5400rpm Hard Drive good enough for Capturing?

[pbemer]

I looking into buying another hard drive for my system to use as a capture drive. I've priced out a Samsung 120 gb drive for $90. Since I'm new to capturing, what differences are there between a 5400 and a 7200 rpm drive?

[i-on-s]

you will probably get less dropped frames with 7200 than 5400 since it runs faster and keep up with storage. 5400 would be good for like a OS h/d or a crap h/d for putting mp3s on or movies.

[El Bart0]

For capturing, you definitely want the fastest possible. I wouldn't touch a 5200 drive with a ten foot pole, no matter what application you're using it for. The difference in speed between a 5400 and a 7200 is VERY noticeable, and if I were you I'd pay the extra for a 7200. You might want to look at the drives with 8MB cache, and get an ATA100 or ATA133, depending on what your motherboard supports.

[pbemer]

Well I have a WD80gb with the 8mb cache on it right now but it has the OS and other programs on it. I figured that the rpm speed could make a difference, so I thought I'd ask.

[WeedVender]

hard Drive speed actually does matter. With a fester spinning disk, you can get better results because data is writen faster and so theres no lost frames from HDD lag.

[jsnkc]

Go with at least a 7200 RPM drive at minimum. 10000 is preferred for video capturing and editing.

[MOVIEGEEK]

you will probably get less dropped frames with 7200 than 5400 since it runs faster and keep up with storage. 5400 would be good for like a OS h/d or a crap h/d for putting mp3s on or movies.

I wouldn't even use it for that.I can't believe they still sell ATA 66/5400rpm HDD's,I guess the old saying "let the buyer beware" by that ancient roman philosopher Caveat Emptor is still good advice.

[Karate Media]

I guess the old saying "let the buyer beware" by that ancient roman philosopher Caveat Emptor is still good advice.

You IDIOT, there was no roman philosopher named Caveat Emptor! It was Emperor Caveat who said that!


And to add my 2 cents -- I've been looking at getting another hard drive (to add to my seagate internal and my iomega external), and the Wester Digital Caviar 120GB w/ 8MB cache is pretty much what I've narrowed it down to. Obviously, it's 7200RPM -- as everyone has said, don't get 5400 for capturing -- it can be done, but you may not like the results. I'm just waiting for the rebates to pop up on it (I've seen all the other WD drives on sale w/ rebates, so I assume it's just a matter of time before the 120GB Caviar gets some, too)

[Gazorgan]

I litterally have dozens of drives among my machines. I ahve capture on 7200 rpm 8 MB cache drives and 5400 rpm 256k cache drives. Depending on how I'm capping, it doesn't matter much. I probably have 2x as many dropped frames with the 5400's than I do with the 7200's. That is to say I have 1-2 dropped frames in a 2 hour cap on 7200 and maybe 5 dropped frames on the 5400.


I usually capture in Huffyuv or MJPEG at 90-95%.

Translated: You drive size/speed is only 1 factor in your ability to capture video. Your IDE controller (for those SCSI deficients out there) probably has more to do with dropping frames thna 5400/7200 rpm's.

[dcsos]

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

MOVIEGEEK wrote:
I guess the old saying "let the buyer beware" by that ancient roman philosopher Caveat Emptor is still good advice.
Karate Media wrote:
You IDIOT, there was no roman philosopher named Caveat Emptor! It was Emperor Caveat who said that!
=========
I'm sure both of you were joking but
CAVEAT EMPTOR
LATIN TRANSLATION= LET THE BUYER BEWARE

there's no emperor or philopher involved
CAVEAT=carefully EMPTOR=purchase

[pbemer]

Well shopping around, I can get a 120gb IBM/Hitatchi with 8mb cache for 100 bucks. I know scsi is the best for anything but they're so damn expensive! The 10k serials are getting close to being cheap except their size and the small size keeps me away from buying one.

[Karate Media]

Uh, yeah...dcsos...

those smilies...they were there for a reason...

but, y'know, it's cool..go ahead and ruin the joke by spelling it all out...hey, that's fine with me...




