DV to laptop via firewire? 4200rpm didn't work. Will 5400rpm?

[Colmino]

Subject says it all. Theory or no, the 4200rpm drive on my brother's Toshiba p105-s9312 laptop was just not good enough to keep up with the DV data coming in on the firewire port. I don't know if I should have been surprised or not.

Now I'm looking at trying to find a good laptop for my sister. There are a few with 7200rpm drives, but good deals are much, much easier to find on laptops with 5400rpm drives. So I'm trying to figure out whether or not such a speed would be reliably fast enough to handle realtime DV video.

Any suggestions? ;p

[gadgetguy]

5400 should work if you use a decent program like WinDV, however a laptop generally only has one hard drive so you are capsferring to the same drive as the OS and interruptions may occur.

[rumplestiltskin]

5400RPM should work assuming the rest of the Toshibe is up to snuff. I'm not familiar with that unit but, as it has a firewire port, it should be sufficient assuming you have plenty of RAM (1GB+) to keep Windows from thrashing the drive (VM).

[Colmino]

Yep, familiar with those. WinDV has a great built-in cache that seems to be good for about three seconds of interruptions. On a desktop pc with a proper hdd, this is plenty sufficient, and I can even get away with doing some minor things during capture. The poor 4200rpm laptop didn't stand a chance. That's why I have this nagging reservation about a 5400rpm solution. In theory, 4200rpm "should" have been adequate (I mean, why else does the thing even have a firewire port?) but it wasn't.

If anyone's actually captured DV on a 5400rpm drive, please relate your experience.

[edDV]

The problem really isn't about hard drive "speed" so much as about the OS taking priority control over the hard drive. In other words, the OS is busy doing something else that it thinks has priority over your stream and takes control of the drive.

This is a problem re: sharing one drive. A desktop two drive system is a better capture platform. A laptop needs all other disk access controlled to maintain the transfer.

A DV transfer is just a stream of data. It keeps coming with little buffering. If the disk isn't ready, the data is discarded.

Turn off background tasks and don't use the computer during the transfer. Back when I captured to a PIII 544 laptop, I maintained a separate hardware profile with just about everything other than IEEE-1394 port and hard drive controller disabled. You don't need to go to those extremes today.

[Colmino]

Okay. Well, WinDV caches about three seconds (hard to say, really; it hits 100% but doesn't necessarily discard data at that point). Is there a program that caches even more? 500MB of ram ought to be good for a couple of minutes.

[edDV]

Okay. Well, WinDV caches about three seconds (hard to say, really; it hits 100% but doesn't necessarily discard data at that point). Is there a program that caches even more? 500MB of ram ought to be good for a couple of minutes.

It's something else in the OS services or antivirus or other task with higher interrupt priority. Try a separate profile with everything else absent. At an extreme you could even use a command line Linux but that would be going too far. My old PIII laptop with 256MB RAM did well with Win98Lite or XPLite. Your laptop is probably much faster than that.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Check to see how fragmented the laptop's hard drive is. If it is heavily fragmented, you can experience significant dropped frames since the captured file has to be written in small chunks all over the place.

With laptops, best option is to use an external drive.

[edDV]

Check to see how fragmented the laptop's hard drive is. If it is heavily fragmented, you can experience significant dropped frames since the captured file has to be written in small chunks all over the place.

With laptops, best option is to use an external drive.

This happens most when the drive is close to full. The drive head is seeking blank space.

The other thing that seemed to help was partitioning the laptop drive to minimize head seek during capture.

[mowermanEd]

I had a Toshiba laptop with only a 40G 5400 drive and had no problems whatsoever capturing with it through firewire