Weirdest problems....H-E-L-P (plz)!

[funsoul]

Hi Folks,

Am having the most difficult time and thought it was time to ask for
assistance from you (again). Also posted this to rec.video.desktop in hopes that someone will be able to figure this one out.

I used to do my captures in YUY2 at
704x480, fullframes(uncompressed), 44.1KHz stereo with approximately 2 frames dropped per minute. Am now dropping roughly 6 frames/min at 352x480.

This is a long, weird tale so I should start with my setup:

p4 1.4GHz (formerly pIII 500eb)
256meg rdram (formerly 256meg pc100 sdram)
asus p4t mobo (formerly p3bf6)
matrox g400-tv
turtlebeach montegoII+ soundcard
promise fastrack100 raid controller (formerly ft66)
3com 10/100 ethernet card

separate capture drives:
3 matrox 45g (RAID0)

o/s= win98se

There are no IRQ conflicts and the tweaks for win98se in the maxtor faq have been applied. Am using vidtools 1.52.033 and the 5.41.008 display drivers.

OK...it started with a simple rebuild after starting to experience issues (ie, crashes and weird error messages). Formatted c: and
re-installed 98se with all cards installed. Returned all setting to their tweaked states. Tested the RAID hard drives using Sandra and they rated worse than a single ata66 27g drive. Repeated tests showed wild
fluctuations in the drive performance. Tried with all default settings and got similar results. The fastrack utility was set for max pci utilization with SMART disabled.

I pulled all 3 maxtors and did testing on each. All rated beautifully using Sandra and the maxtor utility reported that all are in factory condition. I assume that the drives are all OK.

One drive connected to the promise66 set for RAID0 tested miserable. I
rationalized the purchase of the fastrack100 (all 3 maxtors are ata100's). Set it up and ran tests...the same miserable results as
with the fastrack66! *groan*

Next guess (albeit a long shot) was that 1 of the 2 128meg pc100 ram cards had gone. Ran the system with one of them only and got the same results with each....assumed ram to be fine.

Next best guess was the mobo. Flashed it, tested, same results. Decided to go ahead and upgrade (I didn't want to be off-line the 4-6 weeks it would take to get a replacement motherboard and couldn't see
buying a mobo for a pIII 500). Got the 1.4GHz, 256meg rdram and p4t motherboard. SAME RESULTS!!! UGH!

I tried a number of test captures using MJPEG, rgb, YUY2, uncompressed, huffyuv. All yielded similar results. I've even tried
capturing to each drive standalone (ie, not connected to the fastrack) as well as captures to freshly formatted (and performing beautifully other drives). All the captures using the matrox PC-VCR came out fine, though. At MJPEG 704x480, I dropped about 1 frame/minute. All other
results (using avi-io and virtualdub) came out dropping 5-6 frames/min.. Another weird twist is that while captures made with
PC-VCR and rgb on avi-io/vdub came out rightside up while YUY2, huffyuv captures using avi-io/vdub come out upside down...never seen this happen before. hmmm...

I'm totally frustrated at this point. The only things left to replace *groan* are the hard drives, video card and/or sound card. :^(

Any ideas? Any suggestions or assistance would be GREATLY
appreciated!!!!

Thanks for reading
-funsoul

[mad99]

I guess you are using Maxtor-drives ;-)

As far as I remember, there were a lot of problems with maxtor-drives and raid-controllers. I would test the raid with another branch of drives, e.g. IBM

[funsoul]

Hi mad99,

Thanks for responding!

Yes...am using maxtors. The maxtors on the promise fastrack66 worked perfectly before the apocolyptic rebuild.

I removed the raid controller from the system altogether and have been doing individual testing using each of the 3 45g maxtors, a 40g maxtor and one of my 27.3gig ibm's. All results are still miserable. Testing with Sandra and the matrox benchmarking tool show that all the drives are nice, fast and in great condition.

This would appear to eliminate screwey hard drives as a source of the problem (also...I would imagine the odds of 6 hard drives all dying at the same time to be fairly low).

Appreciate your input, though...thanks

Any other ideas?

[Dr Mordrid]

I've been using Maxtor ATA100's with no problems at all. Hmmmm..... and you say FastCheck has S.M.A.R.T. disabled? Even stranger.

I'm assuming you have the drives on the ends of the cables set to MASTER and the third to SLAVE? Each drive was placed on the new controller exactly as it was on the FT66?

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 19 April 2001).]

[Phil Pugh]

A bit off the wall here - was the capture source the same in the before and after scenarios? You haven't got a poor signal causing the problems here?

[funsoul]

Hi Dr. Mordrid! Yes...I disabled SMART in the fastrack utility as per your suggestion. Yes...all 3 drives have proper jumper settings, new cables (tried using the old ones, too) and primary ide channel using 2 drives, secondary using the remaining one. I spent more or less a full day on the phone with promise tech support...they were nice but couldn't help me resolve the issue.

Like I said...pulled the drives and have been trying to just get a simple capture to work without success.

As the controller is completely out of the picture and I'm still experiencing problems, it makes me feel like I'm missing some setting in the os or motherboard.

Phil- I've tried with multiple sources...all stellar quality (tapes that I've done captures from in better times with minimal framedrops)

Could the video card be at least part of the problem? Clearly that should not effect the throughput on the RAID, so there are other problems as well :^(