(again, the smiley means I'm joking)

[MOVIEGEEK]

(again, the smiley means I'm joking)

..and my

[pbemer]

Ok, 'nother dumb question. How big of a drive do you need to capture let's say a two hour video tape?? Just wondering if a 36gb fast scsi would be big enough?

[MOVIEGEEK]

Capture size(approx):
VCD=600MB per hour
SVCD(2.5mbps/CBR)=1.2GB per hour
DVD(9mbps/CBR)=4GB
DV=13GB per hour

[VideoTechMan]

Ok, 'nother dumb question. How big of a drive do you need to capture let's say a two hour video tape?? Just wondering if a 36gb fast scsi would be big enough?

Well, though I know SCSI are good fast drives. But since they cost so much for not alot of storage space, it doesnt justify my purchase of one, plus they are tough to configure. I'd stay away from 5400RPM drives. I read that there are a few 300 GB hard drives but they are 4200RPM and you would need a motherboard or controller card that supports GB size over 137GB. You can go with a 7200RPM drive and a fast ATA/133 IDE controller and you should do just fine. Based on a 80GB hard drive, you can capture about 5 hours of DV video. So therefore if you have 2 80GB drives, you have about 10 hours of video storage at your disposal. There is also a free hard disk tester you can find at www.canopus.com and download the EZDV tool.

VideoTechMan

[troyvcd1]

I capture with a 5400 drive on a ata66 bus with a 800mhz system. I capture from my dv cam to my hd. Never lost a frame.

[skateni]

I capture with a 5400 drive on a ata66 bus with a 800mhz system. I capture from my dv cam to my hd. Never lost a frame.

I tend to agree that a 5400 RPM drives could keep up if you capture a DV AVI. Some have used their laptops to do it and laptop drives are only 4200 RPMs.

[vhelp]

hi pbemer,

I'm capturing every day. I can say, that RPM's are about the same level
of imprtance as the capture card itself. That saying.. If you have a good
capture card, and the right combo of codec mode ie, BTYUV, YUY2 etc.
and you card is a good match for your MotherBoard and cpu and chipset
and harddrive, you'll have no problems with a 5400 RPM speed.

I found my match w/ the Osprey-210 capture card and my 5400 RPM
drives. All my drives are that speed. I'm sure that the 7200's may have
a better rate (less issues) that (and the above) all depends on your given
setup. What one person has and works "perfect" may not work the same
on YOUR given setup. Factor that into YOUR equation.

Plus, 7200 RPM drives are loud vs. the lower one.

-vhelp

[Jester700]

Another vote - 5400 is fine for DV. If I had a equal size 7200 and a 5400 drive, I'd use the 5400 as DV cap drive to use the greater speed drive for OS & progs.

And yes - 4200 in a laptop does work for Dv cap, though I went with a 5400.

[holistic]

O how i tire of the 7200 spin parrots and their mindless faster is better drivel ............ .......NOT always the case.

Go here :arrow: http://maxtor.com/en/solutions/soho/personal_computing/store_edit_movies/index.htm
and read the pdf file (bottom of article)


There is another more important spec than speed , that being aureal density.

http://hardware.earthweb.com/chips/print.php/1581411

aureal density,or basically the amount of data that can be crammed onto each platter. The current high-end specification is 80GB per platter, which allows greater capacity with fewer physical platters per drive and can increase transfer rates while lowering real-world disk accesses.

Although 'seek' and 'latency' times are important (and where slower spinning drives lose to their faster spinning cousins), it is the SUSTAINED writes that are the most important to video capturing. The current 100+ Gb drives have such a high aureal density, that it is a non issue these days for DV (3.7 M/b sec) AND they put in a good effort writing uncompressed NTSC video (~27Mb/sec.) Below is a link to a test of a Maxtor 5200 80Gb drive .

http://www.barefeats.com/hard15.htm <-- Maxtor 80G 5200 test
http://www.barefeats.com/hard25.html <--- more info
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/6076.htm <-- How I know the data rate of uncompressed NTSC !

