Delighted to be here,come say hello!,optimum H/D layout?

[jimbo82]

Hello everyone, first of all Id like to introduce myself and express how happy I am to become a member here. Video encoding has become a great hobby of mine, especially over the past year where Ive focused more on MPEG-2 encoding, I have learnt allot, and have made huge progress since my first jerky VCDs I was so proud of a few years back

Ive made great use of the guides here but saved the forum was saved for when I was past 'newbie' stage and confident I could help out with queries, rather than annoy everyone with my endless qustions and help posts. My vast experiance in overcoming the most head-busting and bizzare problems with good old trial & error Im sure will come in handy to atleast some folk, I would have loved a year ago for advice like i have now!

Dont let me give the wrong impression, I wouldnt class myself as a PRO just yet, although im sure one-day I'll be up there! No, id say im still below ameteur standing to be brutally honest as ive only just entred the world of video capture, But im learning all the time with painstaking setbacks pretty much a thing of my "newbie" past....

Ive only just recently acquired a capture card, a cheap one at that (Philips Fly-tv prime 30) to experament with before I splash out on a top quality card. I look forward to playing around with it, ive only just hooked it up and gonna play a vid through it shortly to see what like.

The only advice I would like is with regards to hardware, setup of my hard drives infact. Sounds simple but I cant get a straight answer because no guides seem to cater for my differances in speed between my 2 hard disks.

I have 1x Maxtor 160gb 7200rpm as MASTER
AND 1x WD 60GB 5200rpm as SLAVE

Im aware that beter performance can be achieved through encoding from one drive to another, but what about in my case? Am I right in thinking that encoding from the 5200rpm to 7200rpm would still be beneficial due to the actual speed of encoding anyway? Would it be faster than encoding from source to output on the same 7200rpm drive?

And with whatever setup is best, would I benefit in creating a seperate Partition on the main 7200rpm drive for OS and Progs, would this be more efficient?

Once Ive got this sorted my system will be optimal , any comments etc about the capture card would also be welcomed, good or bad!


well, look forward to being part of the community, cheers for reading this!!







JIMBO

[redwudz]

Is your 160Gb your boot drive? If so I would have used the smaller drive as boot and the 160Gb as your capture drive. I don't use multiple partitions, never saw much of a need. I use three drives: one for boot one for edit and one for video. (Actually, I have a forth HD for archiving programs also) I usually encode between the edit and video drives. Since the boot just has the OS and programs, I don't care if it runs slower.

As far as encoding, the drive speed doesn't have much effect. For capturing AVI, it can make a difference, depends on your method.

Encoding is almost all CPU speed, a little to do with bus speed and memory speed and least to do with HD speed.

There are other ways to set this up, just my opinion.

BTW, welcome to the forums.

EDIT: Since someone may ask, Your 2 HDs are on the same channel and the two opticals on the secondary channel? What is the layout for master/slave on the two channels? Assuming PATA (IDE) drives. Most newer MBs it doesn't make a lot of difference, though opinions vary.