Which drive do you capture to?

[perdomot]

I've got two hard drives and am curious which I should capture to to minimize dropped frames, etc. The first drive has two partitions; one for the OS and files and an empty partition I could use to capture avi. My second drive is completely empty so I could use it to capture also. Which one should I choose and why?

[freestyler]

a bit of advice I read on here a while back, not sure who said it

you should NEVER capture video to your main OS drive. Windows always writes to the OS drive intermittantly adn this can produce fragmented blocks. In fact, the rule of thumb is that your OS drive will always be fragmented because Windows constantly writtes to it.
So do yourself a favor and get a second large hard disk, at least 80 gigs, preferably more, to do nothing but capture video to. That way you won't have to worry about defragging the capture drive, or dropping frames because the OS is busy writing ot the disk.

[Kool_Aid]

The best setup is with 2 dedicated drives, neither of which is your C:/ drive, (the drive with your OS on it).

7200rpm or faster.

Capture to one of them, and start converting/encoding/demuxing back and forth between the drives.

Speeds things up considerably.

[musher70]

another question should be is...
how large is the drive ur capturing to?
.5 g's a minute using huffy avi's
or r u capturing mpegs?

[ethylene]

I've got some questions on this too, since I'll be building a system later this year.

My new mainboard has a built-in RAID controller. I know I can buy two exactly alike hard drives and put them into a RAID 0 array for maximum throughput. Plus, I can have another hard drive on the primary master IDE onto which to install the operating system(s).

I know that captured video should go to the RAID 0 array. Would it be safe to store other things there, too? I mean, what if I have a separate partition on the RAID 0 array for programs and program data? Does that increase the likelihood of dropped frames, etc...?

[lordsmurf]

I've seen RAID do worse than UDMA IDE. In fact, I've heard and seen users use the RAID cards as mere IDE expansion, disabling RAID.

[perdomot]

Well, I deleted my raid array and set up the two hdds individually. I'll be capturing to the 2nd one and when I encode to mpeg, I'll use a different partition on the first hdd to give me the back & forth effect. Hope this works well. I am going to be capturing with huffyuv.

ethylene,
don't use the raid 0 array as permanent storage because if either hdd goes bad, you'll lose all the data on the raid array.

[lordsmurf]

[quote="perdomot"]Well, I deleted my raid array and set up the two hdds individually. I'll be capturing to the 2nd one and when I encode to mpeg, I'll use a different partition on the first hdd to give me the back & forth effect. Hope this works well. I am going to be capturing with huffyuv.
quote]

That sounds good to me.

[Will Hay]

I've seen RAID do worse than UDMA IDE. In fact, I've heard and seen users use the RAID cards as mere IDE expansion, disabling RAID.

Yup, sounds like me.
I use my x2 Maxtor D740X 80gb HDD's as seperate drives, one for storage (S:\) and the other for video capture (V:\).
And when I say capture, I mean capture.
As soon as I'Ve captured I encode from there to my S drive and then format my capture drive (I do a quick format).
I do this every time.
Will