I have a G5 with two 250GB hard drives, the stock drive which is a Maxtor 6B250S0 about six months old and an IBM/Hitachi 7K250 which I have had for a couple years, migrating it to new machines. Until recently, the Maxtor was rarely used, and in fact was usually dismounted and spun down. OS is 10.3.9.
I recently discovered that when playing HD TV video with VLC, I get freezes on the Maxtor but not when the same file is played from the Hitachi drive. The video and sound stop for about 5 seconds, then jump ahead. The same segment is fine at a different time so it's not a damaged file. It's worse with high res (720p) but also happens less frequently with lower res video. Also, it doesn't matter which drive I've booted from, only where the video file resides.
I haven't noticed any other problems. Well, I
think I have noticed some brief freezes in routine tasks, but I suspect it's just my imagination since discovering the video playback problem.
The video playback problem is 100% reproducible.
SMART status is verified for both drives. Can anyone venture a guess whether this is an impending hard drive problem or simply some weird artifact of a periodic Maxtor calibration procedure?
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