Type of HD-Does it make a difference?

[nyijedi]

I want to buy a new HD and have it dedicated to capturing. I have been thinking about buying the Western Digital 120 GB 8 MB Buffer HD. Does anyone here use that for capturing? Will the 8MB Buffer have any effect on the capturing? I am currently using a Samsung 60 GB 5400 rpm drive to capture to, and it rarely drops frames (I think it only does it when I switch files w/ Scenalyzer b/c of the 4GB file size limit on FAT32 partitions)-does the rpm speed, buffer, etc. have any effect besides the dropping of frames? Is it worth it for me to get the 7200 rpm 8MB Buffer drive, or can I just get a 5400 rpm 2MB Buffer?

Also, if anyone does have this drive, can you tell me what kind of noise it makes? I used to have an IBM hard drive that made a really loud, irritating, high-pitch humming sound. How is the 8MB WD?

Thanks for taking the time guys.

[peregrin]

Hi ,

I use the WD 120GB 8MB cache, for capturing. It's quiet and faster then one of the other drives in my system which runs at 5400 rpm. I'm using NTFS file system but it was fat 32 and was still faster.

I like WD drives and have had very little problems with them.

peregrin

[tlegion]

I use WD or Maxtor drives for capturing. I format them with NTFS so I don't have to worry about file sizes and I use 64K clusters so fragmentation is minimized.

IMHO, if a drive (as opposed to an external fan attached to the drive) makes any sound above a whisper-like hum , it is on its last legs and needs to be replaced asap.

[mkelley]

Definitely get 7200 -- you really need this to insure frame dropping free captures (while memory and faster CPUs have made this somewhat less important, I wouldn't scrimp on it, particularly when you can get 120GB for less than $100).

[TBoneit]

tlegion I am surprised that you say a drive has to be quiet to be good, Personally I agree, But then you say WD or Maxtor drives.

In my experience Many maxtor drives delvelop an annoyiong whine within 1 years time. I'm still using two that are in PVRs that have that annoying whine, one reason it isn't the bedroom PVR anymore. They function fine and have for years... The whine is just an annoyance but doesn't seem to affect drive performance. Whereas Seagates were always quiet whine-wise, but had loud noises as the heads are moved around in the drive.

Back on topic, I use the 120JB (8MB cache) as my system drive since that speeds up the whole system. Scenealyzer Live benchmarks show it to be the fastest of the drives in my system 80MB BB (2MB) 7200 and the 40Mb Eb 5400 models are all slower. I have had no problems capturing to any drive in the system with scenealyzer Live through the ADVC-100. Don't know if that is the reason.

I do capture to either the 120GB or the 80GB 7200 drives and encode to mpeg2 to the other as that speeds up the encode. TO me Capture is one part of the equation, however speedy encodes are important too. That's why I use CCE Basic for DV Captures and TMPGEnc for those files that CCE doesn't like... For example I also handle 544 (or 640) by 480 with 192 @ 48Khz audio files and CCE doesn't like them. It pains me to have to buy two encoders but that's life. I could have just stayed with TMPGEnc and not also bought CCE Basic, But it was so much faster on the DV Captures!

It also will depend on the controller and speed of the system how much benefit you get from the 8Mb Cache.

As I say I use it to boot from P4 2.66 and I could see the improvement in startup time and loading of programs over the older 80Gb 7200 2Mb Cache drive I was booting from.

I just checked and the wholesale to me cost difference between between the BB & the JB (2Mb & 8Mb) cache models on the WD 120Gb is $9 US.

Cheers.
Roger T

[heretic422]

I would recommend the WD 120JB. They're fast and the buffer really helps.

There could be many things causing dropped frames and this drive would help eliminating it as a source of error, although some here may disagree. I don't capture too much but encode a heck of a lot and this drive is great. I had two of them, one in a USB 2.0 cage and one internal. The internal one up and died on me, (could hear the head banging on something inside). Did an advance RMA and I had the drive in 2 days, no questions asked. WD has been like that for as long as I remember. I'm sure Maxtor has a decent exchange policy but I had a bad experience once many years ago and never went back. Things are probably better now as someone here can prbably attest.

Anyway, WD is inexpensive, they have great rebates if you can wait for them, FRY's always has something going on with WD drives so if there's a store near you, try them.

Good luck and burn on, dude!

[thor300]

Yupp, WD has a nice sound, quiet. when i bought 120GB drive i choose maxtor 7200rpm with 2MB buffer, and it has a different sound than my other drive, WD 40GB/7200/2MB buff. Still it seems like the maxtor is faster, but i cant really compare since the OP-sys(w2k server) is on the WD drive. The maxtor is ata133, the WD is ata100, that could maybe make a difference, but i doubt it. And yes, my controller is 133. To heretic422; maxtors are not the only drives crashing, a WD can too. All can.

