TV Card Capturing - Best Type of Hard Drive to buy ??

[Moonstomp]

Hi All,

I'm thinking of investing in a second Hard Drive for dedicated Capturing from my TV Card.

Which would be the best option:

An IDE drive (Western Digital) or

A Serial ATA Drive (Seagate)

Both are 7200 & have a 8Mb cache.

Thanks

Moonstomp.

[thecoalman]

The seagate because I have one Quiet as can be , it's right next to me and I can barely hear it. You can't beat the small red cables either as opposed to those dust magnet and air flow killing ide cables(even the round cables are huge in comparison to sata cables). Ohhh and there's the better performance thing too...

[indolikaa]

How about a Western Digital 10K-RPM SATA drive?


I've captured for a long time just fine with 7200 IDE drives. Full-D1, DV, AVI, you name it.

SATA is getting cheaper everyday. No reason not to invest, even if you need SATA adapters/controllers. In fact, I can't think of a single reason NOT to go with SATA. In your case, Seagate. No question.

[SaSi]

If your motherboard has an on-board SATA controller and the price you get for the SATA disk is not higher than the IDE disk, then you might as well buy a SATA disk. Will have a slightly higher probablility of salvage during your next rehaul/upgrade on your system.

Beware two things:

1. Most SATA controllers on earlier (last year's) motherboards are converters of the IDE bus, thus are limited at 100Mb/s like the IDE disks. 7200rpm disks can marginally gain from a 150Mb/s bus. More like 10000rpm disks are required to sustain the max throughput.

2. SATA is about to become obsolete and give it's place to SATA-2 with a rated speed of 300MB/s. This means that SATA controllers will gradually be replaced (next year) with SATA-2. IDE is more likely to remain with us, as CDRW and DVDRW will likely remain as IDE devices for the near future.

Buy a 7200rpm disk with as much cache as you can get. Get the largest disk you can afford. Partition it in two halves and use the first one to capture. It will be twice as fast as the second partition (both with IDE and SATA drives).

IDE disks at high capacities are a bargain these days. I have 3 x WD2000JB (200Gb) and expect my fourth these days (at 150euro plus VAT it's a bargain compared to 320euro I paid for it 18 months ago).

[thecoalman]

I read afew articles comparing The Seagate SATA to a WD SATA which according to the article was a few more dollars than the Seagate. The gist of it was the WD provided better performance in most categories but was noisier than the Seagate. Might want to consider that too...

[Moonstomp]

Thanks to everyone for those helpful comments & details !!!


I'm going for a 80 GB disk as that's both sufficient (capturing AVI with Huffyuv) and what I can afford at present.

The Western Digital IDE drive is € 100 and the Seagate is € 85. However with the Seagate I have to buy an S-ATA Controller for € 35. There's not much in the difference.

You guys/gals reckon the S-ATA is worth the extra € and losing a PCI slot to the controller for ??

Here's the specs on the two S-ATA items:

80 GB Seagate Barracuda, Serial-ATA 150
7200rpm, 8MB cache
requires S-ATA controller!

Serial-ATA 150 controller
PCI card with 2 S-ATA connections (1 cable incl.)
Incl. Raid 0 and 1 software
Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP

Thanks !!


Moonstomp.