,geneva]a small chunk of data from a music file needs to be read from a disc (CD or hard drive)[/FONT]
2. [FONT=verdana,geneva]this data needs to be "decompressed" or "decoded" (usually in system memory) so it can be streamed out to your speakers in a format that your sound hardware understands[/FONT]
3. [FONT=verdana,geneva]the decompressed sound data needs to be copied from system memory to your sound hardware memory[/FONT]
4. [FONT=verdana,geneva]the data in your sound hardware needs to be sent to your speakers at the appropriate time[/FONT]
5. [FONT=verdana,geneva]repeat steps 1-4 flawlessly every 10 milliseconds (ms)[/FONT]

[FONT=verdana,geneva]In this example, if any of these steps aren't completed on time, then the user could hear a glitch in the music playback.[/FONT]


[FONT=verdana,geneva]so put your audio playback program on the same drive ya?

If this doesnt work then IDK?!?
[/FONT]

 

[kre1987]

Thanks for the help hmammen and desolation

Yes, I forgot to mention it but I am running Win 7 x64

I think desolation may be right here, as when I had my 1 TB MyBook external drive, I never had the skipping problem even with the music on a different drive. I will give your advice a try though hmammen and maybe it'll fix the problem before the green drive sells on amazon (I have it up on there for $100 right now).

I'm probably just going to get this: Western Digital WDBAAU0020HBK-NESN Elements External Hard Drive - 2TB, USB 2.0 at TigerDirect.com
after my green drive sells