hard drive performance

[Morgoth]

I have just bought a new 120gb diamondmax plus 9 (8mb cache), and have been trying it out for analogue video capture through avi_io. I am capturing using mjpeg and high quality with full stereo sound, hence I am using nearly 3mb/s datarate - This hard drive benchmarks (using avi_io internal benchmark) at around 22mb/s, as opposed to my old one, a 5400rpm seagate , which benchmarks around 5 mb/s. So all is well. Or so I thought.

I have found more dropped frames since using the maxtor as a capture drive than when I was using a slower seagate which was also a boot drive! I am not best pleased,as other than gaining 120gb of space, I feel as though I have wasted my money!

What sort of figuires should I get?

Additionally, I have made a few experiments. I do not possess any udma133 controllers, so I am using my drive on the ide connectors on the mainboard. THese are ata100. I get my best results with it in the master ide channel.

Now this board also has a RAID HPT370A controller built in, to allow RAID. When the drive was connected to the HPT, frame drops galore! I was dropping at least one frame per second of capture at it s worst, but it did settle down a wee bit later - still very bad though.

This being the case, I was wondering if some mobo manufacturers have very bad IDE implementations, particularly with HPT controllers? This is an old EPOX board, an 8K7a+, which uses VIA 686B, which seems to be a dirty word in some threads on this board. Is this perhaps my problem?

I can live with the performance of the main ATA 100 IDE connections - the RAID is obviously unnacceptable. All I can say is thank god I decided against buying two drives and using RAID 0+1 on them. Christ knows what the performance would have been. I was wondering if on board RAID is generally poor, and only separate cards are worth it perhaps?

I would really appreciate some feedback if anyone has any experieces or opinions that may be of use here.

thanks,

Morgoth

System:

Athlon 2000XP , 256mb ddr pc2100 RAM
Epox 8K7A+ mainboard
seagate 20gb boot drive
120g maxtor plus 9 capture drive
Sb live value
G200 Marvel

win 98se

[Dr Mordrid]

Three problems:

1. Yes; that mainboard uses a VIA southbridge chip, which controls the PCI bus your RAID is plugged into and also has very limited PCI bandwidth (ability to transfer data from the RAID card to memory and back). The specific southbridge is uses is indeed the 686B, which is about the worst of VIA's lot.

2. RAID's have a relatively high PCI bus bandwidth requirement, which doesn't help matters much when the chipsets capability to transfer data is less than the capability of the RAID to generate it.

3. Also troublesome is the very high PCI bandwidth required by the SB Live (and its not so great drivers). The 696B and SBLive also have quite a history of conflicting with each, which doesn't help much. VIA has tried to address this conflict in their 4-in-1 drivers, but the fix is only partialy effective. They'd have to re-do the silicon to fully fix it.

Add to all of this the bandwidth required by the capture card having to write to the RAID and you have a real witches brew.

One thing you can do with Win9x that might help a bit is to get control of the VCACHE. VCACHE is a disk cache Win9x sets up when it boots. Unfortunately Win9x has lousy control over the size of the cache, which comes out of your system RAM, which very often causes the OS to hit the swapfile during disk accesses. Info on getting control over the VCACHE in Win9x can be found here;

http://www.putergeek.com/vcache/index.shtml

I'd follow the "overall performance" suggestions for the min and max size of the VCACHE vs. the amount of isntalled RAM.

As far as improving the system goes, something along the lines of a SiS 745/748 or NForce2 chipped mainboard along with a less hoggish audio card like the Turble Beach Santa Cruz or some audio card with a Crystal/Cirrus Logic DSP would help quite a bit.

Pick a mainboard with a Promise RAID chip or get a Promise RAID card instead of something by HighPoint and you'll be even further ahead.

Dr. Mordrid

[Ray Austin]

Via boards are bad, but you should be able to capture 1 stream.

It sounds as though you have something disrupting the system or something? Anti-virus software or background programs running can cause these kinds of problems among other things.

