Need a 2nd hdd for capture, which?

[Will Hay]

I need a second hard drive purely for video capture.
I have an IBM Deskstar GXP 40gb as primary master and was thinking of buying the same again, albeit a bigger size.
Is this fast enough drive?120G...
IBM Deskstar 180GXP Ref: HDDIBM120GXP180
7200 RPM - 1 Yr Warranty - 8MB Buffer
Thanks,
Will

[Jerry Jones]

Well, if you have some extra $$$...

...I personally can vouch for the SCSI Seagate Barracudas!

I have two external SCSI 'cudas and they're great.

Each external drive has 36gb of space, which is all I need for capture.

(One external drive for each of my two NLEs.)

I also have Western Digital UltraDMA drives... 40gb + 100gb (each NLE computer).

I use the SCSI drives for capture and I write final DV video .avi files to the 100gb UltraDMA drives.

I bought Siig SCSI cards and they perform flawlessly.

One of them is an UltraWide SCSI.

The other is an Ultra SCSI.

My two external drives both have 50-pin connections.

I also have two, older internal SCSI drives (IBM and Seagate).

I bought my drives from this vendor:

http://www.dirtcheapdrives.com

The external enclosures have fans to keep the drives cool.

SCSI is simple to configure...

...and it just WORKS!

SCSI hard drives are bloody fast and cool because you can easily add extra hard drives or DVD drives or other peripherals as you need them and there's no worry about running out of connectors.

For me, the extra money spent is well worth not having to deal with the aggravation that so often accompanies competing solutions.

My two cents,

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Dr Mordrid]

I wouldn't buy an IBM Deskstar if my life depended on it. Too many reliability problems and they have drastically reduced their guarantee. That and IBM has sold their HDD business to Fujitsu after the class-action lawsuit over the "quality" of their DeskStars.

That said I've been having great luck with my Maxtor D740X (7,200 rpm) and D540X (5,400 rpm) drives. Fast, quiet and solid.

Dr. Mordrid

[paulw]

I would stay clear of Fujitsu as well. We have had 3 replaced over the past month at work. One on a desk top and 2 one our email server. Bad on board controller chips.

[Brian Ellis]

I agree with Maxtor 7200 rpm types. Get as big as you can afford. If you really wish to push the boat out, get 2 smaller, identical ones and a Promise RAID card to drive them. I've got 2 x 60 Gb on a RAID 0 system, giving me 120 Gb and I find this is comfortable for doing, say, 3 - 4 hours of DV capture, editing and creating a 90 - 120 min DVD, without being excessive. The RAID system is particularly useful for analogue capture because the extra speed will minimise drops. 2 x 60 Gb + RAID may cost you 30 or 50% more than one 120 Gb HDD, but is worth the extra investment, IMHO.

[Fred H]

No! Not IBM.
See my signature...

Unfortunately the new Maxtor Deskstar Pro 9 60 GB is not so fast (only 60 MBps read burst speed) like the IBM was and doesn’t compare with my other Maxtor 80 GB drive, which is coming up to 80-90 MBps R.B. Speed with HD Tach.
The worst thing is that my IBM fails randomly with crash and bad clusters. Than it works a while ending with new crashes. In this way I can’t proof it for warranty replacement.
No, no more IBM for me.

Fred H

[Will Hay]

Thanks guys.
I'm not entirely sure I'll see the benefit of installing two hdd's (rather than just an additional one). Most of my captures are generally 2bg or thereabouts (if I capture anymore than that another file is created, this is the maximum file size limit of Win98se right?) so I think just a secondary hdd will suffice.
Also, Is there a *massive* speed benefit in sticking a second hdd on a Raid card rather than just as a slave device from the master drive (in my case the IBM Deskstar)?
Thanks,
Will

[THE_Editor]

I use the following drives and have not had any problems YET!



