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**Dr Mordrid** · 11 February 2001, 23:45

The FT33 should indeed be updated if you're going to use any of the new (and very fast) ATA drives. This for a couple of reasons;

1. its max theoretical throughput is 33 mb/s. Two of the better new drives (IBM 75GXP, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus40 etc.) could easily overrun this capability. EASILY. Some of them can go this fast as single drives, and putting a brace of them into a RAID array would make matters even worse.

Ex: at one time I installed two IBM 75GXP's with a Fasttrak66 and they overran its 66 mb/s maximum. The graph created by DiskSpeed showed them constantly hitting the wall during the benchmark. When I put the same drives onto a Fasttrak100 and retested the reason became clear: they hit almost 70 mb/s. This was certainly over the Fasttrak66's capability and massively over that of the Fasttrak33.

2. the Fasttrak33 had a much higher PCI bus utilizatioin than either the Fasttrak66 or especially the Fasttrak100. This made it less likely to live well with other high utilization cards. The Fasttrak100 is also lower in PCI bus utilization than the Fasttrak66.

3. the Fasttrak100 was updated to use a solid state timebase (a PLL for techies). The Fasttrak33 and Fasttrak66 used a crystal timebase which was much less accurate.

Convinced yet?

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 12 February 2001).]

**BrianP** · 12 February 2001, 06:25

OK so the Fasttrak33 could well be past its prime.... now what would you suggest for drives? Again, I'm not necessarily looking for whopper 60GB drives.

Price is also something of an issue, especially if I have to replace the FT33. The FT66 is about $20 cheaper than the FT100. Is there much of a price difference between ata66 and 100 drives? I need something affordable in any case. (I wanted to spend under $300 on this upgrade.)

**Dr Mordrid** · 12 February 2001, 06:55

There is little or no price difference between ATA66 and ATA100 drives. Actually most companies have now or are in the process of dropping ATA66 entirely so as to consolidate their inventories.

As for the Fasttrak100 vs. the Fasttrrak66...don't skimp. Get the real deal.

The two drives I mentioned are excellent (Maxtor DiamondMax Plus and IBM 75GXP). Both are solid and very fast. A 20g Maxtor ATA100 can be had for about $120-130 about anywhere.

The only things you need to be aware of in setting up such a rig are;

1. Maxtor ATA100 drives come with write verification turned on. This turns itself off after 10 power cycles and after this they run full tilt. This can be done manually using Maxtors WVSET.EXE utility which you can download from their website.

2. With the Fasttrak100 there is a utility called "FastCheck". Install this, run it and go to the Options page. In there turn OFF the S.M.A.R.T. function. This will immediately almost double the speed of the array.

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 12 February 2001).]

**This_Idiot** · 12 February 2001, 14:01

Hi Brian,

I think you'd be lucky to find non-ATA100 drives around, other than at computer fairs.

I bought a pair of IBM GX75's (30Gb each) for about £100UK each a couple of months back (don't try a direct comparison against UK prices, it doesn't work). So for £300, I got a 60Gb raid array capable of sucking in about all the video I could throw at it (30+Mb/s).

Yep, worth it

**IM_Riktar** · 12 February 2001, 17:25

Well it's been awhile since I have done something daring (pronounced "stupid" by some) so I am going to plunk down some hard earned greenbacks on a new MSI 694D AR Pro motherboard with onboard RAID capabilities.

Now before anyone rolls their eyes over this idea let me say that the onboard controller is a Promise Fasttrak 100 controller. I have confirmed this from MSI's website.

The fact that the motherboard is a dual socket 370 doesn't hurt my decision either. If Matrox ever gets the W2K drivers finalized I will spring for the extra CPU and convert over everything to WinDoze 2000.

The way technology advances I figured that by the time it was time to upgrade the controller the motherboard would be ready to go as well.

I sure hope that the IRQ assignment isn't done as dumb as my VD133 Pro motherboard was. I mean who ever heard of putting the onboard raid contoller IRQ on the same setting as the AGP slot?

While this isn't EXACTLY along this topic it does warrant mentioning what I am about to do.

If someone knows any bad stuff about this board let me know quick. Otherwise I will be off to do some "daring" stuff this week. Of course if I have to be the one to find out what is bad about this idea, rest asured I will post the results here.

**Dr Mordrid** · 12 February 2001, 18:14

Found some interesting info on it here;

http://www.2cpu.com/talkback/968239284,59509,.html

and this 5 way test on digit-life.com;

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/v...cpu/index.html

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 13 February 2001).]

**IM_Riktar** · 13 February 2001, 17:23

Thanks for the post Doc. It does give me some things to consider. I will check what the revision of the board is before I pick it up. I will let all of you know what I find.

