How big of effect does your hard drive play during capturing

[munster]

I have a 30 gig Western Digital Ultra 66 5400 RPM drive.
Does having a slow drive effect your capturing ability?

[azali]

I guess it depends on how high the bitrate of your capture settings are. I used to capture 6.5 megs/sec (720x480 ATI VCR1) with my Maxtor 10 gig dma33 drive (5400rpm). Just remember to defrag your drive before you capture.

[GMFTatsujin]

Exploiting the speed of your drive can be tricky too.

First, remember that the bus on your drive will only run as fast as the slowest device attached to it. If you've got a slow CDROM on the same bus as a ATA100 7200RPM hard drive, the bus will clock down so that the CDROM can keep up. Most motherboards have two busses. Each bus has one cable, each cable has two connections. Put fast devices on one cable, slow devices on the other.

Second, make sure that your OS has the drivers to take advantage of that high speed bus! My motherboard has its own particular drivers to use the UltraATA-100 BIOS, and if those drivers aren't there, the bus slows down to regular ATA speed - 33MHz or something like that, which crawls. Go to your motherboard manufacturer's website and get the latest drivers if any are available. Flashing the BIOS is also a good step, but is more complex than I can go into right now.

Third, make sure your drives are set up to use Direct Memory Addressing, if that option is available. In Windows, go to Start, Control Panel, Settings, Device Manager and check the properties on your drives. There will be a check box marked DMA if your drive can handle Direct Memory Addressing. Make sure there's a check there and reboot.

Finally, your hard drive speed will only really come into play when you capture high bitrates. I'm no expert on this particular subject, but bitrates are primarily affected by color depth, resolution, and framerate. If you've got everything maxxed out (24 bit color, 720x480 resolution, and 29.96 frames/sec, for example) you're pushing a lot of data through the bus and your drive may have a tough time handling it. Compression can ease some of this pain, but then you get into processor speed issues.

Always make sure you're capturing to a defragged drive. I've got a drive that *only* takes captured data, so once I'm done with a capture I can clean the drive off completely. If your drive has data scattered all over, you'll lose some time when the drive head has to go seeking for a blank sector to write to. Having lots of free RAM can smooth that problem out though, as the data will buffer while the drive is looking for a place to put it.

Me, I've got a 1GHz processor with 128MB of RAM and a 5400RPM 30GB drive (dedicated to capturing). I always start off with a clean drive, and usually capture at 352x240 with Huffy compression. I rarely drop frames (more due to a corrupt signal than anything, I think), and my hard drive doesn't complain.

GMFTatsujin

[MOVIEGEEK]

A 7200rpm HDD makes a big difference,on my system it was like night &
day.

[Craig Tucker]

GMFTatsujun

Is that right about the bus speed being reduced to the slowest device on the channel, I have two ata100 disc drives for capture and a CDRW and a DVD. At the moment I have one disc drive and on CD device on one channel, and the same on the other channel, the reason I did this was that nero reccomends putting the CD devices on seperate channels for on the fly burning. But if my disc drives are being slowed to ata33 then I will put them on the same channel. (I also have two raid connectors)

When my system boots it says that the drives are ata100 how do you check what they are operating at whilst in use.

Craig

[Spicuzza]

craigtucker,

GMFTatsujin, is exactly correct. Mixing CD-ROM/RW's on the same IDE channel as HDD's will degrade the performance of the HDD's.

Since you have the IDE connections and haven't set up your RAID you could set all HDD's and CD-ROM/RW drives to masters and have all of them on their own IDE cable.

This is a sweet set up and this was how I had my machine set up before I set up the RAID-0. If you do this you will see an immediate performance boost, as no data is being transferred back and forth between two devices on one channel or having HDD data being send through the CD-ROM/RW before it gets to the final destination.

I set up my RAID mainly because the motherboard had the capability and I was curious to see if there was really that big of a difference in HDD performance. There is! But that's another topic.

Your only cost would be two additional IDE cables, and since your only changing jumpers from slaves to masters there really isn't much danger of losing data because of making this type of configuration change, plus if for some reason your machine choked on this (which I doubt) you would simply revert back to the way you had it.

Hope this helps.

Gary Spicuzza
cic7@juno.com

[GMFTatsujin]

I'm not sure how to check whether a drive is actually running at ATA100 or not - I think what you're talking about is during POST you get a text message that your hard drives are connected to the ATA100 busses. I really couldn't say if that's what they're clocking in at, I think it just means that's the bus they're attached to. Perhaps Maxtor has a utility that will detect the transfer rate on your hard drives?

On my motherboard, I've got 2 DMA66 busses, but there's also an ATA100 bus. It can therefore support 6 drives - and I'll bet that you've got a similar situation.

At the moment, the fastest speed any of my hard drives supports is DMA66, so it at long as I keep my fast drives on the same channel, everything's going as fast as it can. When I get some 7200RPM drives, though, I expect I can put them on the ATA100 bus, keep my slower stuff on the DMA66, and watch it go zooooom!

Is there really that huge a difference between 5400 and 7200 RPM drives, considering that there's so much calculation going on during a video render/compression? I mean, aren't the drives waiting for the processor to finish with a frame most of the time? I would think that for these applications, RAM speed and processor speed would be the two big bottlenecks.

GMFTatsujin

[Craig Tucker]

Thanks for the replies guys you learn something new every day.

As for the Post registering the drives as ATA100, this must be a measure of the drives performance and not the bus, as my DVD registers as ATA33 and its on the same bus.

One more question, if you have two ATA100 drives on seperate ATA100 buses, set as masters with no slaves, will they operate quicker than two ATA drives on a single ATA100 bus, one set as a master and the other as a slave.

Craig

[Spicuzza]

GMFTatsujin, "Is there really that huge a difference between 5400 and 7200 RPM drives.?"

The answer is YES for video capturing and overall system performance! Your computer perfomance is limited to the slowest/weakest component in your machine. If your HDD spun at 60 rpm, obviously loading programs and accessing files would take considerably longer.

craigtucker, "One more question, if you have two ATA100 drives on seperate ATA100 buses, set as masters with no slaves, will they operate quicker than two ATA drives on a single ATA100 bus, one set as a master and the other as a slave?"

Yes, path of least resistance, but I don't think you will humanly notice any difference as I have a 40 gig master with a 20 gig slave, however, performance will noticeably be hindered if you are transfering large video files from one drive to the other on the same IDE channel. When I transfer files from my RAID-0 to 40 gig master it is done much faster than when I transfer files between the drives on the same IDE channel.

At least this has been my experience.

Great discussion!

Gary Spicuzza
cic7@juno.com

[catnip1]

For anyone interrested hdtach 2.61 is a good program for testing HD speed, you can find it here: http://www.tcdlabs.com/.

Good luck http://www.tcdlabs.com/

[McQuaid]

GMFTatsujin:

I agree with everything you say but didn't know about the drives having a performance hit when coupled with cdrom drives? Any articles stating this? I'm sure your right, but I read in the past that as long as you have the proper ide cables for ata66 devices and above, you'll get the maximum performance out of it regardless of what the other device is. Bascially, other deivces will create a performance hit if you don't have the 80pin ide cables.

And btw, I have a PII400 64megs and 20gig 7200 rpm drive and cap at 352x480 with picvideo 18 and avi_io and never drop frames. I realize you use Huffy but picvideo 18 or 19 fullframe (480 lines) versus huffy half frame (240 lines) will yield much better results.