[Spicuzza]

My 2 cents in favor of Western Digital drives.

If it fails and is under warranty they send you another drive immediately.

Usually get it within two days and then you send the defective drive back to them.
It is for this reason I doubt I'd buy any other brand.

That's GREAT customer support!

[heretic422]

Thor300,

Please read carefully -

I had two of them,

referencing the subject of the previous sentence, WD 120JB drives

one in a USB 2.0 cage and one internal. The internal one up and died on me, (could hear the head banging on something inside). Did an advance RMA and I had the drive in 2 days, no questions asked. WD has been like that for as long as I remember.

I clearly state that my WD drive crashed.

Therefore your comment -

To heretic422; maxtors are not the only drives crashing, a WD can too. All can.

makes no sense. I did not say that Maxtors are the only drives that crash nor did I say that the bad experience with Maxtor I had was due to a crash.

I also wrote -

I'm sure Maxtor has a decent exchange policy

so nowhere do I bash Maxtor nor say that their products are inferior in anyway.

And you're pedantic condescending remark that -

maxtors are not the only drives crashing, a WD can too. All can.

merely emphasizes you overinflated opinion of yourself as if you're some old wise guru imparting profound knowledge you've known all along. You mean ALL drives can fail???? Gee I thought they lived on forever and ever. I'd better not mention this to my 4.3GB WD I bought back in '98 cause I'm sure it's out of warranty by now!!!!

What is wrong with you? Why do you have to be like that without carefully reading and understanding the posts of other members? All the original poster <nyijedi> wanted was opinions. Are you telling me that my opinion is wrong? Who are you? Did I say anything about your opinion of Maxtor drives?

The poster after you <Spicuzza> was able to understand what I was saying about the WD RMA process and how easy it is to swap drives with WD. He didn't bash Maxtor either. Aren't you gonna say something to him because he agreed with me?

Read carefully

[The village idiot]

My 2 cents go to the WD. As for service, I don't know... I've never had to send one back in the last 6 or 7 years that I've been using them exclusively.

[thor300]

are you tochy or what! heres 2 lines for you, reply a flame again please. i look forward to see how emotional you can get this time. a simple misunderstanding and such a flame, that is just great man, keep it up, flame me more! go go.

[heretic422]

Excellent demonstration of your ignorance! You can neither read nor spell nor use punctuation correctly nor count the number of lines in your post. Can you see the preview button next to the one you HAD to click in order to submit that post? Can you click on a link? Simple motor skill, you should be able to handle it.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=illiterate

You also have demonstrated, by your response, (the one with the poor spelling), that you are not unfamiliar with being corrected for your reactionary habits; you encourage me to continue flaming you so you can claim to be the victim. In the words of Tony Soprano's mother, "Poor you..."

If, in retrospect, it was as you hold,

a simple misunderstanding

then clearly you acknowledge that your response was inappropriate, yet I see no apology forthcoming. Not to me but to the others in this forum for having to endure your incorrect and opinionated blather. I'll do it for you: Fellow DVDRHELP.COM forum readers, please accept my apologies for Thor300's ignorance, immature behavior and complete inability to read carefully. Though I can't promise he won't do it again after he reads this post, at least we have a better understanding of what makes him tick.

So now, Thor300, (clearly not a reference to your I.Q.), you can tell all your little friends at school that you've learned a few things:

• - you know what illiterate means
  - you can pronounce illiterate
  - a complete stranger on the Internet evaluated your character flaws perfectly
  - you're now more self aware than when you first posted your knee-jerk reaction to a "misunderstood" point because you're inept at carefully reading something presented to you on a computer screen.

Boy oh boy! Someday, you'll make some poor woman incredibly regretful for marrying your illiterate, sorry self - if you haven't already.

[thor300]

Now you made a complete fool out of yourself mister heretic422. Can you see that no others has bothered getting involved? Could it be because it was so obvious that i never ment you, but the post above yours?? you say i dont read carefully, but did you read carefully? You didnt mention anything about crashing maxtors making a bad sound after a year, so why would i say that too you? It was a misunderstanding, simple the wrong nick, and you falme like hell, and then you start talking about MY girlfriend, when YOUR girlfriend is the one we should feel sorry for. And who should appologize??? I cant say im sorry for writing the wrong name after your first reply, you just exploded like a piece of american space technology, serving noone. Let the users here who are not u.s./british hear your skills in foreign languages and demonstrate your punctation skills in those same languages, and then we could come back to my skills in foreign languages.

To the original thread (before the flamer got hurt): TBoneit, not only maxtors crash (or make bad sounds after a year), all can. I just have to write it once more so some hurt hearts that has hard times sticking to the topic can heal. Sorry for involving you this way TBoneit, but since it was your nickname i mixed up with the flamers in the first place i just have to write it once more.

