IDE vs SATA Hard Drive for Capturing To?

[Tom Saurus]

Currently I have a SATA Drive, and I am adding some additional hardware to my computer. I am upgrade my DDR400 Rahm to 1Gb and purchasing a IDE Hard Drive that is 200Gb. Which of the two types of hard drives is the better of the two to capture video to? I hope IDE Drives are adequate, I have already sent my money to pay for it. I was going to get another 160Gb Sata, but the technician told me about a "Mirroring Effect" that dimishes your overall size in Gb's.

I have an AIW 9800 Pro Capture Card, and I use that to record stuff from our Digital Satellite Dish. I hope someone can give me some advice on this subject. Thanks in advance, for any advice you can give.

[Cobra]

My machine that I use for capturing video uses an ATA133 drive (normal IDE) and it does it perfectly. You shouldn't have any problems. I certainly don't.

[gadgetguy]

I've had trouble capturing to my SATA drive. Lots of dropped frames. It also gives me trouble when trying to process a video that's stored on it. But it works fine for storage. I just have to copy the file to an IDE drive if I want to do anything with it. If your current SATA drive is working for you, great, but an IDE drive will be more than adequate to the job.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

well crap!
I was thinking about stepping up to a SATA 10,000RPM in the hopes that it would help to alleviate my dropped-frames....
Not that I have a TON of dropped frames (about 4 frames dropped per hour when capping from the AIW's tuner), but there's always room for improvement

[Tom Saurus]

Xylob the Destroyer, gadgetguy & Cobra, thanks for responding to my questions. It was kind of each of you to give me this advice.

Cobra: About the dropped frames, you should shut down every program that isn't necessary when you are capturing video, perhaps that is where the problem lies.

[Cobra]

Funny... I have seen SATA systems caputing video too, and they do it perfectly. SATA has more bandwidth but the drives themselves rarely use it up - they physically aren't quick enough.

[pfh]

I've had trouble capturing to my SATA drive. Lots of dropped frames. It also gives me trouble when trying to process a video that's stored on it. But it works fine for storage. I just have to copy the file to an IDE drive if I want to do anything with it. If your current SATA drive is working for you, great, but an IDE drive will be more than adequate to the job.

Might not be the drive as much as the SATA controller causing probs......

[budz]

I use a SATA 200 GB hard drive to capture with no problems but I don't use a AIW capture card. I use a Canopus ADVC-100 to capture from my digital cable box.

[lenti_75]

guys, IT NOT THE SATA drive your problem for dropped frames, it's either the driver or the system, dont' tell peolpe bullshit

how could be IDE better, when a SATA is a lot faster ???????

I use a sata 160 Gb drive without any error for the last 2 yrs. don;t tell people that you have dropped frames because of it, it's your piece of s*** capture card or whatever you use, and maybe a ton of antivirus and firewall software running.

BUY SATA !!!!! IDE is dead, why whould you go down and not up ????

:P

[Wile_E]

Try WinDV. It uses a big-ass buffer. As far as I'm concerned, all other capturing software is junk compared to WinDV. They need to start using buffers on other software. While capturing with a Canopus ADVC-300, I can now play games too, with no dropped frames. Intensive games like Unreal Tournament, etc...

Another thing that helps...A capture card/device that has it's own processor, so it doesn't bog down your CPU. Some so-called "capture cards" just are dummy cards. They may have video inputs, but no processor. This is what causes problems.[/b]

[waheed]

When I switched over to SATA from IDE, I noticed faster loading times, faster video encdoing times and an overall faster response time.

If people experience problems, it does not neccessarily mean its the hard drive. There are other contributing factors to consider.

IDE drives are good and do the job well. In my opinion, i think SATA do them better.

With SATA, there are no worries about setting up Primary or Secondary master/slave etc.. as with IDE.

[Ward River]

BUY SATA !!!!! IDE is dead, why whould you go down and not up ????

:P

Your SATA drive does the same job for video that an IDE does and it doesn't do it any better but it costs a lot more money. So you know how to spend your money stupidly on stuff you don't actually need. Bully for you. Are we supposed to be impressed or something?

[Wile_E]

With SATA, there are no worries about setting up Primary or Secondary master/slave etc.. as with IDE.

IDE has automatic configuration too. It's called Cable Select. No worrying about master/slave jumpers.

[Ward River]

When I switched over to SATA from IDE, I noticed xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx, faster video encdoing times and ......

No you didn't, you were just imagining the CPU bottleneck loosening up because you just spent a lot of money on some hardware you didn't actually need and felt the need to somehow justify doing it in your mind.

[lenti_75]

BUY SATA !!!!! IDE is dead, why whould you go down and not up ????

