How big must my hard driver be?

[Clueless_one]

I'm very new to the world of computers but am interested in getting old VHS recordings onto my new PC.

I was talking to a man in my local PC store and he said that I would need "a big fast hard driver". Well I looked at it after taking off the side panel and roughly measured it's dimensions. It's around 4" wide, 5 3/4" deep and 7/8" high (thats not including the wire sticking out of the back). What I would like to know is: is this hard driver big enough to do what I want or will I need a bigger one? I'm not sure what the man meant about being "fast", as it is firmly screwed to the inside of the case and cannot move at all!

Thank you for any help offered.

[Gazorgan]

Big as in storage capacity , not physical size. With few exceptions all harddrives are the same size anymore.

You should get nothing smaller than an 80 GB. 120 or 160 are better, but it's a cost issue. 8 MB cache and 7200 RPM are also a requirement. Avoid 5400 RPM drives if you can at all help it(cheaper but slower).

You also want an Athlon XP or a Pentium 4, 512 MB or RAM, nice fast video card, a good capture card, 5.1 stereo sound card.....and maybe a DVDRW drive. Monitor is your choice, I'd suggest 17" CRT (flatscreens aren't very good vfor video work yet). Your looking at $500 to $1000 depending on who builds it.

Oh yeah, I suggest Windows 2000 over Windows XP (notice 98 wasn't mentioned?).

[Dennis1968]

It reffers to RPM and storage space. not the physical size

40 gig or higher at 7200 RPM, UDMA 100 or 5400 RPM, UDMA 133.

[Treebeard]

okay sounds like your in for an information ride, and badly need one too.

size of hard drive is not the physical size meaning dimensions, but rather how much storage space, example 20gig, 40gig, 60gig. speed is measured in RPM's. usually 5400 for cheaper drives and 7200 for a good drive, 7200 is fast enough.

you should probably learn same basic computer language and terms. Do some reading in the guides section to the left <---

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I almost hope this post was a joke , b/c if no u have a loooong ways to go

[EddyH]

If it's any help, my hard driver seats four in 'relative' comfort and will do about 90 flat out.. isnt much good for video though, so you probably need something closer to Mr T's van. Plenty of room in the back for all the tape machines, and a big V8 block up front to outrun the MP's.

Or if this isn't a spoof post , do a few things

* 1 put the side back on your PC before something gets broken. You wont find out anything by looking at it.
* 2 go back to the computer store and smack the dude upside the head, until he gives you a more extensive and layman-worded explanation. with the proper words. he really should have checked that you understood him.
* 3 if all else fails... open up My Computer (on the desktop! not with screwdrivers) right-click on hard disk C:\, choose Properties from the list that comes up, and check the total and free space. That will tell you how 'big' it is (how much data it remembers)... for example this drive has about 28 Gb (gigabytes - one CD is 0.7Gb) in total, of which ~12 was free before I started a medium-low complexity level DVD rip, and there's now about 5 left over (not counting other things that have gone on in the mean time). Absolute space isn't so important as how much you have free - for this example, 7 or 8 has been enough, as it was a 'small' DVD being converted to a single VCD at not much more than beginner level. To cover all eventualities though ('maximum' size DVD, converting to a quad set of SVCDs with some inbetween processing) having a good 15-20gb free is advisable. You know. Just in case.
* 4 speed shouldn't really matter so much (unless you're planning to capture full-resolution TV pictures live off the air..) - most video conversions happen at less than 1:1 speed, and its unlikely that you'd have a large enough drive to actually carry out the editing that isn't also easily fast enough any more. there aren't any 'slow' hard discs these days but there sure are blazing fast ones... expensive and meant for professional use.

any good for you?

and/or did i pass the joke test

[EddyH]

wooo speedy replies

oops i misread that - brain drew a blind spot on the 'transferring VHS' part. for a task such as that, you'll probably want at least good 60Gb disc with little else on it, preferably as a second drive in your system used exclusively for that task. Unless you're going overboard for quality (*more* than standard TV rez) you'll be capturing raw uncompressed video data at a rate somewhere between 7.2mb per second (NTSC VCD) and 30mb/s (PAL full-DVD)... enough to fill a CD in anywhere from 95 down to 25 seconds! Most hard discs can sustain all of that if uncluttered and not much else is going on simultaneously - get a 7200rpm model with 8mb cache and ATA133 if you want to be absolutely certain - but will soon fill up, even with mild compression schemes aimed at high-quality video capture.

E.G. Uncompressed, without sound, a half hour of VCD quality home video of your kids on christmas day will chew about 12.5Gb even before you start converting or processing it. Raise that to an hour and a half of rare movie with DVD quality capturing and stereo sound, and that becomes almost a full 160Gb (yay for HuffYUV). If you're doing that much in one go you might want to invest in a drive cooling fan

(( apparently a decent mid-level to aim at for great but not excessive VHS capture is CVD (1/2 DVD horizontal clarity, and therefore half as much data storage needed, and full vertical clarity) or SVCD (2/3 horizontal) rather than going the whole hog - obviously you can see this would save you a lot of space or if the material isn't achingly high quality, vanilla VCD (1/2 horizontal and 1/2 vertical) which may also cut down a little noise ))

Another thought.. when you're done looking at the disc size in My Computer, close that window and right-click / choose properties on My Computer itself. See how much memory you have... how many MB RAM. Good idea to have at least 384mb tucked away with modern tools it would seem, very memory hungry. 512mb even better.

