Hard drive speed.

[funky-d-munky]

Well RhinoZ, I don't know what your doing wrong but those numbers a way to low. With my old K6-2 and a 3 gig 5400rpm I used to get 5 mb/s. Check to make sure you have DMA enabled in Device Manager and that you selected yes to DMA when installing the drivers. Have you fully formated your drive when you re-installed? Defraged? Did you break up your drive into smaller partiotions? Two gig for c: then a d: and e: divide the remainder.

Dr. Mordrid, you obviously arn't a big fan of Via , but when someone says they are getting 3 mb/s with a new 40gig drive, I think you are letting your personal predjudice eclipse reality when you tell them its because of Via drivers. Maybe they don't have the pci bandwidth to run an RT-X but they can certainly do everything else quite competitively, especially BASIC HARD DRIVE FUNCTION. I have worked with many Via boards and have never had a problem with HD functioning. Last I looked I was getting about 55 mb/s with my 7200 rpm Raid.

[KRSESQ]

Transfer rates and access times aren't really a problem with my VIA system either. The bottleneck is elsewhere in the system. The Doc could probably supply the technical details, but basically although my big fast hard drives benchmark high and I have more memory in the 'puter than I do in my head, the VIA PCI bus chokes on anything other than MatroxMJPG or MPEG. Huff YUY? Forget that. It can barely handle MMJPG at full screen, minimum compression. I'm going for one of those ECS boards as soon as I can slip it past the wife.

That off my chest, I agree that those benchmarks are alarmingly low. The drive manufacturer should have a downloadable diagnostic utility that can scan the drive and either repair it or tell whether it should be replaced or not. One of my aforementioned Maxtor 30 gigs benchmarked at @3.5 MB/Sec. PowerMax diagnosed a "SMART Process Check Failure." In layman's terms, I'm gettin' a new HD!

Kevin

[RhinoZ]

Hi Funky-d-Munky,
Everyhting you said I have done. Remember in my first post I had to do a reinstall of w2k. So I reformatted the hard drive and only installed the Via drivers, the promise driver and the matrox drivers. DMA was installed druing the install. I removed my win98se partition to try the marvel under w2k, but otherwise the marvel captured fine in w98se. And no I have no partitions on my os drive and never had partitions on my captue drive.

Hi Krsesq,
I'll look for the PowerMax utlity right now.

Thanks guys.

[RhinoZ]

Okay guys,
I ran the hard drive test and everything passed. Now the Matrox hd benchmark lists my drive at 2.20mb/s. I'll run the test again later tonight and see what happens,
Thanks for the help.

[KRSESQ]

Rhinoz:

A couple of other things you can try:

Download and run Sandra system diagnostic and see what your drive benchmarks with it. It will give you a lot more information than the Matrox benchmark. Free download here:

http://www.3bsoftware.com/downloads/sandra.html

If it still tests low, do you have another system you can plug it into and run Sandra on it? If it STILL benchmarks low, your next stop is Maxtor tech support.

If it tests okay in a different system, then it looks like the mobo you're using has problems, buddy. That, or your VIA drivers are corrupted.

When I set up my system, I always install from the mobo-supplied driver disk and then install the updated software downloaded from my motherboard manufacturer's website. Seems odd, but to do otherwise gives me "driver not found" errors all over the place.

Also, if your driver version is 4.29, you have to uncheck busmastering when installing to Win2k. Its a known incompatibility issue with the VIA drivers. You can install BM when you run the update.

Good luck.

Kevin

[TnT]

Also check out http://www.viahardware.com maybe they have more on that board or someone in their forums knows the problem.

@Doc, well of course that's not gonna work, but it didn't sound like RhinoZ was going to be doing that anytime soon. So just telling him he should be able to capture more than 176x120.

[Peter Janak]

"I've been capturing analog full frame (NTSC) with just a Seagate Barracuda IV 80GB and I only drop 1 frame out of every ~1200, but I believe this is due to the SBLive Value I am using (or do I have incorrect fps? haven't had time to check). Anyways, it would be better to capture using RAID, but from my experience it isn't necessary if you have a good mobo and hard drive (unless you need to capture a lot of footage at a time).

I used to use have a mobo with a Via chipset and 3.4MB still sounds really low."


