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**moreau** · 3 May 2000, 08:44

If you want ata66, buy a 7200 rpm with 2MB cache.

Such a drive should be able to put down streams of about 12-15 MB/s, which is fine for RR-G compressed MJPEG.

Keep the boot drive separate from your capture/edit drive. That's physical drives, not partition. Also, if you use the Ulead software that came with the RR, make sure to set the temp directories to reside on the capture drive.

Perhaps some of the others with more experience can comment...

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Home System:
G400 DH 32MB, PD 5.52, bios 1.5-22, TGL 1.0
RR-G, VidTools 1.52
Win98SE, DX 4.07.00
PIII 550E @733, Asus P3B-F 1.03, Bios 1005
128MB Crucial PC133, CTX VL710, SBLive Value, lw 3.0
Promise Fasttrak66 Conversion, bios 1.08, Driver 1.14
2xWD136BA 7200,2MB
Adaptec AHA-2940U, bios 1.23, IBM 18ES 9.1GB Ultra SCSI

**elister** · 3 May 2000, 08:50

FYI: DMA66 hard drives dont work as well on a motherboard with a DMA33 controller. True they are backwards compatible, just use a dma33 cable on any dma66 drive and it will work.

However!!!

The video clips "may" have some audio sync problems.

Having used a Maxtor 30 gig dma66 7200rpm drive on my old Asus P2B (w/dma33 controller) i had MANY MANY mpegs that were just a fraction out of sync. Having since moved them onto a Asus K7M with a built in dma66 controller and those problems went away.

If you dont want to buy a new motherboard (should your current one not nativly support dma66), then i would get one of those promise dma66 PCI controller cards. Makes a huge difference.

**DrMordrid** · 3 May 2000, 11:14

Most of the ATA/66 controllers require the mainboard support PCI 2.1. Many older ones don't, so this should be checked before purchasing one.

That said the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 drives are so fast it's unreal. One test recently posted on Anandtech gave them a 20% plus advantage over the next fastest drive.

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by DrMordrid (edited 03 May 2000).]

**BajIvan** · 3 May 2000, 12:42

Dear All,

Thank you for your quick reply. My motherboard is SY-6BA+ III, which as specified on http://www.soyo.nl/product/6ba+III.htm
has only DMA33 support, but Five 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (v2.1 compliant)

So I guess an ATA66 card would work with these PCI slots.

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PIII500, 64MB, 10.1 GB IBM 7200rpm,
G400DH, 32MB + RR-G

**DavidHM** · 3 May 2000, 19:37

Considering that PCI 2.1 is nearly 5 years old, I wouldn't worry about not having a PCI 2.1 compliant motherboard. Unless you're running a very old original Pentium motherboard (which I doubt anyone into video editing does), you should have PCI 2.1 complaince since all Pentium II and above chipsets support PCI 2.1. Not sure about Pentium Pros, but if the original Pentiums had PCI 2.1, I'm sure most of the Pros do as well.

**Cheezwiz** · 3 May 2000, 20:52

Well almost any or maybe all of the UDMA or SCSI drives on the market, will be able to handle the capture rate that you need.

For cost reasons it is much more logical to stay with EIDE drives rather than SCSI.

I am not sure if there is another solution to the out of sync audio problems, somehow it seems odd that a DMA66 running at 33 could cause this. Maybe replacing his motherboard was what really fixed the problem, but I don't know exactly what happened so I can't say anything certain. But I would suggest buying and trying the drive before also buying a controller card.

The difference between 7200 and 5400 RPM drives is not too bad so I would opt for the 7200RPM drive just because of the speed increase. Although this increase is not neccasary to capture video (current drive are plenty fast enough to capture compressed video) it is nice to have. In fact you may want to make an operating system partition and a video partition both on the new drive and use the old one for backup or something I know ppl will tell me I am wrong but I think it is justified because of the nice speed increase and the fact that you should have speed to spare. The Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 40 is a very nice drive. I am currently using a Mactor Diamond Max Plus 5120 (20GB, DMA33, and a little older) and have no problems capturing form firewire (3.6Mb/s) onto the disk which is partitioned to hold all of my stuff, which includes to OS's and all my program and data files.

For any storage questions check out www.storagereview.com

-cheez

**MikkoJ** · 4 May 2000, 01:22

From my personal experience with DV editing I'd say to definitely go with a 7200rpm drive. Although the 5400rpm drives' specs may seem nice, once your disk is almost full and you have a lot of files, you may run into problems. I've loved my Deskstar GXP's.
Also I'd suggest to keep the video/capture drive totally separate from OS/apps disk: separate physical drive, separate IDE channel. Otherwise any system I/O has a good chance of interrupting the video stream.

mikko

**Cheezwiz** · 4 May 2000, 02:15

Well maybe try the os on the same disk and if you ever have a problem, then throw it on the older slower disk.

**BajIvan** · 4 May 2000, 16:00

Thanking you all, for nice advices. From all I read here, I will look for a 7200rpm, 2MB cache drive, and will plug it onto a separate IDE channel. If the problem still exists, I will get a DMA66 PCI card. Apart from the DMA33 IDE's I believe my motherboard is good enough and am not looking to change it.

Best regards

Ivan

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PIII500, 64MB, 10.1 GB IBM 7200rpm,
G400DH, 32MB + RR-G

**Cheezwiz** · 4 May 2000, 20:04

One small, but vitally important thing to remember while setting up your drive is enable DMA under the drives properties in Windows device manager.

This makes a huge differenve and without it you may not be able to capture your video.

-Cheez

**Cheezwiz** · 4 May 2000, 20:06

One small, but vitally important thing to remember while setting up your drive is enable DMA under the drives properties in Windows device manager.

This makes a huge differenve and without it you may not be able to capture your video.

Also remember to do this if you ever delete and re-install windows because the default is disabled.

-Cheez

**kevind224** · 5 May 2000, 03:27

I don't know if it's still available, but last week I picked up a 15 GB 7200 Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 40 drive from Staples that was on sale for $139....and they threw in an Ultra 66 controller for free. The controller is from Digital Research (not the Promise one you can modify to be RAID, but it works fine). The controller came in very handy as I was out of IDE ports.

Kevin

**BajIvan** · 5 May 2000, 09:33

Thank you, Cheezwiz. I haven't taken care of this so far .. But do you mean the DMA setting of the driver for the HDD itself .. or the Direct Memory Access from the System devices?

Kevind224 .. Do you mean Staples in the UK ? What cache has this drive ?

best regards

ivan

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-----------------------
PIII500, 64MB, 10.1 GB IBM 7200rpm,
G400DH, 32MB + RR-G

**kevind224** · 5 May 2000, 10:52

Sorry, I don't know about the UK...I got it in the US. I didn't realize you were from the UK, they might have different deals there, but it may be worth calling them. I do see that Staples has stores in the UK. Just be sure they have it on sale AND in stock, they are known here for advertising things that are not in stock for some time later.

For the other question you have for Cheezwiz about DMA, I think it depends on the drivers you are using. For my onboard controller on my FIC VA-503+ MB I use the Windows 98 default VIA drivers and the setting is in Device Manager as you say. When I used to use the later (more problematic) VIA drivers the choice was in the driver setup utility. For my added Ultra 66 controller the setting is off a tab from the Device Manager. So I think the answer is, it depends on what drivers you are using, but checking Device Manager first is a good idea.

Kevin

Kevin

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What HDD for video caputre/editing ?

What HDD for video caputre/editing ?

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