Fujitsu MPF324AT Partitioned & formatted as C: (Engine room) & D: (Programs) NTFS

IC35L120AWA07 (IBM deskstar 120gb) Purchased from Ebuyer for £118 inc VAT & Delivery. No problem with it yet (Touches wood) NTFS

Quantum FireballP ( Two of em) 60gb & 40gb FAT32

All ATA drives controlled by Onboard Promise controller.

Quantum VikingII 4.5gb Which was my original NLE drive many moons ago. It cost a Whopping £350 back then .. Now its only used as a "Scratch disk". FAT32

[Brian Ellis]

Will

1) If you have a single extra HDD, do NOT put it as a slave on the same IDE cable as your boot drive. Put it as master on the other one for max performance. If you share the same IDE cable and the swap file or anything else needs to kick in, you will lose speed on the second drive.

2) Yes, you will get almost twice the overall transfer rate (read and write) with a RAID 0 configuration. Furthermore, it is totally independent of the system IDE, so that there is no risk of conflicting drive access. The extra speed is because both disks (or more, if you want: you can put up to 8 at a time on some systems, but you won't get 8 x speed, more like between 3 and 4) receive alternate packets of data and while one is actually reading/writing the other is transferring data to/fro the buffer. With a normal single-disk IDE system, the two operations alternate.

There are a few RAID controllers on the market, but some reputedly do not perform as well as others. The Promise controllers are, generally, fairly trouble-free.

The size of file you capture is not material to the speed of disk you need. If you capture in analogue at, say, 15 Mb/s, you will get just a tad more than 2 minutes of video into a 2 Gb file. (~8 minutes of DV). It is not always easy to get a sustained 15 or 20 Mb/s, auto-split into 30 or 40 separate 2 Gb files, over, say, an hour's capture on a single disk, because the FAT32 boot segment needs the directory system written to. This means that the heads are constantly thrashing to the start of the disk, as well as to where the data is being recorded.

IOW, RAID gives you added security against dropped data. It may be overkill on a DV-only system, as opposed to analogue, but good overkill.

[Will Hay]

I must be way off the mark with what I'm doing here Brian, my recent success (or so I thought) was around 3mb/s, and I thought that was 'okay'.
I'm not using anything other than the standard stuff that came with the Matrox software BTW.
Whilst I'm aware of this hufflepuff codec, I haven't installed it yet. Much like a second hdd is this free codec pretty much essential and would I see a big improvement?
I've tried virtualdub for capture rather than the Matrox remote (MR) but I seemed to get more frames drops than I did in MR. I couldn't see a facility in MR to use a different compression tool but I imagine that's a facility virtualdub has.
I think a new motherboard is on the cards, this is the kind I have my eye on:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2067923790

Not only does only the floppy drive intermittemntly fail but now I've inadvertantly buggered the PS2 port!
I'm also leanng towards a new sound card (someone recomemmended the Hercules XP Theatre) and whilst I can appreciate there are no guarantee's I'm still unsure wether I'll see any benefit in ditching the SB1024.
Will

[Will Hay]

Thanks for the no-no on IBM guys.
Ignorance always told me IBM were the best (I'm sending this via an IBM laptop!) and had you guys not posted I would have definatley sourced another deskstar.
Looks like it's maxtor for me, an 80gb-ish on a raid controller card.
In the past I always avoided Maxtor, I had a pal who had one and it was noisy as hell, obviously they've addressed that issue.
Thanks again,
Will

[K6-III]

Go for Seagate.....most reliable and most quiet...

If you want a 3 year warranty, get a Samsung 7200rpm...

[Jerry Jones]

I believe, Doc, that you may be mistaken regarding IBM and "Fujitsu."

All of the reports I've read suggest IBM's hard drive business has been acquired by Hitachi:

http://www.itworld.com/Comp/3743/020604hitachiibm/

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

I might add...

Fujitsu got out of the desktop hard drive business about one year ago:

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-270989.html

...and have since focused on notebooks and servers.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

Info about the IBM Class Action:

http://www.sheller.com/ibmclassaction.htm

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net