Blue Iris behavior with bad WD Purple drive

[Revlus]

Just wanted to relay an experience in case anyone runs into this as well.

My entire Blue Iris machine starting locking up periodically. The problem kept getting worse and worse so I started to investigate... as near the end the server would be OK for max 30 seconds!

My Windows 10 Event Viewer started to give disk warnings.
"the io operation at logical block address (blahblah) for disk (blah) was retried" This happened every few seconds.

When you search google, lots of blame on bugs and other things.... but at the end of the day I noticed a few things.

1) The WD Purple drive (disk named in the error msg), was at 100% active time, and the response times were sometimes getting to 2 and 3 seconds, which is an enormously long time for a hard drive to respond to a request. For reference, I right now continuously record 8 15ps camera streams. Most are 2MP H264, but I have one 8MP H264 as well.

2) If I stopped Blue Iris, I could recover my machine performance after a forced reboot. Or I could wait 10 minutes for all the drive re-write timeouts to fully expire after 8 retries x the waiting period.

3) Rest of my drives were fine.

So... replaced the WD Purple with a new one... turned on all the recordings... and now the disk "Active" time bounces between 0% and 2% and the Response Times don't go over 10ms... that's with periods of writing about 3.5MB/s to disk for short bursts.

So moral to the story.. these WD Purple drives can absolutely handle a bunch of drives.. and if you are hitting 100% Active time on an average setup, you might have a drive issue.

Time to call in the warranty on my first WD Purple... :-/

 

[nejakejnick]

My old SSD started randomly freezing for 20s and showing 100% active time. New SATA cable fixed it, or maybe it was a new firmware that fixed it, dunno.

 

[Revlus]

Yes, that was something I tried before replacing the drive and saw online a percentage of folks had that issue. Didn’t solve for me. Running on same SATA cable as before with no issues. Firmware was already most recent available. Certainly good things to look at though.

 

[khx73]

I'll second the bad sata cable comment (even though it wasn't the problem this time, @Revlus). I had an issue once in my pc with a intermittent sata cable..what a nightmare. Luckily I found it and tossed it... wish I would have written down the symptoms and how I narrowed it down now.. for future reference. Seems to me it was causing brief lockups of some sort..

 

[Revlus]

I'll second the bad sata cable comment (even though it wasn't the problem this time, @Revlus). I had an issue once in my pc with a intermittent sata cable..what a nightmare. Luckily I found it and tossed it... wish I would have written down the symptoms and how I narrowed it down now.. for future reference. Seems to me it was causing brief lockups of some sort..

Appreciate the comment.... I've since even purchased some spare SATA6 cables just in case, from CableMatters I think it was.

To follow up... WD processed my returned drive, fixed it... sent same drive back. Now it works as expected, on the same cable. Whole process took about 1.5 weeks. I did NOT choose the rush option which would've saved a few days.