You should be able to capture video at that rate no problem... the drive isn't the problem... you already verified that with the bench test... so blaming the drive is WRONG!

so take a step back and dig deeper and maybe even a better solution would be to trash that via board!

[Morgoth]

Thanks for the info doc - I have been concerned about buying a new mainboard though, because if I do , I will end up with the g200 marvel not working - most boards now are 8X AGP and not backward compatible, particularly the nforce2 boards. Perhaps, considering the kind of expense I am going to have to go to with a mainboard, and it would probably cock up use of the marvel, maybe now its time to push out the boat just a bit more for the advc-100. Presumably that way I can stay with my existing setup, as dropped frames shouldn't be a problem?

I have installed the best via 4in1 drivers for win98 and performance is okish - less than ten frame drops in an hour, and none together,so I probably won't notice any more. Is it unreasonable to aim for zero frame drops over, say, 2hours?

Ray - I do not have any software running in the background - particularly not AV, that would screw everything! I agree the mainboard is the real problem. Just trying to limit my expenses for what I am doing

[Dr Mordrid]

An ADVC-100 would be an excellent choice.

On my SiS based editing systems (and the old 440BX platforms they replaced) and the G400-TV I was running about 1 drop/100,000 frames which AVI_IO further mitigated by copying the previous frame into a dropped frames slot. This keeps the audio in synch.

Importing IEEE-1394 is more reliable than that, but this is using Win2K SP-2 or WinXP.

Win98 isn't really that good of an editing OS given its weaknesses in cache and memory handling. It can be done with some optimization, but the NT cored OS's are much better.

Dr. Mordrid

[Morgoth]

thanks for the input Dr Mordrid. I have posted before about advc100's and I think I need to start saving. My system has a series of boot drives that I replace - My OS of choice is XP - I am only using 98 at the moment because of the inability to get the g200 to behave in XP.

When I get the advc-100, I presume I use AVI_IO to capture from an IE1394 source? My only concern is that will the 686B screw me up again - after all the bandwidth will be coming in via the IE1394 card on the PCI bus and then out to the drives again, which is the same as with the Marvel, albeit via the AGP port?

thanks,

Morgoth

[Brian Ellis]

Not at all. Firstly, let me say I did the transition from Marvel to ADVC-100 well over a year ago and don't regret it.

You will get zero drops (possibly even with your present system, but I don't guarantee it) using IEEE-1394. You don't need AVI_IO: haven't used it for ages. I capture straight into MSP7.

The bandwidth required is much reduced. You will no longer have a card generating a hungry MJPEG sucking it up like fury. Your IEEE-1394 is just copying the DV stream generated by the ADVC straight onto the hard disc: the CPU is hardly involved at all. I can tell this by my CPU temp which stabilises at 57°C at rest. While heavily rendering, it rises to 69°C. While capturing, it hovers between 58 and 59°C.

[Ray Austin]

Originally posted by Morgoth
Ray - I do not have any software running in the background - particularly not AV, that would screw everything! I agree the mainboard is the real problem. Just trying to limit my expenses for what I am doing

I noticed that you are running an Amd 2000+.... same as me except I am running it on a Sis chipset.... ECS K7S5A. A very cheapo mother board with no pci bottle-necks that you are currently dealing with. I don't think the k7s5a is being made any more they converted it to k7s5a-pro, but in essence it is the same motherboard with improvements. You might want to check it out.

[Morgoth]

Brian - thanks for putting me straight. Its good to know that someone else has made the same upgrade - at least I know it is what I am after!

Ray - thanks for the pointer on the board. I really could do with a better board, after all this is around 3 years old I think! Ultimately, i want to upgrade properly, maybe to one of the new athlon 64 bit cpu's when they arrive - I was hoping to hold off long enough to do that, they should be in the shops and settled down in price and stability etc in around 6 months I hope! If my board drives me mad before then, if its a cheapy I may well go for it.