Well for me, I just learned about RAIDS and even more from reading Dr. Mordrid posts I only have a WD ATA 100 80gig 7200rpm and a MAxtor ATA 66 30gig 5400rpm. My mobo only supports ATA 33 . No room for an ATA-100 control card. It when there was it didn't help much. I have a crappy Pinnacle DC10plus analog cap card. Actually it captures uncompressed pretty nice. Its often I can cap at 640x480 uncompressed without
dropped frames. But what I hate is a very subtle "stop and go". Noticable during pans or fast foward motion towards the camera.
Its kinda like one of the TV channels. They rythnically compress time in programs to allow for more total commercial time per day. Its God Dam annoying. As for the BIOS "SMART". I've always been told it makes your drive perform better/faster. I'll turn it off and see how that helps. Incidently, turning off "write-behind verification" and "read-ahead optimization is a good thing when planning to capture. But with some drives doing so slows down readd write performance I leave my current system simple stuff and internet and have another system set up RAID0 dedicated for video/3D. WHen I can afford a new system anyway.
Pete Janak

[RhinoZ]

Hi YA Folks,
Thanks for all the help..
The problem was with the motherboard itself, and SB live on PCI slot 4. I went back to the place where I got my computer and I got a replacement for my motherboard. Updated the bios on the motherboard..reinstalled everything and got speeds of 18000 and 19000mbs from my two hard drives. Stayed up till 2:00am last night getting it all done. Then my little girl decided to wake up too early this morning. Sheesh!.
Have a great weekend.

[Peter Janak]

"Hi YA Folks,
Thanks for all the help..
The problem was with the motherboard itself, and SB live on PCI slot 4. "

Why was slot 4 the problem? On my motherboard each PCI slot is a busmastering slot. Was your Slot 4 your only Bus mastering slot or something?? I have an SB Live also.
Slot1 =AGP
Slot2=DVD decoder card with TV out
Slot 3=modem
Slot 4=SBLive
Slot 5=Pinnacle DC10plus

Yeah I know I don't have a dedicated video setup. I only have one computer and can't afford a decent set top DVD player.

I really wish that slot1,2 and 5 didn't use the same IRQ but theres no way around that.
Pete Janak

[RhinoZ]

Hey Peter,
Yeah I wish I had a dedicated computer for my video editting too, but I might after Christmas and I'm going with a SIS chipset mobo ( MSI 745Ultra ). This computer will be used for the internet and all my little girls games. The games were messing with my work program and I need my work programs.
Anyways my slot4 = your slot 5 ( I did not count the AGP slot as slot 1 ). I really don't know why it didn't work but it works now.
Cheers.

[Peter Janak]

Actually I was mistaken I have 5 PCI slots and an AGP slot. slots 1,5, and the AGP slot all share the same IRQ. Sorry about that.
Pete Janak

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Peter Janak
Actually I was mistaken I have 5 PCI slots and an AGP slot. slots 1,5, and the AGP slot all share the same IRQ. Sorry about that.
Pete Janak

This situation drives me nuts sometimes

[Peter Janak]

Don't I know it. My capture card screws up when its on the same IRQ as my display and and my DVD decoder card. Yeah I know. Buy a set top DVD player. When I add my ATA-100 card its more trouble. Boot up is nearly 10 times longer. I think because the computer has to stop and think about how its gonna deal with all this stuff. Then if I put the ATA card on a different slot the dam thing won't even boot. Man, I just need to step up to the world of Pent 3 or 4. Pent 4 boards are starting to come with built in RAID controllers. THats a good thing. Draw back is I need to find a Pent 3 intel chipset board that still supports the old AGP spec in addition to the new ones. My AGP card is a Diamond Viper and its only a 1.0. Or if I can't I'll have to buy a modern AGP card. Which I can't afford at the moment if I buy a new MOBO. He-he, actually right now I am using Pent 3 buts its a 4 year old MOBO. Crap, it won't even let me install Win98 SE or Win2000. I tried to up the BIOS but no go. Not even regular Win98 would install then.

[RhinoZ]

Boy, and I thought I had troubles.

[LvR]

Peter

I have a crappy Pinnacle DC10plus analog cap card. Actually it captures uncompressed pretty nice. Its often I can cap at 640x480 uncompressed without

I am interested to know how you managed to do that.

As far as I know the DC10 is based on a hardware Zoran Mjpeg chipset that does not allow outputting of raw video in any format - ie - you can only capture in Mjpeg with that card, no uncompressed.

Care to explain?