Playback stalls, hangs and skips

I have a PC with 14 HDDs. 4 of the drives are currently connected to an X299 XPower Gaming AC motherboard using a Silverstone Gen3 x2 ECS06 sata expansion card.

I used to run an external enclosure with 4 bays connected via 10Gbps USB-C. I found it was noisy, and when the power went out I'd have to crawl under the desk to power all the drives back on, so I replaced it with the ECS06 and put all the drives in the PC. Plus it uses less electricity having the drives inside the PC without the extra enclosure.

I'm using 10GbE. The PC is connected to a Netgear MS510-TX switch to another MX510-TX switch by fiber. The two PCs used are then connected to the switch with cat6 cables to the 10GbE RJ45 port.

Streaming content from drives connected directly to the motherboard are fine.
Streaming content from drives connected to the ECS06 will stutter, skip, and eventually hang completely after 10-15 minutes.

Copying data from a drive on the ECS06 will copy at 1.0GB/s until about 15GB and then slow to 70MB/s with frequent dips to 0B/s.
Copying data from a drive on the motherboard will copy at 1.1 GB/s until about 15GB and then slow to 220-240MB/s

* Note: The 15GB is a Windows setting. By default Windows has a 5.0GB setting but as I have 32GB of RAM I increased it to 15GB.

According to Wiki PCIe 3 x2 has a max rate of 1.97GB/s, or 16 Gb/s That should be more than enough to stream the content without issue. The card is 2.5x the max sata 3 speed. So perhaps there is something else at play. I just can't figure out what.

I could buy a PCIe3 x4 card that has a max rate of 3.9GB/s but if it's not the card at fault it'd just be more waste of money.
Or I could go back to an external enclosure. I'd have to find a 6 or 8 bay as I'm about to replace the motherboard and the most sata ports I can find is 8, so I'll need 6 external ports.

Unless there is some other tuning I can tap into?

The only real idea springing to mind for me is this: Does the ES06 card have a separate power connector on it that needs to be plugged into the power supply? If so, is that connection solid on both ends?

If I can think of anything else I'll post back again, but in the meantime, I have a question for you:

What setting did you use to bump up the cache from 5GB to 15GB? I have a system with 128GB and I could definitely benefit from bumping this value up

I have just upgraded a clients PC from an old 2nd or 3rd gen intel i7 with 10 onboard sata ports to an new MSI B760M Pro motherboard with a 13th gen i5 that only has the 4 onboard sata ports (seems to be common these days with m.2 being the default choice for most setups).

I've installed a new ECS06 6 port sata card as he wishes to maintain the use of the 10 HDD's he has in this system.

Client got back to me on Friday stating that the data transfer rates on the drives that are connected to the ECS06 card appear to be about the half the rates they were when connected natively to the old ten year old motherboard. System runs Win 11 and works flawlessly from the nvme. Everythings updated.

I did send an email to Silverstones australia support on Friday and have yet to hear back from them.

Seems strange this pcie card doesnt perform aswell as a 10 year old board.

I did notice there was a firmware update on the manufacturers website to fix issues with the Intel 600 series chipset but whether this solves issues using older and newer chipsets im not sure, and what issues it fixes it doesnt state.

Additionally the ECS06 card i purchased does not have a header for external power as the second poster commented.

Heres the link for the update:

ECS06

Westoz said:

Additionally the ECS06 card i purchased does not have a header for external power as the second poster commented.

Just for the record, that was a brain cramp by me. A power connector is not needed for a SATA card, I was thinking of a USB expansion card. Those have a separate power connector because you may potentially need to supply power to a bunch of high-power USB devices.

I can confirm that I installed the firmware update and there is no improvement on my end in terms of copy speeds (to or from any drive connected to the card), or stability streaming content from any drive connected to the card.

The ECS06 is a PCIe3 x2 card, which for all intents and purposes should be fine as far as bandwidth goes.

I worked with Tech support and there appears to be no faults with the card, and there are no Windows or card settings that can be adjusted to improve performance, though we did make some changes to NICs - which also did not yield positive results.

From that discussion it was suggested that three options are available

1. Try a SATA compatible SAS HBA card with 4 port breakout cables (which yields 8 ports), with are typically PCIe3 x4
2. Get a USB enclosure. These are mostly 10GBps but there are some 20Gbps options. But these have their own issues like noise, power consumption and power up after a power outage.
3. Go for a server rack solution. Again power consumption considerations, as well as space and cost.

Option 1 might be doable. I've got some retailers looking at products for me.

There are some 8 SATA port Motherboards around, which are typically insanely overpriced, like the Z790 Creator ProArt

Bottom line - the ECS06 is probably not faulty, it's just not fit for the purpose it's marketed for.

- - - Updated - - -

hsehestedt said:

The only real idea springing to mind for me is this: Does the ES06 card have a separate power connector on it that needs to be plugged into the power supply? If so, is that connection solid on both ends?

If I can think of anything else I'll post back again, but in the meantime, I have a question for you:

What setting did you use to bump up the cache from 5GB to 15GB? I have a system with 128GB and I could definitely benefit from bumping this value up

Sorry, I totally missed this question.. Let me track it down again for you. It is a registry setting.

UPDATE
Here you go...

Code:

This remote dirty page threshold was 5 GB per file by default (oho, sound familiar?)

This threshold can be controlled with the following DWORD registry value name:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\
RemoteFileDirtyPageThreshold

If the default size of 5 GB does not work well for your configuration, it is recommended to try increasing the limit in 256-MB increments until performance is satisfactory. Please note the following:

    A reboot is required for changes to this registry value to take effect.
    The units of RemoteFileDirtyPageThreshold are number of pages (with page size as managed by Cache Manager). This means it should be set to the desired size in bytes, divided by 4096.
    Recommended values are 128MB <= N <= 50% of available memory.
    This threshold can be disabled completely by setting it to -1. This is not recommended as it can result in timeouts for remote connections.

For example, if you want to set the limit to 10GiB that's 10,737,418,240 bytes / 4096 = 2,621,440 which is decimal DWORD: 2621440

Full post here....
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...r/ba-p/2637581

I would love to know what that registry setting is. Don't drive yourself nuts looking for it, but if you made sure to document it somewhere, that would be great.

hsehestedt said:

I would love to know what that registry setting is. Don't drive yourself nuts looking for it, but if you made sure to document it somewhere, that would be great.

See above updated post