During a marathon 12 day stint I upgraded the Raid 5 array to Raid 6. It took almost 12 days to reshape the array. Awful.

Almost immediately thereafter, playback on XBMC became unwatchable, jerking and stuttering. For 2 nights I have been able to watch nothing. Is this coincidence, or is this problem owing to the new Raid setup?

Well, it wasn’t the raid array, proving once again that coincidences actually do happen. I moved a movie to the local hard drive, and played it there – the raid array not involved. And it still has the issue.

After some diagnostics and some reading, I did two things together. I reset the SMC, and I cleaned the air intakes of dust. I should have done them separately, but I didn’t. I powered down, unplugged everything, took off the bottom, blew out the dust with a can of air, plugged it all back in. Having unplugged I have reset the SMC. Some reading suggests that the need to do SMC resets may be a harbinger of impending power supply failure. We will see. For now it works.

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It worked for half a day, then began to fail again. In the end, the way I fixed this had to do with Boinc. I’ve always run Boinc, and never have had any problem with competition for resources. But this time, after a lot of attempts at a lot of different things, it turned out that if I stop Boinc the movies play, if I run Boinc they don’t. I changed the parameters on the mac mini so Boinc will only compete if the cpus are idle and have been idle for 3 minutes. Problem solved.