Let me also .demonstreite . my exsellent .gramar and spilling and.use of.punctation.(add use of comma), to, that, so someone get more reason to flame (or was it fleym), Not sure what it has to do with the topic, but feel free to ask heretic422, the expert in foreign languages.,.

[holistic]

Scenalyzer = DV ........DV = 3.7 MB/sec

Will go out on a limb here - ALL of todays ATA133 or better hardrives will have no problem 'transferring' the DV signal.

The incorrect belief that 7200 is better is just that - Years ago that may have been true but todays drives have such a high aureal density that it matters little unless you are doing RAW AVI. DV will do fine on laptop 4200rpm drives !!

Buy the hardrive that is the best suited to you needs .

NOT a 7200 because it is faster (get a red one in that case)

NOT a 120Gb because it is ..ooooooooh .. bigger .

Get one that will suit your budget and video needs.

EG: DV is ~ 13Gb hour . If doing home movie transfers than a 60Gb may suffice . If doing TV/disk captures of movies then yes go for the 120Gb.

][

[nyijedi]

Thanks for the advice-and I apologize for starting a mini-war here

[vitualis]

@ thor: try and read posts carefully before posting
@ heretic: cool the flames or I will give you a warning.

Regards.

[Bondiablo]

The WD drive is good, I have one and I never drop a single frame capturing DV but neither it or the Maxtor drives are quiet. If a quiet drive is important you'd be better off with a Seagate or if you can wait a little while Samsung has a new drive, the SP1213n, that is supposed to be about as quiet and in some respects quieter but runs cooler and performs better than the Seagate Barracuda IV.

www.silentpcreview.com

[txpharoah]

Years of computing have shown Western Digital drives to be the best from my experience. I've never thrown one away because it was bad, just because it was too small or and old format (ESDI, SCSI, slow IDE).

Seagate crashes if anything goes wrong. Normally as good as WD drives.

Maxtor dies slowly and you lose lots of data at a slow rate. They are noisy too. I've never had one last more than two years.

[gmatov]

I have returned WDs, I have returned Maxtors, I have returned Seagates, I have owned, and still do, IBMs, I even have one made by, I think it is JCS, the founder of Commodore Computer Company, and a Samsung. These are still operable, just a little low on capacity. ( And who would have EVER thought that 4 gigs was "low capacity")
You guys are all going on bias, "Well, I own this, so obviously you should, too")
They are all advertised as 1/2 a million MTBF, more or less, or some such. You got one that broke, luck of the draw.
And access time is, what, 3/10 of a millisecond faster on one than the other? Gimme a break.
All drives, of recent manufacture, are ATA 133. And, just guess who owns Western Digital. Why, Maxtor does. And, sonomagun, we'll just make junk drives under the WD name, or we'll make GOOD drives under the WD name, and sell them just a little bit cheaper.
I would suggest you buy the drive on sale, with the best rebate (they ARE a commodity), and you will not drop frames because your drive could not keep up.
In fact, (although this is conjecture ) if the drive could not write as fast as the program was encoding/capturing, I do think the program would crash/stop.
And, as far as returns, all the companies I have returned drives to told me that they would cross ship, with a credit card number, to be charged only if they did not recieve the returned drive in a timely manner.
Bias raises its ugly head here, doesn't it?

[txpharoah]

And, just guess who owns Western Digital. Why, Maxtor does.

Though I was actually unaware of this, it doesn't mean much. JVC and Panasonic are part of the same corporation, but they don't share between themselves.

This thread was almost as bad as the DVD format wars. Again, I don't care what one person buys, I can just post my results and experience. Same reason I won't buy Ford, but somebody obviously likes them.

[gmatov]

Tx,
No, but I think when they announced the purchase, they also announced that they would merge the two product lines to give the consumer the best of both worlds. I assume that to mean that any technology one had over the other would be incorporated into the other line.
That said, the first Maxtor drive I bought after the merger/buyout had a WD drive, a 20 gig in the box, with a note saying that it had the full Maxtor guarantee.
I AM having some problems with it at the moment ( my daughter's machine; she gave it to a guy who said he would upgrade her 'puter. It had a max 350 meg CPU cap, and he put in a 500, which ran, or said it did, at 400. I upgraded the BIOS, now recognizes it as a 500, but I think he used the WD Data lifeguard utility to get it to "see" the 20 gig. I changed her machine to a 1200 Athlon, but the drive is giving me trouble. Going to have to run Data lifeguard and uninstall Data lifeguard to see if that is the problem. I am kinda pissed about the whole issue. I have always built her machines, and someone says "Oh, I can make it faster.", and she bites. What the hell is Dad for? Well, I guess to fix up the screwups.