Interestingly, I think many of my frame drops may be down to the quality of my video tape. The worst drops came when I was trying capture Day of the Triffids, recorded off uk gold 2 on a vhs longplay tape - very bad, around 10 drops in 50 mins, but later I tried to do edge of darkness, a bbc original tape, and it ran for two hours with no drops at all! However the capture did collapse with no i/o buffers left errors, and I had to restart at a near convenient point and tack it together in vdub. Not sure if avi_io captures collapsing like that are part of my 686B woes, but all in all, I can get by I think, until I can afford my upgrades.

thanks again all,

morgoth

[davpen]

I also made the upgrade from G400+RR to ADVC-100 some time back. I have used the ADVC-100 on two VIA systems. Asus 17V133 (KT133A+686B) and a Abit VH6T (Apollo Pro 133A+686B). It worked perfectly on both of them. I even had a Sound Blaster Live in thoses systems that didn't cause any problems. I have now upgraded to an Asus A7S333 (SIS745) and a XP2400+ but that was mainly to improve render times.

Cheers,

David.

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by Ray Austin
I noticed that you are running an Amd 2000+.... same as me except I am running it on a Sis chipset.... ECS K7S5A. A very cheapo mother board with no pci bottle-necks that you are currently dealing with. I don't think the k7s5a is being made any more they converted it to k7s5a-pro, but in essence it is the same motherboard with improvements. You might want to check it out.

The K7S5A Pro is still being made/sold;

http://www.ecsusa.com/products/k7s5a_pro.html

I have one in my wifes system and it works very nicely. While the SiS 735 is an older chipset it has the advantage of being a single chip with the interconnect circuitry being internal and not part of the mainboard. This ups the bidirectional bandwidth up from 1000 mb/s too 1200 mb/s....which is even higher than many modern SiS chipsets.

She is currently running an AthlonXP 2000+ and and it works great with a Marvel G400-TV doing HuffYUV, Ulead MPEG and PICVideo MJPeg captures.

We paid $45 for it at a local computer show but I've seen it for ~$40 on

http://www.pricewatch.com

Dr. Mordrid

[DentyCracker]

I have the selfsame drive in my machine as my only windows drive. I only do analog captures and have captured over two hours worth of huffyuv video at a time without a single dropped frame (even when overclocking which is practically all the time) using vegas 4 and msp 6.5. I of course have a SiS 963L southbridge. My drive averages at 47MB/s on hdtach 2.61 (bursts to >100MB/s). If you have a high PCI bandwidth chipset the soundcard issue is not such a problem.

[Ray Austin]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid


The K7S5A Pro is still being made/sold;

http://www.ecsusa.com/products/k7s5a_pro.html

Dr. Mordrid

Yes, Doc that's what I said... the board was originally called "K7S5A" then they added USB2.0 and corrected a bios problem among other things and then named it "K7S5A-PRO" in essence it is the same board, but better.

yes... it's very cheap...and works good. Via can't touch it...

However I disabled the onboard audio and use a turtle beotch santa cruz.

[Duty]

Here is a thought,

While I ws still in college (about 2 years ago) I was given the opertunity to do research on the actual performance gain on data transfer using raid 0 (2 drives). The test was part of a report on inexpensive things small businesses can do to boost the performance of desktop computers and low end servers.

I used the test computers onboard ide controller for the base check and a promise tx2 for the raid test. I used a single ibm 40gb 7200 drive for the base test and a matched drive for the raid test. In the end it was a little over 400% boost in performance. Now you need to know one thing before this all makes sense. The MB I was using was a RIOWorks pdvia. The pdvia is a dual pIII low end server, mid level workstation MB that uses the VIA Apollo Pro133A (that chip set is not known for its speed). Moving to the IDE card was a boost but adding the raid 0 really gave it a push in the right direction.

So the point to all this? In some cases the raid option will give you a huge boost. I went from dropping a lot of frames to none at all. I haven't dropped a frame in 2 years (at least not that I can remember).

My 2 cents,

Jeff

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by Ray Austin
yes... it's very cheap...and works good. Via can't touch it...

However I disabled the onboard audio and use a turtle beotch santa cruz.

Good moves. IMO this is still an excellent budget editing system board.

Dr. Mordrid