:P

Your SATA drive does the same job for video that an IDE does and it doesn't do it any better but it costs a lot more money. So you know how to spend your money stupidly on stuff you don't actually need. Bully for you. Are we supposed to be impressed or something?

GOOD FOR YOU my wise friend..... and it's not all about encoding.... I can see you did not use it, so I trust you.

[waheed]

When I switched over to SATA from IDE, I noticed xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx, faster video encdoing times and ......

No you didn't, you were just imagining the CPU bottleneck loosening up because you just spent a lot of money on some hardware you didn't actually need and felt the need to somehow justify doing it in your mind.

Where i live, prices for SATA and IDE is similar, not a huge difference for the same make/size/speed.

However, I do have a Raptor at 10,000RPM and the speed difference is noticable. Its not all in my mind. How would the CPU bottleneck loosen up out of nowhere at the point when I switch over to SATA. Can you justify your reasoning?

And dont take my word of it, see of review of hundreds of consumers who have purchased the

same drive

[lenti_75]

i'm getting sick of "SMART" people who don't use it and say it's no difference, because they say so.

it's like, there is no dif between a scsi and ide.....is there any ????

just buy a ata 33, save a lot of money....

[Xylob the Destroyer]

...how could be IDE better, when a SATA is a lot faster ???????...

so...
let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly.
when upgrading something, speed is the ONLY factor to consider?
overall performance & reliability are meaningless as long as a given device is faster?

[Cobra]

overall performance & reliability are meaningless as long as a given device is faster?

Very good point. That's why I went with a Seagate. 8)

I have noticed perhaps a small difference in my jump from IDE to SATA, but as I say the IDE interface wasn't really saturated to begin with. SATA only really shows a difference with 10,000RPM discs.

[pfh]

The real advantage of SATA at this point in time is those 10,000 rpm's vs 7200. That's about it, BUT- as chipsets are improved to take advantage of SATA capability we will see a slow migration towards SATA for the theoretical advantages

Doesn't everyone remember the difference in 5000 rpm IDE an 7200 ??

No point in everybody getting bent out of shape here. Real world testing has not proven the big benefits to warrant a major change to SATA
IDE is not dead yet and won't be for a long time.

Like I said, it's most likely chipset drivers or SATA controller drivers causing probs. not the drive.

[Skith]

I was going to get another 160Gb Sata, but the technician told me about a "Mirroring Effect" that dimishes your overall size in Gb's.

A updating the bios on your motherboard would likely solve the issue (if there is even such an issue). The only other possibility concerning this, is that the technician was refering to the use of a RAID array for mirroring (data redundancy). This is where you have two drives that "mirror" eachother, so if one fails, the backup can take it's place. This effectively cuts storage capacity in half.


Most SATA drives are actually IDE (PATA) drives with a bridge board to convert the connection to SATA. One of the few true SATA solutions is the Seagate 7200.8 series. No hard drive can currently saturate the theoretical +100MB of PATA. This is still true even when you consider the "Burst" transfer speed (not sustained).

The current advantages to SATA drives are mainly:
(1) smaller cables for better case cooling.
(2) Frees up IDE ports for Optical drives *.


* Each IDE controller/port on a motherboard supports 2 devices (master and slave), but only one device per controller may be accessed at a time. This can potentially cause problems if both devices on one controller need to be read/written to at high speeds.

edit: One is not likely to notice a difference unless RAID is used in a data intensive situation, such as a server. Even SCSI is not significantly faster in average desktop use.

[gadgetguy]

guys, IT NOT THE SATA drive your problem for dropped frames, it's either the driver or the system, dont' tell peolpe bullshit

i'm getting sick of "SMART" people who don't use it and say it's no difference, because they say so.

I believe I stated my experience using a SATA drive. The reason for dropped frames is directly related to attempting to capture to my SATA drive. If I change nothing else except where the file is captured to, it will drop frames going to the SATA drive and doesn't drop them going to my IDE drive. If I try to edit a video file that is on my SATA drive there is a significant lag time when scrolling through the timeline. When I try to author from my SATA drive, it unpredictably cuts the audio short on my menus and the main movies. I can take a file that I experience problems working with on the SATA drive and copy it to an IDE drive and no longer experience any problems with it.
I agree that it probably is a problem with the drivers/interface more than the drive itself, and that the SATA spec should make it excellent for video. But, Tom asked for advice and I related my experience. I would hate to have had Tom hear nothing negative about SATA, and then have him experience the same difficulties that I encountered.
While I don't consider myself an expert professional, I am a long way from a novice when it comes to both video and computers. I was given the name gadgetguy because of my love for technology, but I'm not blinded to it's faults by that love.