[hoyboy]

Spaeking of low capacity drives, I have just had somebody give me a Maxtor H/D rated at 125MB!. It was Manu. in 1993, so I suppose it is reasonable. But who would hjave thought 10 or so years down the track that 128MB RAM in a computer is too low, let alone as a hard disk! . Have to try and keep up with it all

[The village idiot]

So Maxtor owns WD... They also bought Quantum.. Hitachi now owns the storage portion of IBM. CompUSA brand is maxtor. Any other partnerships we should know about?


The maxtor-WD one still throws me. They certainly have been keeping the 2 lines different. I can see bits of quantum's tech in the newer maxtor drives, but I don't really see anything from WD in them. Or the other way 'round.

I still stand behind WD. But the newer Maxtors look like they might be worth trying. As far as noise, I have one of the newest line of Seagate 80GB drives. It does not seem to be any less noisey than any other drive I have. I did put a newer style Maxtor 20GB in a computer. It was supposed to be less noisey with its fluid dampened something or other. It did indeed have a slight decrease in noise. It was also only about 2/3 as high as other drives, and said it used less power than others. It was also the only new 20GB drive I could find for that old MB that wouldn't take anything above 30GB. Mostly the smaller drives have all gone away. Too bad 'cause I need a 4GB for an industrial machine that runs a printer.

[gmatov]

Idiot,
Were you putting that 20 into a 98 machine? If you were, there is a new fdisk from MS to recognize large drives, actually 3 years old, but not the original 99 version.

I know what you mean about small drives. My one kid's sis-in-law works for a Co. htat does the same, and their need is like 10 megs, I think impossible to find, special made, probably twice the commodity drive price.

I just installed one of the new Max 40s into the same kid's b'friend'd machine, an old one, fdisked, formatted on my machine, installed in his, machine sees and reads all the partitions.

Please, do NOT use the Data Lifeguard and such utilities.

I have not had a drive fail since 2 or 3 years ago, and that was a WD formatted w/Data Lifeguard. They took it back, no questions asked, but I lost a ton of data, backed up to another partition, but when the whole drive goes, so does your data.

I buy the sale drives, just as I bought 2 of the 160's a couple weeks ago at 79 bucks apiece, after rebate. 8 meg cache, 7200, complete with a Promise ATA 133 controller card.

Again, they're commodities. They keep crying that they can't make money because of a glut of them on the market, driving the price down, and the size just keeps going up.

Remember, once upon a time Bill Gates said 10 megs would take care of all your computing. And, Tom Watson, of IBM, said there was a need for, maybe, 5 computers in the world?

Yeah, right.

[The village idiot]

I worked on an IBM with the brand new 10MB hard drive when I was much younger. Such innovation at that time was unheard of. But it did do a number on the 8 inch floppies. They faded away very quickly after that, partly from the hard drive and partly from better floppies.

[alenhard]

Since we're on this topic (or off it, I can't tell anymore...) I posted this in another thread and you all might be interested, especially the OP:

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=298017&pfp=BROWSE

Great deal on a 160GB WD internal hard drive at $99!

[Yirkin]

The last two Western Digital drives I bought had an annoying high pitched ringing noise that drove me nuts. They went back to the store the next day. I have two Maxtors in my system and even though I have been using them for years, they are still really quiet, not the least bit noisy.

On the topic of using a fast drive for capturing, I don't know that it is necessary. Tivo's ship with 5400 RPM drives and they spend 24/7 capturing directly to mpg. They recommend 5400 rpm because they run cooler and use less power.

I have tried capturing to different drives and I don't drop frames regardless if I write to a 5400 ata66 or a 7200 ata133. I don't believe it matters so long as your computer can compress fast enough.


Howard

[gmatov]

Yirkin,
True. Some people are telling everyone to get 7200, 8 meg cache to prevent "dropped frames". If you are converting a DVD at 8 mbps, megaBITS, that is 1 megaBYTE per second. ANY drive will do 30 MB or more, at burst.
The same with a capture. 8 mbps, the drive will keep up, and then some. The bottleneck is the CPU, and the system buss. The cap program can't convert the data as fast as it is being fed.
If it were the drive, you would get errors such as "Can't write to HDD", or a crash.

[Alan69]

Still, if you do other things while capping, the larger the cache the longer Windows can do something else and still get back to the capping file before it loses frames. If Windows used the ram cache a bit better it shouldn't matter but sometimes Windows just drops everything for a bit while doing something else, so 8 MB on the drive at least gives it 4 times longer to get back to capping on those occasions.. While there are other reasons, a frame is 1/30th of a second so a fairly long time, it can easily drop only one frame now and then and it really be the HD that got starved for a little bit..

I like to do other things while capping, so the bigger the better. That said I have just a 2MB buffer on mine, and few problems, but I also have a 2400+ processor, may be more needed on a slower machine. And I still don't do too many processes at once either.

Alan