Hardware

[zoobie]

Since I have a DAC-100 (like Canopus 100) separate hardware converter to DV, is it really necessary for a separate hard drive? I was under the impression that the extra hard drive was for internal capture cards.

Comments/suggestions appreciated.

Thx

[compuser]

I guess it depends on how much space you have currently... and how long you want to record to your drive...

A rule of thumb, DV take up about 13.5 GB/hour.

[redwudz]

It's never really necessary, but does help with transfer speed. With one drive, one controller, the data has to wait for free time when it's writing or reading as the bandwidth is shared between the read and write modes.

Two HDs just make less work for the CPU and system. There are also issues with your boot drive wanting to do OS operations while you want to encode or transfer.

Maybe it's not a big issue, but it is much more efficient with two drives.

[edDV]

It's never really necessary, but does help with transfer speed. With one drive, one controller, the data has to wait for free time when it's writing or reading as the bandwidth is shared between the read and write modes.

Two HDs just make less work for the CPU and system. There are also issues with your boot drive wanting to do OS operations while you want to encode or transfer.

Maybe it's not a big issue, but it is much more efficient with two drives.

When I cap to my single drive notebook with the ADVC-100, I need to stop all background processes and keep my hands off.

On the desktop that has 4 EIDE controllers and multiple drives, I can do most anything short of games without loosing frames.

Just keep the capture and scratch disks (temp files) off the OS drive.

[zoobie]

You mean just make a new logical drive partition on the OS drive?

Getting mixed signals here...

Thx

[jimmalenko]

I thought what they said was pretty clear

It's not a requirement to have an extra hard drive, but it is beneficial in many ways. And I mean a seperate hard drive, not just a seperate partition on the same hard drive

[edDV]

You mean just make a new logical drive partition on the OS drive?

Getting mixed signals here...

Thx

On a single drive system like a notebook, I find it best to capture video to a separate partition to keep fragmentation under control. A defragmented partition will keep the record heads on a contiguous path so long as the OS doesn't take the drive for its own purposes.

It is this conflict between the OS and the capture process that causes frame drops.

An external drive on a notebook doesn't necessarily improve the situation but on a desktop a separate drive on a separate disk controller can operate separately from the OS drive through a process known as "PCI bus mastering". The OS and the capture process can each do their own thing mostly without conflict.

[spectroelectro]

You should always use a separate hard drive physically different from your OS hard drive. The reason is that Windoze constantly writes to its OS disk. There's no way to avoid this. So if you capture to the same hard drive on which your OS resides, you're begging for dropped frames and other issues.

[zoobie]

Thanks all