I've never had problems with iTunes, but I recently moved to a SSD and now music skips.

Question

Howdy all.  I've recently replaced my Analog HDD with a Solid State drive, (Samsung 840 250GB) which is so much faster, but only problem now is when listening to iTunes, I notice serious skipping.  I have reinstalled drivers for chipset, audio, optimized the BIOS, yet still experience skips while under processor load, and also when system is only playing audio.  I had no problems with this prior to the SSD and all was solid.  I have uninstalled iTunes, rebooted and reinstalled to no avail.  I'm running a Dell Latitude E6500 with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz with 4GB DDR2 667.  The SSD is a Samsung MZ-7TD250.  All else on the machine is rock solid.  Any advice on this?  iTunes version is 11.0.4.4.

Answer 1

I don't have a definite answer, but by any chance do you have your hard drive encrypted? (e.g. Windows BitLocker, or a third-party full-disk encryption package)
Playing my iTunes media files on my laptop used to work perfectly. Ever since the full disk encryption software was installed, my music skips & buzzes (and sometimes just plays more slowly, which is really weird) whenever the files don't get decrypted fast enough. That's usually when other apps are also accessing files, maybe there's a disk access priority scheme that doesn't work as well when it has to funnel through the decryption driver?
Also, although my symptoms are occurring on a rotating disc drive, I've heard that there are some compatability problems between the disk encryption packages and the SSDs.