SCSI or RAID for video capturing?

[Remo Williams]

I dont know which configuration would be better for using as my capture drive (doing analog captures of vhs tapes), does anyone have any advice? My system specs are below in my signature. I really dont want to spend more than $150.00 (my dear wife may lose her patience with my "cheap hobbies")

*I found a cheap priced SCSI drive (4 pack?) which has gotten my interest, it's a "Seagate ST446452W 47GB SCSI Hard Drive(4 Pack)" for $150.00. I dont know anything about SCSI.
http://www.softwareandstuff.com/h_hd_ST446442W4.html

I have a RAID motherboard (GA-7DXR AMD761), but have never used that feature. The only experience I have is that I did at one time use one of the RAID connections simply as an ATA100 connection when backing up a friend's hard drive. However, I do have a basic understanding on how RAID works.

Currently the IDE drives I am using are all 7200rpm ATA100/133 RPM Maxtors.

Thank you for any advice offered.

[kayfam]

Remo Williams,
Despite what that article said there is no way in hell you can have a 4 drive SCSI setup for $150. A single Seagate 18GB Cheetah - ST318406LW goes for an average $179.00 and thats not including the price of the controller. The cheapest route would be to go with RAID if you must but I don't think your going to see much benefit as far as capturing is concerned. An ATA 100/133 7200 RPM drive is plenty fast. My suggestion would be is if you want a dedicated capture drive use an add-on IDE controller and make the drive the primary releaving your CPU of all the I/O processes. All this being said I do use a RAID setup for capturing, but at the time it was cheaper to stripe 2 60gb drives together than to purchase a single 120 gb drive. Since then drive capacity has gone up and prices have dropped.
Just my 2 cents worth........

[BJ_M]

those seagates are full hieght drives and are HUGE ... they are also very noisy and i wouldnt take one for free much less 4 ...
you see a lot of these are e-bay ...

i love scsi and not a huge fan of most lower end ide raid systems but with the speed and quality of todays IDE drives and at the realitily low bit rate and compressed video you all a mostly capture at -- IDE drives are fine .. i would go with 7200rpm though .. cache size is not that important in capturing ...

if you want to capture full D1 or better video uncompresseed-- scsi drives in a raid config are the only way to go really - or a really really good IDE raid setup - not the cheap-o onboard raid solutions (im going to get flamed for this but when you do it for a living - and want reliability .. i am right)

[kayfam]

I agree with BJ_M about onboard RAID. Considering the fact that the average cost of a decent motherboard is in the area of $150 and a add-on RAID controller starts out around $80 (please no flames, I know you can get them cheaper) you know something had to be skimped on and also to mention the fact their generally harder to set up.

[Remo Williams]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Since this is just a hobby, I'll just get a couple 60GB drives and play with raid and non-raid setups and see what the differences are.
Currently Im using a dedicated 27GB partition on my slave drive but it fills up too quick, especially if i use "no-compression". I wasnt even able to get a 96 minute movie on it the other day. Plus, I thought maybe my data transfer rate wasnt any good, cuz i get synch issues in my captured video. <<Thats was why i initially asked about SCSI, cuz its faster and thought it might help.

Thanks again!