H10 - HDD activity during playback

[Pavulon]

Hello,

Lately I've encountered strange behaviour of my H10 5GB during playback. After I boot Rockbox and play a song, HDD read some data to the buffer and then spins down. After some time it spins up again to read further and spins down again. This would be correct, but after few such cycles, it spins up and read data "on the fly" and the disk is spinning all the time. It seems like the buffer is full and the old data are not removed from it. I'm sure this shortens battery life a lot. Have any of you encountered similar problem? I found nothing in wiki and in bug reports, that's why I'm asking you for help.

My setup: anti-skip buffer 15 seconds, newest sources from CVS compiled (including bootloader), rockbox_default theme and I'm playing just mp3 songs.

Best regards,
Pawel

[bascule]

Wait until this happens again, then go to:

[menu]>Info>Debug (Keep Out!)>View audio thread

and describe what is happening. This may give us a clue.

[Pavulon]

Hello,

thanks for the fast answer.
here is the debug info:

pcm and codec progressbars are floating close to the max values
track count: 4
cpu freq: 75 MHz
boost ratio: 100%
pcmbufdesc: changing from 14 to 15 /21

best regards,
Pawel

[bascule]

That generally sounds OK; the one to watch is the codec buffer, it should slowly empty itself into the PCM buffer until it reaches a low 'watermark', then it refills from disk.

Try watching through a couple of cycles of the codec buffer and match the drive activity to the refill process. If the drive is doing other things whilst you are not browsing menus etc. then something else is wrong...

[Pavulon]

OK, I think I know where the problem might be. I've changed rockbox_default wps with my custom wps and since that time everything is as it should be. HDD is off almost all the time . It spins up around every 5 songs.
I wonder only, what exactly in default wps caused the problem. Or maybe it's just my player's issue?

Best regards,
Pawel

[nls]

The default wps uses slow peakmeters that slows down your player, as you saw in the audio thread it uses 100% boost on the scpu meaning it uses all the available cpu. This makes disk access slow because the cpu cant keep up -> hdd spins longer -> shorte battery life / skipping music.
And as you have already discovered the workaround is to not use peakmeters.
The same thing can happen with very high bitrate files or lots of dsp enabled (replaygain/crossfeed/eq/dithering etc.)

[Pavulon]

Everything clear now

Thanks for the answers!

Best regards,
Pawel