HD benchmark continuing dialogue

[Chet]

Hi
A few weeks ago I had some posts back and forth with Dr Mordrid and others about Matrox HD bench mark and how accurate it was. At that time I had one drive with 3 partitions. They showed C 9.4, D 8.7 and E 7.84. I just bought a 27.2 gig maxtor just for video files. According to the bios it's running UDMA 4 which I think is /66 and the initial drive is running at UDMA 2 which I think is /33. I would have thought that at least relative to the other drives that I'd get better performance, or at least as good in HD bench mark but it's the slowest drive showing 3.99 - 4.59 mb/s depending on how recently I've defragged. No dropped frames so its OK but I wonder if anyone has comments.

Thanks
Chet

[This_Idiot]

Chet, there's been a lot of discussion about how well UDMA66 supports video capture, and the results seem to indicate that it is no better than UDMA 33. Or, if you follow the rationale of Grigory (some do, some don't), then anything above PIO4 is wasted.

It's also widely acknowledged that the HD tests reported by Matrox HDTest are wildly innacurate. Still, as long as you can push over 4Mb/s (using Matrox or any other benchmark) in MJPEG then you shouldn't be having problems with datarate.

[Pertti]

Chet,

Have you checked in Device Manager that DMA transfers are enabled for that drive ?

The Matrox HD Benchmark is meant to be used for determining the capabilities of a drive for video capturing / playback, not as a general benchmark for the maximum peak transfer rate (especially not the cached ones), which most BM programs are doing.

Anyway, you should still run the Matrox HD Benchmark everytime you have installed the VideoTools, before you do enything else.
The Matrox HD Benchmark writes the results in the registry, where PC-VCR and other programs go to check the maximum possible capture resolutions, and as Chris said, anything over ~3.5MB/sec gives you the maximum MJPEG ones.

Pertti

[Chet]

Thanks for the replies
I get the idea that HD benchmark is not the sharpest knive in the drawer but I was supprised to see that it wasn't relative to the new drive. I expected that if it showed high on the boot drive it would show high on the data drive which should be the faster drive. Well like I said it is capturing well. I just wanted to follow the general comments of the group that a dedicated data drive was the way to go so when finances allowed I went out and got one.

I do have DMA transfers enabled so I guess it is what it is and I guess if it captures well as the song goes "don't worry be happy"

Thanks again
Chet