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  1. I'm still looking at putting 2 drives in a RAID 0 stripe set. But now I'm settling on what drives to put in this set. I've narrowed it down to 2 choices, both are WD drives.

    1. 120GB drive, 8MB cache, 40GB per platter density
    2. 120GB drive, 2MB cache, 60GB per platter density

    Since I'm concerned about sustained writing capacity for long captures, I think the cache size is less significant. The cache will quickly be filled during capture, and at that point continuous writes wouldn't benefit from the larger cache.

    So I think the higher platter density is of greater importance.

    Any comments?
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  2. I don't think the platter density is really relevant, the cache helps handle stream irregularities, Sustained Write Speed is primary performance number for capture.

    All the platter density really means is two or three platters in drive, higher density MIGHT translate to higher sustained write speeds, but not necessarily. Too many other variables.

    More cache WILL translate to higher sustained write speeds, and burst mode speeds, almost independent of other factors.
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  3. When I say platter density, I mean areal density. More data in a smaller physical space. So there's less stroke movement for the same amount of data written. It's more than just the number of platters.

    Beyond that, I still don't know. What do you mean by stream irregularities? I would imagine the write bitrate coming from a capture program would be pretty constant (unless you're doing real-time encoding, which I will not).
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  4. Irregularities more from system interruptions but video data will vary somewhat, the stream is close to max writing capacity anyway so any variations are extra hard to handle.

    Areal density may increase, sure, but what are the speeds for the heads, drive rotation speed, ata rating, burst mode capabilities, etc. That's what I mean, there are two many variables. The memory cache will probably be more important than slight variances in other factors.
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