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[OlegMZ]

I have noticed at some point that playback  of video from my DNS-323 started to freeze every 10 minutes for a couple of minutes. During this time even CLI (telnet) is responding with delay to say nothing of file transfer which drops from 10 - 15 MBytes/s to 100 -150 KBytes over 1Gblink, which is extremely annoying.
Command TOP does not show any significant CPU or memory utilization during this time.
This happens exactly every 10-11 minutes even if I stop the playback to 4-5 minutes, so it does not look like HDD reading delays and some kind of read buffer underflow.
I tried to inspect HDD with SMART diagnostic - everything is OK.
I tried to disable torrent and UPnP servers and reboot DNS - no improvements.
The only suspicious thing left is my setup itself which is as follows:
Firmware - latest beta 1.10b7.
2xWD15EARS (AFT ones) configured as RAID1 with EXT3 and REFORMATTED after latest firmware upgrade.
Right after reformatting and copying all data back to DNS-323 from backup it worked like a charm (which wasn't the case with 1..
The 1.10b7 was supposed to work fine with AFT drives, however I do not really like the result of fdisk - l output, although I am not a pro in Linux:

root@DNS-323:~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1               1          66      530112  82 Linux swap
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary
/dev/sda2             130      182235  1462760452  83 Linux
/dev/sda4              66         130      512040  83 Linux
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks  Id System
/dev/sdb1               1          66      530112  82 Linux swap
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary
/dev/sdb2             130      182235  1462760452  83 Linux
/dev/sdb4              66         130      512040  83 Linux
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary

Partition table entries are not in disk order
root@DNS-323:~#

So my questions are:

Has anybody experienced anything like that?
If you used 1.10b7 firmware and formatted your AFT HDD no matter which setup you used - what was your output of FDISK -l command? Do you have "not end on cylinder boundary" as well? And how is your DNS behaving?

Thanks.

[seattle web guru]

I have the same problem with my 343 as well. So far no one on these boards can answer whats up. Other than try another computer, etc...

[OlegMZ]

Thanks for reply. At least I am not alone. Don't know is it good or bad though 

What is your setup anyway?
- Which firmware?
- Which HDD (AFT or not)?
- How did you format them (Standalone drives, RAID, EXT2, EXT3 ...)?

Maybe we can find common points, eliminate irrelevant settings to come closer to the root cause and the solution. So far I can see the only one solution - ditch this NAS and NEVER buy any other Dlink product due non-existent support :-(.

[Steve Pitts]

Do you have "not end on cylinder boundary" as well? And how is your DNS behaving?

Yes I do, and my DNS323 is behaving just fine - but then I don't use it for streaming just as networked disk space.

If you look at my post about checking format of AFT drives you will see that I get the same messages in the output from fdisk. However, I did some research on this when I first encountered it, and really it is just a bit of historical baggage. Unless told otherwise fdisk will report the disk layout in CHS (Cylinder/Head/Sector) but that geometry is mostly ancient history. Some old OSes might have problems with partitions that don't start on a cylinder boundary but the switch to LBA (Logical Block Addressing), which ignores the real disk geometry and simply treats it is a stream of sequential sectors, means that any OS released this millennium is not going to care, and that includes the Linux variant in the DNS323.

If you'd like to see the shape of your disk in LBA (and thus confirm that there are no overlapping boundaries) use this variant of the fdisk command:

Code: [Select]

fdisk -ulwhich reports start and end sectors rather than cylinders. It still bleats about partitions not starting on a cylinder boundary, but hopefully the explanation above will have assured that that is irrelevant.

[OlegMZ]

Thanks for clearing it up Steve!

I really forgot about -u key and was wandering why all of a sudden I saw 66 where I expected to see 64, having overlooked that it was cylinders, not sectors, and end, not beginning of a partition.
fdisk - ul indeed showed me absolutely correct numbers, aligned to 4K boundary.

This means formatting should be fine and the culprit is somewhere else. It is very difficult to catch it if NAS is used for occasional file transfer because it looks like a temporary slowdown. You have to watch file transfer progress and speed (as in Win7) or network utilization to see that. With streaming video it is much more obvious and annoying.
What I did not like is that I googled 'linux freeze 10 minutes' and came across an issue with "regular" Linux PC with the same problem, which was resolved ... by replacing WD green HDD to something else. Not a very good sign...
I really need more info and statistics. It might also be new beta firmware, which was built on new linux kernel (?), power saving settings or anything else. Who knows...