/remembers first computer with a whopping 1mb of main memory

While you're on the roll, restart your PC at some point and see if it states the processor speed and type (or check the documentation from the store.. forgive the patronisation but i'm going to assume you didn't self build). Anything much under 1Ghz / 1000Mhz is going to hurt for capturing. Up around the 2Ghz mark will work a lot better and isn't a very expensive upgrade (if needed) any more. (consider the video as a large number of phone books in the back of your car, the capturing as a set of hills, and each Mhz as a c.c. and a half of engine capacity..)

After that, well, go find some reviews for video capture cards and bag a decent one and some software either from the same place, or freeware online Oh yeah, and a DVD burner (or at least a CDRW, for S/VCDs) if you dont have one.

As an alternative route, have you maybe considered transferring it via a MiniDV or Digital8 video camera (if the material is mainly short stuff, like TV shows up to 1 hour rather than movies) and then piping the DV data directly into a compatible computer (using a little less space - about 3mb/s at near-DVD quality off the bat), or recording straight to disc using a stand-alone DVD recorder (if it's not on copy protected tapes)? The quality may not be quite what you could acheive in full-manual mode with a capture card, but it will still be quite good and the method could prove a lot easier and more handlable for the beginner.

Happy hunting.

[SLICK RICK]

I'm not sure what the man meant about being "fast", as it is firmly screwed to the inside of the case and cannot move at all!

I'm sorry, I don't know everything about computers myself, but I have to ask: Is this a joke?

SLICK RICK

[Clueless_one]

Thank you for your replies, which while helping a little, have raised many more questions than they answered for me. I do feel a little embarrassed at my ignorance and have decided to do some more research on the subject of computers at a more basic level because it's glaringly obvious to me (and one or two others here) that I know absolutely zilch. Once I have figured out a little more I will be back.

In fact it's only by pure luck that I managed to connect to the internet and stumble across this site.

[funkguy4]

the name suits you! JK

[vandakeg]

how could anyone take this as anything but a joke?

[MpegEncoder]

how could anyone take this as anything but a joke?

At best it's an "attempted joke".

[FT Shark]

I was talking to a man in my local PC store and he said that I would need "a big fast hard driver".

Are you sure it wasn't a woman that you talked to? My wife says that I have a Big Fat hard Driver

Just remember it's not the size of your hard driver that counts it's what you can do with it

[KetchSumAir]

How big does my hard drive have to be?

It doesn't matter what size of hard drive you have presently - it's always too small!

How fast does my hard drive have to be?

Obviously - faster!



Clueless_one:

If you're not joking around, I truly feel your pain - I know a 50 year old that asked me to help him buy 'one of those fancy computer thingies' cause he figured it was time to learn.

After 1 year, he is able to email, internet, and understand all general computer terms such as hard drives, memory, etc. Now, he's getting into scanning/faxing.

Video Editing is a very difficult task - even for the computer literate. I'd suggest you either take a computer crash course (spend many, many hours all at once), or take about 6mo's to a year to learn - then try out the Video Editing world.

[funkguy4]

Video Editing is a very difficult task - even for the computer literate. I'd suggest you either take a computer crash course (spend many, many hours all at once), or take about 6mo's to a year to learn - then try out the Video Editing world.

Not rue! Not true! Even back in the days of my newblyhood I didn't find it terribly difficult to edit video. This was back in the day of vcdhelp.com. I didn't even sign up for this forum until I had lost my newblyhood.......maybe it's just me, but I'm sure it's not difficult for everyone.

[overloaded_ide]

I have a large fast drive I can sell you pretty cheap.

It is about 4"-5" high, 6"wide and pretty long too. At one time this was a very fast drive as I had taken it out of an XT (pretty cose to XP) and dropped it on my foot. I think it was doing 80mph when it hit the wall after it hit my foot! Now that's large and fast for a drive even by todays standards

It should be safe enough as it has already crashed. However it has not burned yet, since I could not find it durring the bond fire we had.

I like to play with magnets and those are worth something to me (about $10), so if you would like this large fast hardriver I would sell it for like $20. $10 for the magnets inside and $10 for shipping. These large drive are also heavy.

I will also throw in a small shovel in case you decide to really "DIG" into your system and see what it's all about and how it works

I do consider the orignial post a joke, and this is all intended as a joke also for those that remember the BIG drives of the old days. 10 meg XT?

BUT, if by any chance you were actually serious, then I hope I did not offend you personally. We all had to start somewhere and learn as we go!
And I am still learning as we all are.

[funkguy4]

I'm only young enough to remember the 60Mb ones....

[xtreemkareem]

Ahh.. my first computer... I didn't know crap and it took 3 years after I got it to figure out that it had a whopping 480 megabyte hard drive and 8 megabytes of RAM. I remmeber one day my brother and I went to build computers for local schools... we stole a few sticks of edo ram and after the upgrade, we wer eat a rocking 16 mb of ram... then we stole some ram from my uncles computer to get our maximum 36 megabytes of ram... by then I could install windows 3.1 and I knew how to play around with autoexec.bat and config.sys.... ahh.... the good old days... though we had to fix the computer befor emy dad came home and beat me with a stick!