best configuration to capture

[matr8x]

Hi. I want to get serious in capturing my videos so I would like someone to tell me the best way to configure my system to capture to disk and editing.
See I have a p4 2.53 1024mb ram and 3 hard drives.

1 maxtor 200 gigabyte 8mb hard drive
1 maxtor 160 gigabyte 8mb hard drive
2 ata133 pci cards
1 ibm 40 gigabyte 2mb hard drive.

What's the best way to configure the hard drives to achieve the most optimum transfer and editing speeds of the hard drive. See i'm a little confused.

Meaning. see I figure I put 768 swap drive on the 200 gigabyte hardrive connected to the ata133 card, and another 768 swap drive on the 160 gigabyte hardrive(connected to ata133 pci card). Than capture on the 200 gigabyte. Edit on the 160 gigabyte hard drive. Would there be a performance problem with the swap file on the 200 or 160 gigabyte hard drive. Should I partition the drive and if I should, what size?

General newbie questions that wants to get the best performance with the available equipment I listed and speed from my hard drives. I might also buy another hard drive if it'll help the speed. Explainations would be nice.

Thanks again.

[drak23]

matr8x:
Does your controller card(s) allow a RAID setup? If so, consider configuring your 160 - and 200 GB drives to look like one big drive. With a RAID dual-channel controller you will get twice the throughput of a single-drive setup. You will lose 80 GB (RAID will only see twice the smaller drive) but you get a huge performance gain. If you can't stand to waste the space and price is not an object then go for that extra hard drive. I think your machine must be running out of bays though!

Note I haven't tested this yet, but I plan to have this configuration on my next desktop sometime later this year (2-200GB drives on a RAID-enabled motherboard). Maybe someone who has tried RAID for captures will comment.

Don't worry about which drive you edit on, it will not affect your captures, just keep them defragged.

Ideally your capture drives won't contain your OS or application files. Don't put your swap file on either drive, keep it on the 40GB. Keep that drive defragged also.

Just my 2 cents.

Drak

[drak23]

Correction:
You'll only lose 40GB in the RAID config (160x2 vs 160+200, i.e 320 vs 360).

Typing not thinking...

Drak

[matr8x]

nope. it's just 2 plain ata133 pci controllers included when I bought the 2 matrox hard drives

[drak23]

I'd consider getting the RAID controller (look up Promise Technologies on the web). I think you'll get more benefits with this than with another hard disk, and 320GB is a lot of capture space, especially with huffy or MJPEG.

Regards,
Drak

[gmatov]

Matr8x,
Per some of the replies I've seen here, you should put the 40 on the EIDE, IDE 0 or 1, Pri, whatever your board calls it, and the other 2 drives on ONE of the ATA 133 cards. You'd be wasting a PCI slot by using both, with 1 drive per card. There are 2 separate channels on each card, so no collisions, or slowdowns. Cap to the 200 (captures will be larger than the finished render ) output to the 160, and if you use TMPGenc, or CCE, delete the files you don't need for a burn.

Drak,
Not too long ago, we'd have given an option on a left arm FOR 40 gigs HDD space. What're we, spoiled, we can say "You'll only lose 40 gigs of space..."?