**Greebe** · 15 February 2001, 23:07

.

**IM_Riktar** · 16 February 2001, 03:51

CarlosW: From my own experience I would look for a motherboard that DOESN'T have the onboard raid controller hardwired to the same IRQ as the AGP slot. I ran into this on a Iwill VD133 Pro motherboard which made for some very long and painful hair pulling sessions trying to figure out why I couldn't sustain vidcaps without dropping frames. I also am not keen on Highpoint products. They work OK, but not as good as the Promise line of RAID controllers. If you can hold off until after this weekend I am going to get back here with results from my testing with the MSI mobo I mentioned earlier in this thread.

So far I have not been able to find anything that will cause this motherboard to not perform as I want for NLE!!!!!

As far as overclocking capabilities go I have found that the gains are not worth the problems that can crop up when pushing a CPU/component past the factory specs. Don't get me wrong I still do it on some stuff, but never on anything that I need to work without problems. Overclocking is a very fun hobby, as long as you realize that you are sacrificing some of your time away from the very thing you want to do with your computer simply for the sake of saying "look how fast I can make thi......." oops gotta reboot, system froze up again. Know what I mean?

**The Scientist** · 16 February 2001, 08:07

CarlosW: > I am running a Matrox marvel G400tv
card and a PIII 700E@933 on an Asus P3Bf slot1 BX motherboard.
This translates to a 133MHz FSB and so far I have
not noticed any issues with the out of spec AGP
speed. I do not appear to have any more frame drops or other
issues with the system overclocked or when run at 100MHz FSB.
That said, the advice given by others about not overclocking
a NLE machine is well worth taking note of due to the many other
potential problems that can afflict NLE setups
ie. eliminate overclocking as one of them from the start!

One relevant issue I would like to point out is that, in my
hands, neither the Highpoint 366 or 370 EIDE
controller chips would play ball with the playback of Matrox MJPEG
encoded avi files. The problems I had were a consistent jerkiness
in the playback of these particular file types (albeit not always at
the same frame locations). These were not present in avi files
encoded either directly with PicVideo's MJPEG CODEC or Matrox MJPEG
avi's transcoded to PicVideo MJPEG's. I spent a lot (read: far to much!)
of time tracking this problem down and found it to be present both on
my system based on a Soyo 6BA+IV bx m/board (inbuilt Highpoint 366),
forerunner to the Soyo 6BA+100 (inbuilt Highpoint 370) and on the
Asus P3Bf system when using an Abit hotrod RAID PCI card (Highpoint 370).

I'm now using a Promise Ultra66 card which does not show this issue.

Hope this info is of use to you.

Cheers, Simon

[This message has been edited by The Scientist (edited 16 February 2001).]

**CarlosW** · 17 February 2001, 06:51

Thank you all for the advice

IM_Riktar: I'm looking forward your results; I've found a place where I can buy a MSI-6321 (here in Buenos Aires you don't have many choices).
The_Scientist: I currently have a SOYO 6BA+IV (hpt366) & didn't found jerkiness in MJPEG playback (Quantum LM Hard disk) but I never capture long full screen videos.

I'm curious about getting a dual processor (like the MSI of Riktar) Could I frameserver VideoDub to TMPEG and get one processor for each task in Win2K?

**CarlosW** · 17 February 2001, 07:50

Riktar: did you test a dual P3 configuration?
I've read a review about setup complications with 2 processors installed
http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/hardwa...5&mscssid=&tp=
and some difficulties with the G400 dual head feature
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/msi...o/index4.shtml

**IM_Riktar** · 17 February 2001, 22:30

I have not tested with a dual CPU setup yet. The other CPU is on it's way. I look forward to testing under NT 4.0/ Win2000 as well as Linux.
I have not had ANY problems with my G400 Marvel with this board. As a matter of fact I have just completed a 47 minute video project that went very well. Capturing using the Matrox MJPEG went well. I also tried the HuffyUV capture and had very good sucess. So far everthing I have asked this board to do it has done without so much as a hiccup. I am almost beginning to wonder when the bottom is going to fall out. It is going that well. More to come.

**IM_Riktar** · 18 February 2001, 18:26

Well I picked up the motherboard. So far so good. It looks like the folks at MSI were thinking when they assigned IRQ's on this board. The Promise Fasttrak controller is seperate from the AGP slot. So far I have installed, board, re-installed Windows 98SE and started capturing with NO DROPPED frames. Yea! Now I must admit this is with Matrox Mjpegand hardware assist. I will let everyone know how the Huffy captures go sometime this weekend. I will post a little more in-depth info at that time. But so far, things look "promising" (Groan, I know, poor humor)

Announcement

Fasttrak33 -- what should I upgrade?

Fasttrak33 -- what should I upgrade?

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