But, perhaps I'm taking all this criticism of saying something negative about SATA drives to personally. I'm just a little tired of people saying that I have not experienced the things I have. Or that I must be an idiot because I experienced it.

[Gurm]

You can go on and on about theoreticals all you want, but the point in fact is this:

PATA is an inferior standard when it comes to concurrent accesses. There's been a reason people have always chosen SCSI over IDE for serious work - it's because IDE sucks when you're doing more than one thing at once.

Does this matter in "average use"? Well, that depends. Define "average use". For me average use means that I'm running a bit torrent or two in the background, maybe doing a transcode or encode, and I'd also like to surf the web. For THAT application, SATA is almost a necessity - it's so much faster than IDE that it'd make your head spin.

Then you also have to address the driver issue. PATA drivers are notoriously... *bleh* whereas SATA drivers are optimized for throughput. I get spoiled by my machine - dragging and dropping an entire DVD image from one drive to another takes ... almost no time. Doing so on my friend's machine last night took about 10 minutes. Not forever, but longer than I had expected it to take.

In fact, I don't even notice the difference between my Seagate/Samsung SATA drives and my Seagate IDE drive. Perhaps that's because I'm not doing a transfer over the same bus. Maybe if you had one drive on Primary Master, another on Secondary Master, and did a copy it'd be fast too... but on Primary Master to Primary Slave... you can saturate the ATA100 bus pretty darn quickly.

Now, one other thing to address. I have NO idea what the "mirroring effect" is. Some salesman snowed you on that one.

[Cobra]

I'm just a little tired of people saying that I have not experienced the things I have. Or that I must be an idiot because I experienced it.

I know exactly what you mean. Check out this thread:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=264825

Now, I had a problem this morning. I found a solution, and I shared it. Nobody knocked me for it, but when I researched the problem on the Internet I saw many people being slammed for it. I can assure you, it is a genuine problem, but seems only to trouble certain machines even though they are "identical".

Back to the subject! I don't know what could be causing the slowdown on the SATA drive. Is the cable a good one, or is is old and frayed? How does it connect to the PC - a controller card or directly to the motherboard? What controller is it, or what motherboard is it? Sooo many variables!

Tom, I'd say you'd be fine with either a SATA drive, or an IDE drive. Just now - for our purposes - either standard should be just fine. After all, I'd be worried if you were capturing video at 133Mbps! SATA seems to have some teething problems as I discovered this morning but once it works it is just fine.

[gadgetguy]

Now, one other thing to address. I have NO idea what the "mirroring effect" is. Some salesman snowed you on that one.

As stated earlier, the salesman was probably referring to RAID. The Promise controller on my motherboard only allows RAID so adding another SATA drive would not increase my storage capacity. If his is the same, then the salesman was correct, even if he didn't explain it well.

[lenti_75]

...how could be IDE better, when a SATA is a lot faster ???????...

so...
let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly.
when upgrading something, speed is the ONLY factor to consider?
overall performance & reliability are meaningless as long as a given device is faster?

did i say it's meanningless?

then why bother uprgrading when faster is nothing ??? obviously you don't upgrade

anyway, the problem for dropped frames is not the sata drive, it's the system or the software. i cxapture form a dv camcorder and meantime do something else, with 0 dropped frames.

SO, if you really are a TECHGUY, find the problem...OUT

[virginva]

i have two seagate 160 sata drives in raid 0. i can capture, encode, run word, surf the net, play music, and not a single problem. same goes for burning a DVD---no coasters.

[waheed]

I agree with cobra with this one.

Real noticable difference is recognised with 10,000 RPM drives. The only company doing this is WD. This matches SCSI speed and realibilty as well as being faster than some 10,000 RPM SCSI drives.

[Gurm]

There's no such thing as a Promise controller that ONLY allows RAID. If you've got ONE drive hooked up there's no reason you can't hook ANOTHER drive up. The first drive might be a single-drive RAID array, so then so would the second - big deal. Terminology. A single-drive RAID array on a Promise controller will, when plugged into any other controller... look like an ordinary drive.

[Skith]

I agree with Gurm (though I suppose it is possible). I have never heard of a RAID controller would not allow drives to be run in a non-raid configuration.

This would be even more true, considering most RAID arrays (to my knowledge) require drives of the same capacity (and probably the same model). If the drives are not the same, The larger drive would be formatted to match the smaller drives capacity (wasting space).

In addition, most RAID arrays require special set-up proceedures (meaning you have to specify you want a RAID setup).

I have read of some problems with SATA (such as corrupted data on the Abit NFS-7 series) when two SATA drives were connected. The workaround was to switch a setting in the motherboard bios. This issue was fixed with a later BIOS revision for the motherboard.