Help: audio stutter in Vista

[White Widow]

I have Vista Ultimate running on a an Asus S96J (Z96J) with 2GB RAM and a 1.8GHz Core Duo. This laptop uses the 945PM chipset and the Realtek ALC883 HD codec .

I play all my MP3's off an external USB2 hard drive. All my music plays fine, until the primary hard drive has to read or write, which inevitably and repeatably causes the MP3 playback to stutter.

I have heard that the Microsoft-Vista IDE/SATA driver is to blame, but I have no way to confirm this or find an alternate SATA driver.

I have the latest drivers installed, including the Intel and Realtek HD drivers (driver v6.0.1.5443). The system is using the Microsoft driver (v6.0.6000.16386) for the Intel 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7-M Family) SATA storage controller.

Is it possible the primary hard drive and the USB drive are assigned to the same IRQ and this is causing the problem? Can I manually assign different interrupts?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thx,
Aaron

 

[montag451]

Sounds like your hdd is possibly not utilising DMA.

Go into device manager - just check if your sound drivers are ok (no little '!' or 'X')
If ok,
Go to your hard drive, see if it is using DMA or PIO.
If PIO, then uninstall the hard drive,

Reboot,
see if the sound is better now.

 

[White Widow]

Thx for the response.

When I check the properties for the Intel IDE/SATA controller, Device Manager reports that both the internal SATA drive and the CD-ROM are in Ultra DMA mode. However, since this is reported under the Intel controller, I can't check if the USB drive is in Ultra DMA mode or not. Where can I check that?

I see both internal and external hard drives listed under "Disk Drives" but DMA mode is not reported there, only under the controllers section, and I don't see anything about DMA mode under any of the USB Controllers..

 

[montag451]

If it is external on USB, you aint gonna get no DMA on that drive. Its good you have it on the SATA though.
It (external) will go at theoretical max speed of 60MB/sec, and that only if you are ultra-lucky and happen to be wearing the right colour socks.

IRQs shouldn't be an issue, so don't go there.
There does sound like there could be a chipset problem - were the chipset drivers installed at the beginning?

 

[White Widow]

Yeah, I fresh installed Vista a couple moths ago, using the latest drivers from all the hardware vendors (Intel, Realtek, ATI, etc.) that were available at the time.

I've been using MP3's off the same external drive for a long time, and I don't recall having this problem until fairly recently. I haven't made any significant software changes (that I can think of).

In general, why would primary disk access cause the USB transfer to stutter? If I copy the music to the main drive and play it, then basically no amount of disk access causes any problems. It's as if access of the main disk puts any USB transfer on hold or something. Using Vista's resource monitor, CPU usage and read/write rate are all quite low even when the stuttering and hiccuping happens. Hmmm....