Hard drive issues while captureing

[haubrija]

Hey,

Although I've captured before (with a BT848 card) I finally got a decent enough capture card that I want to get hard core into it. But of course, like any newbie I have the recurring problem of dropped frames... about one a minute. From following the forum, most people seem to agree this is way too many. Looking at solutions from previous posts, it seems the best way to beat the dropped frames is to have a decent sound card and a fast hard drive. Now my sound card is halfway decent (some would differ based on brand) so I turned to my hard drive. I got a 30 gig Western Digital Hard drive that supports up to ATA 100 - 7200 rpm transfer rate.

Now here's my problem... using the disk utilities I set my hard drive to ATA 100 because my motherboard is supposed to support it. However when the bios loads up, it still says ATA 33. I can't figure out why. I searched through the bios looking for a place to manually set it to no avail. I have a feeling that this is the cause of my dropped frames, put if you could, look at my specs below and tell me if you think its a differnent problem and help me out with a possible solution. Thanks.

Specs:

P4 1.4 ghz
DFI Mainboard with Intel i850 chipset - Award 6.00 pg bios (I think)
30 gig Western Digital 7200 rpm capture drive.
Xtasy Everything capture card.
Soundblaster Live 5.1 sound card.
256 Rambus ram

I'm usually trying to capture to 640x480 or 720x480 in Avi_IO with 44100khz 16 bit sound to the Huffyuv codec.

Thanks again

[Lamont Cranston]

Is the hard drive connected with an ata100 cable? If it is only device on the cable is it connected at the end of the cable? You can set the ata using the floppy that came with your drive. There is a utility to check and set. Can you go into the bios and look at your hd settings? I can understand ata66 but not ata33.

[ggtronic]

i'm curious about my drive speed ( ata ?)
not able to find speed info in the Bios

i have 2 drive : maxtor 4O G ( 7200 rpm )
+ quantum big foot 6 G ( ? )

can someone explain me how to find there connection
speed

thanks

[AndyWatkins]

ggtronic,

Please bear in mind I don't know what I am talking about, but I thought I once heard that drives on a single controller only go at the speed of the slowest.

I had this problem 4 years ago when I put an old CD-Writer on a hard drive controller, if you got them the wrong way around or something your hard drive ran like a dog......

Basically try making sure the old cacky 6 gig drive you have is not on the same cables, controller etc as your shiny new disk. Even better through the old one away and buy 2 shiny new drives!

Andy

[cifcap]

Haubrija,

I'm curious about the Xtasy Everything. I own one (but haven't installed it in my new system) how is of the AVI captures? I purchased this thing because it can handle both NTSC and PAL according to the information on the Visiontek website.
I've also read a few about some audio synch problems on this site and on the web. Are you experiencing these difficulties too?

My (current) system specs are as follows:

1.47GHZ Athlon T-bird proc
Gigabyte GA-7DX mo-board
80GB 72K Western Digital HDD
TDK VeloCD
ATI 16MB AIW 128 (MMC 6.3)
2 Crucial 256MB DDR modules
Audigy (Gamer)
And Windows 98 (SE)

What operating system are you using? I plan to (clean) install Windows XP when Microsoft releases a service pack. Thanks for any help you can provide!

Cifcap