Does Live TV have trouble with Raid? I am.

[Mugsy]

I recently upgraded from a single SSD to two SSD's in a Raid-0 configuration, which meant reinstalling Win7 Home (64bit) from scratch, including WMC.

My "Record to" drive is still a single 2TB HDD. I never had a problem before, but since the upgrade, Live TV has a tendency to choke... especially if I try to use my C: drive at the same time I'm watching TV. The TV reception will suddenly get extremely choppy and eventually go out entirely. At first, I thought my TV antenna's signal was just being obstructed and I'd try (and fail) to move my outdoor antenna to clear up my reception.

Then one day, while recording a program when this happened, I stopped the recording to reboot the PC, but as soon as I stopped recording, the signal cleared up. Sometimes, closing Live-TV and relaunching fixes the problem, and other times only a full reboot (sometimes more than once) is required.

The problem is intermittent and impossible to reproduce on demand, but is clearly connected to recording/buffering... even though I'm not recording to the Raid. But WMC is installed on the Raid, and I never had problems before the upgrade.

So my question is: Is this a Raid issue or just a bad install of WMC? Anyone else with an SSD Raid setup having problems (could my C: drive just be too fast now?)

Thx.

[UCBearcat]

Too fast? Highly unlikely.
If I were to make an educated guess... the RAID firmware or drivers aren't playing nice with Windows. The RAID controllers shouldn't care what kind of drive is connected, but I'm curious if non-commercial grade SSDs are designed with RAID in mind. Just a thought.
You could launch Task Manager > Resource Monitor when the choppiness occurs and check to see what the disk I/O is like at that time. It probably wouldn't hurt to see what the I/O is doing under normal operation as well.

It's your system, and you can do as you wish, but... what is the purpose of placing your OS in a RAID-0? Sure, you'll get increased performance... but SSDs are stupid fast for an OS drive as it is... Then, if you lose either one of those drives - You're screwed.
I would rather take my chances with a single SSD w/ my OS on it than a RAID-0 any day of the week. That is just my 2 cents.

[signcarver]

Someone once mentioned they needed a symlink on C to the recorded tv folder when it was on another drive... my experience has always been it would move wherever you changed recording to. (Supposedly WMC was coming up too fast from sleep for the other drive to be "ready" and thus changed recording, or at least the buffer, back to C)

Flexraid is also another problem I see a lot with (but should only affect recording folder) as it must be able to read and write the same block "simultaneously" so the buffer doesn't work.

[barnabas1969]

I ran two SSD's in a RAID-0 for a while because I discovered that I had purchased too small an SSD. There were no problems with Media Center. However, I will say that TRIM only works on the latest couple of versions of Intel Rapid Storage drivers... and AMD doesn't support TRIM in a RAID at all.

My guess would be that you are using a different version of the video or chipset drivers than you were before you reinstalled Windows. Do you have a recent system image backup that you could restore instead of reinstalling Windows?