What's wrong with 5200rpm hardrives?

[tony123]

Other than being slower? It doesn't affect the image quality.

[dcsos]

DUH!
They can't affect quality if you transfer files to them or work off them.

but If you capture analog video to them: you may drop frames !
This will lessen the "QUALITY" by missing frames...
not by any lack of quality in the DRIVE..its just a speed isssue

and I believe you meant "5400"rpm drives as I've only seen 7200 and 4200(laptop)

[tony123]

If I capture raw avi to a 5400 drive, I'm bound to drop frames?

[bugster]

If I capture raw avi to a 5400 drive, I'm bound to drop frames?

Not bound to, no. Its just one more link in the chain of overall system performance. Anything that slows down the system has the potential to cause frame drops. Using a faster drive is a simple solution in many (though not all ) cases of dropped frames.

[energy80s]

I have noticed no difference between 54 and 72 hard drives. I use both and don't have frame drops or other nasties. The only thing against 72 drives is that they run hotter and are a bit noisier. Get whichever is the best value at the time.

[Gazorgan]

Unless you do a lot of capturing, you won't notice much difference between 5400 and 7200 RPM drives. And by capturing, I mean 720x480 in Huffyuv (40 GB/hour rate).

You can get some significant system performace boost by having a second 80 GB drive, even if it's 5400 RPM. Especially if you backup your DVD's.

[spiderman2k1]

IF you use the same IDE cable you must have the same speed hard drive's on that cable or the faster drive will go as slow as the slowest drive and some time's even slow. So if you have one 5400rpm drive put it on IDE channel 1 and 7200rpm on IDE channel 2 or the other way around

[tony123]

I see. Thanks for explainining.

Would slow FSB cause dropped frames? I believe I have a 133/133.

[mgh]

Had 5400 rpm drive earlier with a PIII 800- with PICVIDEO codec and full DVD PAL resolution of 720x576 did not have problems with dropped frames when capturing. Whichever you use enable DMA

[triphop]

IF you use the same IDE cable you must have the same speed hard drive's on that cable or the faster drive will go as slow as the slowest drive and some time's even slow. So if you have one 5400rpm drive put it on IDE channel 1 and 7200rpm on IDE channel 2 or the other way around

Not so. There are a number of factors to consider here. Firstly what is the type of the ATA drive interface 133/100/66. This certainly will have an effect. Remember also that if you are addressing both drives then you will have a bus contention issue. Another factor - some new drives operate much like SCSI drives in that they optimize their operations so that head actuator assembly movement is minimized - you basically send a stream of commands and the drives does its business. This is called command tag queuing.

All of this gets solved with SATA which basically dedicates a drive to a cable. This is the way to go but until the economies of scale ramp and until we have NATIVE SATA support from chipsets (this is happening now), SATA is still somewhat ahead of mainstream. When DELL and HP and the rest start going to SATA exclusively - thats when all will be good.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/print/wd-raptor.html

[overloaded_ide]

Myself I always buy the 7200rpm. I get the ones with 8mb cache and 3 year waurantee
They cost alittle more, but I want my drive replaced if it dies in 1yr 3months! Normally the price is not that much higher and the 8mb cache instead of just 2mb I feel is worth the difference in price. Plus the drive is faster also.

The slower drive is fine, nothing wrong with them, just slower, 2mb cache, 1 yr wauranty.

Personnally I do feel the 7200rpm drive my also be a little better constructed. Since I buy the ones with a 3 yr, I think they might plan on making those last longer than the one year ones.

Dropping frames may ocure more often on the slower drives than the faster ones. But if you can get the data on the drive there is no difference other than speed for saving or reading it. Data is Data, doesn't matter what it's on. Like your DVD or CD drive is much slower than you hard drive, and that works fine

[tony123]

regarding IDE cables-- is there only one type or are there types that can handle more data transmission?