Do yourself a favour and grab a copy of Virtual Dub and test your harddrive.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

It contains a little utility that will test drive write speeds. It may suprise you. Until i got my DV camera I managed to capture 352*480 with the huffyuv codec AND no frame drops on a 30Gb ATA66 drive ........ go figure.

][

[CaseyComb]

Well Hollistic, I work in video and I am a filmkaker also. The proof is in the pudding. I have used both 5400 and 7200 speed drives on both platforms. At the end of the day the 5400 speed drive always dropped frames. For capturing and editing you will not go wrong with a 7200 drive. I mean really capturing,editing, and encoding video is already tedious, time consuming, and frustrating. Why not get a 7200 drive. If it can read and write faster the logic dictates that it is better fo this type of stuff.

It aint rocket science.

[holistic]

Good for you CC. I too have been doing the video gig for many years, but only as a hobby, and am very aware of how a computer works (having built several of them). I don't use them for cooking puddings though .

I will admit, that if i was to do this professionally, I would even go one better and actually go wth a RAID ed SCSI system. BUT since myself and [ most here on this forum ] have source material ( VHS , Hi8 that is WELL below 'broadcast data rates' of over 50Mb/sec ) the new 100+ Gb drives spinning at 5200 rpm will suffice for 95+% of home users since ITU-R601, CCIR 656 is ~ 27Mb/sec and well within the write range of these drives when used with a codec such as huffyuv. As for DV ....... well........


Hmmm ...... am curious ........and what is your 'rig' ? (computer / capture hardware/software) What codecs ?

Nope ! not rocket science ........... just physics and some common sense

][

[energy80s]

I have both 5400 and 7200 drives and there is absolutely no difference in capturing to either drive. No dropped frames anywhere - and I don't even defrag very often. The cost of a 7200 drive is usually about £15 more ... is this justified? The last drive I bought was a Western Digital 80Gig 7200rpm for £85 ($135) from PC world. It's identical in capturing abilities to my 5400 60 gig drive. Operating systems and software have much more to do with cap quality than the spec of the hard drive.

[Hardcoreruss]

Go for the 7200 rpm you will get less dropped frames.

[pbemer]

Ok,, another dumb question,,

Last night, I captured from my ADVC-100 into Vegas Video from my sattelite receiver. I captured an hour of Farscape with no frame loss. When I was all done, I had captured an AVI little over 13 gb. Now since I'm going through my canupos deck, isn't everything to be considered as digital video?

[rhegedus]

Yep - but you need to convert the avi to a format which you can edit using the Canopus DV File Converter.

Regards,

Rob

[pbemer]

I don't have any issues in converting or editing the AVI's, my question is in capturing in general. MovieGeek had showed different sizes of Captures which I assume are files after they are converted to there respective file types. But then again, I'm a newb, so is there a way of capturing straight into a VCD or DVD format directly?

[rhegedus]

Not with your Canopus.

Regards,

Rob

[TBoneit]

I don't have any issues in converting or editing the AVI's, my question is in capturing in general. MovieGeek had showed different sizes of Captures which I assume are files after they are converted to there respective file types. But then again, I'm a newb, so is there a way of capturing straight into a VCD or DVD format directly?

If your machine is fast enough you can capture from within your dvd authoring software. That will leave it ready to burn to DVD.

I do it some of the time, where speed matters more than the very best quality.

I use Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2 (30 day trial available) www.ulead.com

That method produces decent quality for Sat Tv. From VHS I capture with Scenealyzer and then filter and use a 2 pass encode for better quality (CCE Basic or TmpGenc)

What I do is try the trial versions, 30 day on TmpGenc & DVD MF2, analyze do I use them enough to pay? In the case of the 3 software mentioned above, the answer was yes.

I'm frugal but not cheap. In other words Time matters as much to me as money. Being human we have a finite lifetime and I have better things to do than sit and wait on cheap things that take longer.

Philosophy lesson over

If you capture in AVI DV Format its easier to edit after the cap. I go the easy way and for a TV show I would just use Scenealyzer and it's pause button to not record commercials in the first case, I can live with the slight blemish in the caps for myself.

for others I'll cap whole thing and edit.

Cheers