Type of hard drives for capturing

[spiderico]

I'm new to this, but quickly becoming obsessed with getting my setup to run as good as possible. Regarding hard drives, most of you say that you should capture to a seperate hard drive. I currently have a 110gb (more than enough space for my capture needs), but it is not dedicated to capture.

How important is it that I get a dedicated drive and if I do get one, does internal vs. external matter?

By the way, I've gotten more useful info on this site in 2 days, than I have in 6 weeks of talking to "experts" in various stores. Thanks.

[epo]

Is separate drive needed for capture is not 100% clear. Depends from capturing codec (no need, when capturing into heavily compressed MPEG-s) and system configuration.
But when it comes to editing (very intensive read-write), second drive is absolute must as drive-to-drive is up to 10 times faster than reading and writing back on same drive (and causes 100 times less stress to drives).

I personally have no experience with externals. One thing to say tough - internal is allways cheaper.

[painkiller]

Additional, internal, hard drives - while highly recommended - aren't critical to capturing video.
You need to be more inclusive though of what you have/intend to have in order to make your captures.
If all you will use is a plug-in tv capture card, a seperate hard drive is advised because the computer's operating system had a tendency to perform intermittent housekeeping tasks to the primary partition on the bootup drive. This can usually be a reason that vid captures can potentially lose individual frames every now and then. But this is somewhat insignificant for the most part. (If you leave the machine alone and don't add to its burden at tthe time.)
If you use a firewire device, or usb2 device maybe, capturing can be more stable and thorough - but still a second hard drive is advisable to collect the capturing due to the reasons mentioned earlier.
In addition, despite the speed of today's P4's and AMD's - while you ar capturing video - it is strongly advised not to use multitasking features (running additional programs). This can cause more frequent lost frames of video and can greatly reduce the quality of the captured video.

As an additional thought, and due to personal experience, even if you have a small network of computers - attempting to use shared drives on a computer that is capturing video will also cause significant frame loss.

Help out?

[andkiich]

All the answers given are good, but for me it's either a striped RAID or a Serial ATA drive.

[spiderico]

I'm capturing VHS through an ADS A/V link, connected through firewire. P4 2.6 processor, 110 gb hard drive, 512 ram. Ulead Video Studio 7 or Pinnacle Studio 8 to capture (Still haven't figured which one I like better)

Not planning to store anything on the hard drive. Just capture, burn to DVD then delete.

Everything seems to be working fine as is, except when I try to capture from old VHS. I sometimes get chunks of dropped frames. Could last for a second or two. Never happens at the same place twice. You can also see this happening before actually begin capture. If you just watch in preview mode, you'll see the occasional hiccup. So I'm assuming this has nothing to do with the hard drive setup, right? Just poor VHS signal? I just ordered an AVT-8710 time base corrector from AV Toolbox to try and fix this. From what I've heard it might do the trick. Does this sound like I'm doing the right thing?

So even if I don't need a separate hard drive right now, will I run the risk of eventually blowing the thing out over time as do more capturing? I'd rather spend some extra $$$ now than have major problem later on.

As I said, I'm new to this but appreciate any input. Thanks.

[painkiller]

You can't always localize the exact reason why vid captures lose frames. Particulalry as we try to do this on homebrew systems.
Especially if you are experiencing multiple difficulties in the one system.
Considering your latest info, I would say - yes, I experienced the same thing before on a similar setup.
I have found that the original video quality (age of vhs, fair to good or poor/noisy video) has an awful lot to do with the poor capturing that happens with that material.
Since then, I am happy to say that changing over to Directv and replacing a lot of wiring in my house has made a ton of improvements.
As an example, I tried capturing an older vhs tape of a b&w Doctor Who movie last week. While the capture seemed to go fine, the original recording was very poor. A lot of noise and dropouts.
As a comparison of a more recent hi-qual 2.5 hr movie capture - the DV file transformation to dvd mpeg format took about 6 hrs.
That Doctor Who movie of equivalent length, took almost 60 hours for the same transformation from DV to mpeg dvd format.
I am no longer concerned about trying to salvage old vhs tapes.

Just my experience, fwiw.

As for the storage concerns, the maximum space available is key to making this life/job easier and more convenient. Gives you time to collect and make your transformations as you see fit.
But the prime reason advice says to use an additional hard drive is to give you (us) the best conditions possible - and minimize or eliminate the possibility of vid loss. Even so, that's the purist after technical superiority.

Just like hi-fi - for flat and perfect audio response to be of use to you....
Your hearing should be textbook perfect.

Have fun and enjoy what you do.