Help Me troubleshoot RAID 0 setup for video capture

[Dpick]

Hello, I was hoping someone out there would be able to help me solve the problem I have been having for weeks ever since I first tried the current configuration on my computer for video capture.

My system configureation consist of the following,
motherboard= Epox 8RDA3+ (Rev 3)
CPU = AMD 2600+ (266 FSB)
RAM = 2 Gigabytes of Micron PC2100
Video Card = ASUS 9800 256mb pro
Sound Card= Maudio Revolution 5.1
Hard Drive (for OS) = Maxtor 160 GB ATA 133 8mb cache
Hard Drives (for RAID 0) (2) Hiatachi 250 GB ATA 100 8mb cache (Formatted as one NTFS Logical Partition)
RAID PCI Controller = IT8212
http://www.syba.com/us/en/product/43/02/01/1/
Operating System = Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2

My question and need of help is why I am having frames dropped no matter what RAID 0 settings I use when trying to capture video and audio at the same time?

I went thru the trouble of adjusting the BIOS PCI latency to 64 and even tried 200 with no noticeable improvement with not losing frames.

I currently have the RAID 0 partition as a strip size of 16 kilobytes with a NTFS cluster size of 16 kilobytes.

For capturing video, I use the ASUS 9800 built in Rage tuner and I use the MAudio Sound Card for capturing Audio. And I use Virtualdub with the virtualdub sync plug in to capture from both devices.

My frustration is that no matter what DISK IO settings I try in Virtual Dub, when I capture either live television or VHS source, Virtual Dub will drop frames massively after two minutes of capturing both audio and video when saving to the RAID 0 drive. Yet when I capture directly to the Maxtor OS hard drive, virtual dub will not drop frames at no more than normal. (normal being 10 frames maximum an hour except for poor video source)

I'm about ready to give up with RAID entirely and use 1 Hiatachi drive for capturing and eventually use the other Hiatachi drive in anouther computer I have.

I would really appreciate any pointers people would have in what else to try to get my RAID drive working as well as a single drive or better.

[edDV]

RAID 0 offers little advantage for most video uses (ATA66 and above). Exceptions include multi-stream hardware video processing cards or uncompressed captures.

Why do you think you need RAID?

I'm unfamiliar with that card.

[redwudz]

Your stripe size seems too small for video. Try 64K or even 128K. You can benchmark the drive with SiSandra and it may tell you where the bottleneck is. http://www.overclockersclub.com/downloadcenter/download.php?action=file&id=12

If it's not working any faster than your boot drive, then it's not much use in that configuration. Do a Google search for 'RAID setup' or 'RAID 0 stripe size' for more info.

[lordsmurf]

This very issues was discussed on these forums AT LENGTH not more than a month ago. Search the forums. Should be one of the top results.

[Dpick]

Yes lordsmurf, I did find the earlier post and read how you said RAID is not for video capture. Although I did read how some others prefer RAID for video capture.

So it still interest me to try RAID anyways. And from what I could read in the earlier post, no one ever came up with a solution of why Malchiah could not get his RAID SATA drives to capture as well as his IDE OS drive.

I realize RAID 0 is very stressful on the hard drives and the chance of data loss is extremely high.

I have no intentions of using my RAID 0 partition for permanent storage or storing anything on the drives I can't afford to loose.

It just interested me to have a Half terabyte partition for storage and video capture of of many SLP 6 hour recorded VHS tapes I have.

My interest in RAID goes back to watching one of the last episodes of "The Screensavers" on Tech TV with Yoshi showing how he got a Terabyte of storage by RAIDING 4 SATA Western Digtial 250 GB hard drives together with a 64 bit SATA controller.

Now I had a much smaller budget to work with, and I thought RAIDING 2 IDE hard drives together would be good enough.

Unfortunately I have yet to figure what is causing the bottleneck with my RAID configuration.

I tried SiSandra performance test, and besides flagging accoustic management, it did not find any problems with PCI latency or the RAID configureation.

Would really appreciate anybody else giving pointers on what is causing the bottleneck in speed.