0

Today I was watching Band of Brothers which I have stored locally on my hard drive in 720p. Watching the first two episodes went perfectly as usual, however when viewing the third episode my Kodi video player suddenly paused the video to buffer. This happened a few times, so I decided to switch to VLC in the hope that would solve it. Unfortunately it still happened. I then decided to move the episode file to my SSD and play it from there and then there were no problems.

In the evening I started watching a movie in 1080p from my normal harddisk and the same happened again. So I copied the movie to the SSD and it worked great again.

I have a suspision that my harddrive is simply too old (5 years and counting) and I noticed today that the harddrive makes more sound than usual. I downloaded some software to test the reading speed and it is around 1.5 mb per second. Is this extremely low? Can this explain why movies suddenly need buffering? If so, why did the first 2 episodes played without any problems while their bitrate is for all episodes around 2250 kbps and they are in 720p.

Héctor van den Boorn
  • 101

2 Answers2

1

If you suspect a HDD issue, download the diagnostic utility from the HDD vendor and run their tests. It should be able to determine if the drive is failing.

Mike Lowery
  • 139
  • 1
  • 10
1

If this is a sudden problem, please run diagnostics and backup important data off of that drive. I've had a similar issue where suddenly out of nowhere, the cutscenes in the game I was playing had looping and skipping audio.

Sure enough the diagnostics were showing a bunch of bad sectors popping up and the drive lasted a few days after that.

R. Cross
  • 26