Let me know if this is right...

[Jon Lai]

I have a HTPC.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050E
Gigabyte GA-M78SM-S2H
2GB DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM
Samsung 1TB with 32mb Cache HDD

Playing 1080p - smooth
Playing 720p + uTorrent - smooth
Playing 1080p + uTorrent - seldom unsmoothness

Both the uTorrent and the movie is being played from the same hard drive.

I want to fix this. Will upgrading from 2GB->4GB RAM fix this issue? Or is it dependent on the hard drive?

[mingyang]

both video and uTorrent requires alot of accessing on your HDD, I'm pretty sure RAM upgrade won't help at all.

Just wondering if the video and uTorrent d/l directory is using the same partition. If they use diff partition it could help. Heck a new HDD is better choice.

[edgedamage]

Run HD tune on the drive and post the results.
http://www.hdtune.com/

[edgedamage]

both video and uTorrent requires alot of accessing on your HDD, I'm pretty sure RAM upgrade won't help at all.

Just wondering if the video and uTorrent d/l directory is using the same partition. If they use diff partition it could help. Heck a new HDD is better choice.

What I do is DL to one drive and push the finished files to a different drive.

[Jon Lai]

Run HD tune on the drive and post the results.
http://www.hdtune.com/

Would I run it during normal operation or when I'm doing both 1080p + uTorrenting?

[mingyang]

Would I run it during normal operation or when I'm doing both 1080p + uTorrenting?

Run it without anything on to benchmark your drive performance.

I'll stress again that you should separate the drives for each program or even try diff partition to see any improvement.

[Mprezd]

both video and uTorrent requires alot of accessing on your HDD, I'm pretty sure RAM upgrade won't help at all.

Just wondering if the video and uTorrent d/l directory is using the same partition. If they use diff partition it could help. Heck a new HDD is better choice.

partitions won't do anything. It is still accessing the same physical drive.

[mingyang]

partitions won't do anything. It is still accessing the same physical drive.

It is same drive like I said but partition will help from my experience. OP's best solution is obviously secondary drive.

[ks_tiwari]

Partition wouldnt help, a separate drive is better idea. Limit number downloading thread ! Some sort of priority or QoS setup can help too.

[Brewmeanie]

partitions won't do anything. It is still accessing the same physical drive.

agree, it's still same drive, and same number of heads. Just get a 2nd hdd.

[Cybersid]

Try increasing the cache size in utorrent, it did help me in the past...

[Jon Lai]

Try increasing the cache size in utorrent, it did help me in the past...

Thanks I'll try that.

I know another hard drive is the obvious answer but it doesn't work practically because I'm not going to dedicate one of my drives just as a temporary storage for downloads, since I'm obviously going to play from them as well.

[artemm]

Thanks I'll try that.

I know another hard drive is the obvious answer but it doesn't work practically because I'm not going to dedicate one of my drives just as a temporary storage for downloads, since I'm obviously going to play from them as well.

Do you have write-caching enabled on the Spinpoint? They're fast drives, so I don't think simultaneous reads and writes should affect 1080p playback.

I often have utorrent going at 1000kb/s+ and 1080p movies played from the same volume never slow down... then again, my setup isn't too comparable.

[Jon Lai]

Do you have write-caching enabled on the Spinpoint? They're fast drives, so I don't think simultaneous reads and writes should affect 1080p playback.

I often have utorrent going at 1000kb/s+ and 1080p movies played from the same volume never slow down... then again, my setup isn't too comparable.

I don't know what that feature is, so unless it's on my default, I would say no.

Can you give me a quick description of what that is and how to turn it on?

Thanks.

[mr_raider]

Try disabling cool n quiet.

[artemm]

I don't know what that feature is, so unless it's on my default, I would say no.

Can you give me a quick description of what that is and how to turn it on?

Thanks.

Open device manager, find your drive, right click and select "properties." Click on the "Policies" tab and look at the options. Make sure write-caching and/or "advanced performance" are selected.

Defragging will also help if it's a drive performance issue.

[Jon Lai]

Open device manager, find your drive, right click and select "properties." Click on the "Policies" tab and look at the options. Make sure write-caching and/or "advanced performance" are selected.

Defragging will also help if it's a drive performance issue.

Already selected. Defragging won't be much use because I constantly download and I don't want to have to defrag every week.

I'll post HDTune stats in a bit.

:(