Question about 2nd Hard drive for Video Capture??

[VEBouto]

Hi, i am thinking about buying a 2nd hard drive purely for video capture only and have a question.
1. I'm sure my current internal hard drive's speed is only 5400, if that sounds right, but it's one of the older IDE type, so do they still make the faster 7200 HD drives, and if so would you guys recommend a faster drive because it will perform better when i capture on it with my software.
Thanks.

[budz]

The current trend is to use a SATA hard drive but your motherboard has to have SATA connections or you could use a PCI SATA controller card for it.

Yes, they still make IDE 7200 rpm hard drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136111

The Western Digital Black series 500gb, 640gb & 750gb SATA drives are fast.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136320
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136319
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136283

[VEBouto]

Thanks for the info Budz...but can anyone tell me if it will be better for capture using the faster 7200 rpm drive? I usually capture in uncompressed avi...then encode to Mpg2.
The only thing i plan to have on the 2nd drive is my video capture software and that's it basically...maybe a media player aswell.
Also what brands do you guys recommend?

[redwudz]

Most newer 3.5" drives are 7200 RPM, but for uncompressed video, platter speed isn't as critical as when using a more compressed codec format.

Brands of hard drives? Same as budz posted, WD is my present favorite.

[jagabo]

Capturing to a drive that's not your boot drive is always a good idea.

Capturing uncompressed RGB at full D1 resolution requires the drive to write about 30 MB/s, YUY2 about 20 MBs. That's still uncomfortably close to the limit for many drives (at least in the inner cylinders). You're usually much better off using a fast lossless codec like HuffYUV (unless you have a really slow processor). That will cut the data rate by about half giving you much more headroom. Capture YUY2, compress with HuffYUV.

[neomaine]

Hi, i am thinking about buying a 2nd hard drive purely for video capture only and have a question.
1. I'm sure my current internal hard drive's speed is only 5400, if that sounds right, but it's one of the older IDE type, so do they still make the faster 7200 HD drives, and if so would you guys recommend a faster drive because it will perform better when i capture on it with my software.
Thanks.

Putting your converting software on the converting drive won't really buy you anything. It reads the program once, loads it into memory, and its done. No need to bother.

With drives at these prices, why not make it a 2nd and a 3rd hard drive? Keep your OS and software on your current drive. Use the 2nd drive to capture to and the 3rd drive to convert* to. It'll much easier to keep the drive defragmented as well.

* = Converting tools usually have a temp/intermediate file or files so you have to take this into consideration. The idea is to have one drive only reading while the other is only writing.

[lacywest]

How about capturing to a external Seagate or Maxtor or Western Digital USB 2.0 500 GB drive ... I do this for Win 7 Media Center to record my TV shows ... I even use it for installing games on ... Wolfenstein 2009 ... PainKiller Resurection ... etc ... etc ... works for me.

Plenty of drives costing 80 bucks ... Walmart ... Target ... last week prices.

I only have a single 80 GB drive in my tower [Dual Boot ... WinXP Media Center 2005 and WIN 7 x64 Ultimate] ... and about 6 external USB 2.0 drives ... all 500GB drives.

Target ... last week ... had a Seagate for 69 bucks ... 500GB USB 2.0 drive.

[VEBouto]

Thanks, but i have always thought that capturing on an external hard drive is worse, according to some of the threads i have read here at VideoHelp.

[jagabo]

How about capturing to a external Seagate or Maxtor or Western Digital USB 2.0 500 GB drive ... I do this for Win 7 Media Center to record my TV shows ...

Since MCE capture devices all capture hardware MPEG 2 compressed video you are only writing 1 or 2 MB/s to the drive. The OP is capturing uncompressed video so he needs to write 20 to 30 MB/s. That will be very risky with a USB 2.0 drive. An eSATA drive will work though.