5400rpm's to Capture..Software RAID or HPT RocketRaid133??

[bamafamily]

Hey All,

I want to use the 5400 rpm ATA100 drive to capture TV and to do rips.
I plan on getting another 80mb drive of the same model and RAIDing them together....Thing is..I have a choice..

Dynamic Disk...a la Software Raid thru XP??
Hardware RAID via a Highpoint RocketRaid 133??

I have read the reviews....just wondering the real world experience....

thx

Mark
ps.I am trying to use the one 5400 rpm I have instead of buying a 7200rpm drive...

[ian follow]

Hi guys,

I'm interested in that stuff too.

I'm planning to buy:

1) FIC motherboard, Intel chipse, Highpoint RAID
2) on drive for XP
3) one drive for video and another for audio (80 + 80 Gb)

You opinions?

Thank you,
Ian

[BJ_M]

others im sure may disagree but on-board IDE hardware raid is not worth the problems ..

[Jester700]

Much easier to just get a 7200RPM drive, since you're buying another anyway. I'd advise against RAID most times. How are you capping TV? Even a single 5400RPM drive will keep up with a DVD rip or a DV stream.

[sterno]

I would agree that RAID is usually unnecessary. I've done capture in 352x480 and 480x480 to a 5400RPM drive without any real problems. I've heard that you usually don't gain much capturing TV higher than that. Drive speed doesn't really matter for DVD rips, it may go slightly faster but it's not like you're going to drop frames or something.

I will recommend against software RAID. If you need/want RAID go for the real thing, the controllers aren't all that expensive if you just need RAID0. The only significant advantage of software RAID is that you can mix and match drives instead of needing to keep the same speed/capacity for everything. The tradeoff is the extra load on your CPU.

[James_T_Kirk]

I agree - i cap just fine on my 5400 as long as no other programs is using that drive also - such as FileSharing proggys.

And it does keep up with both DVD and DV stream without problomes - I bought a 7200 rpm just because it seems as though they are phasing out 5400 rpm drive as I didn't see many at circuit city.

but ive noticed no difference in video performance - only improved performance i have noticed is the 7200 rpm drive seeks through the folders faster.

most people will tell you that you dont need arrayed drives, that 5400 and 7200 are both fast enough - I will tell you from experience the exact same thing. The amount of both space and Megs of ram you are running with either speed matters the most.

[Jester700]

One thing that IS nice is to have a seperate (non raid) drive just for capping. You can use it whenever needed for C: drive image backup, it can be a different file format, etc. Just makes life easier.

I have a 10GB system drive and a 80GB cap drive (which I also use for audio). Both 7200RPM.

[ian follow]

Hi everyone,

On-board RAID is OK for users with many devices, thus system can be on channel 1, video disk on channel 2, and CD writer, reader, ZIP... on channel 3 or 4.

There's must be some improvement in speed if ZIP or CD is distinguished from system drive, not to mention video drive. Correct me if I'm wrong.

And one question: how much RAM is minimum? 256, 1 Gb??

Tnx,
Ian

[vcdfreak]

Usually boards with RAID is not really stable at least that's what I encountered after several installation attempts of PC. Yep 5400RPM is usually enough if you are running at least a ATA-33 connection. If you running the 5400RPM in older ATA standard you might get dropped frames.

7200RPM is usually slightly faster than 5400RPM drives if you read the benchmark charts carefully. Moreover, 5400RPM drives nowadays are highly engineered and optimized. With a 2-5 US$ of difference between the two types, it's OK to take the 7200RPM models although it gets hotter and noisier.

[bamafamily]

Well...it seems that the 5400 RPM might be enough.....All I am doing is capping from a TV source using PowerVCR. I am capping 480x352 @2520CBR with 224 Audio. I have not capped a long program yet, but will be doing so tonight....

My XP1600+ with 512 of PC2700 RAM seems to be doing ok... I have a 40GB Barracuda for my system/apps/games drive and my 80GB Maxtor has 2 paritions on it. a 20MB FAT32 to hold some big dat files (non video) and a 60GB partition NTFS drive for capping.

thx for the help all

Mark

[ian follow]

Very informative posts, guys.

I have a somewhat strange situation. On IDE channel 0 IBM 15 GB 7200 is master and Maxtor 40 GB 7200 is slave. Results from VirtualDub: write on system disk ~ 15000 kb and on Maxtor ~ 9000 kb.

If someone has an explanation - he's the man!

Ian

[Jester700]

Make sure the Maxtor has DMA enabled.

If so, is it freshly installed? For a long time Maxtors had a "write verify" algorithm enabled for the first 10 power ups that slowed it down. After that, it went to its rightful "full speed". There IS a utility to disable that right away, but I dunno where- check Maxtor's site.

[OptimusPrime22]

Does using a CD or DVD or CDRW drive on a Raid Channel improve the performance of them? Like, if I used a CDRW drive on a Raid Channel would it reduce the chances of buffer under run? Or would it improve the speed of the data transfer from the drives? I'm just curious because I am looking to get two 120gig hard drives for capture and use a PCI RAID card. I was also considering putting a CDRW drive on the other channel. If anyone has any experience with this then please let me know how it turned out. Thanks.

[Jester700]

No. A CD drive can't make use of RAID, so it only uses the channel as a standard IDE controller, and I don't think the buffer in a RAID controller are active in such a configuration.

Buffer underrun proof CDRWs are like $50 now, so it's no big deal these days...

[OptimusPrime22]

Cool, thanks for the info. I'll be buying a new CDRW anyway because they are much faster and cheaper now too.

[Jester700]

On second thought...

The buffer memory probably IS active, giving you an extra couple MB of buffer. Still nowhere near as good as a "BURNPROOF" CDRW or even one with more of its OWN buffer memory, but it's something...

[BJ_M]

i dont know about all raid controllers but you can not add a cdrom to a tx2000 or tx4000 anyway ...

[ian follow]

Jester700 tnx for quick answer.

Both drives are 7200 so I expected similar performances and Maxtor is one year old. Both drives are "Multimode Word 2"...

I think I'll open the case and look inside, I did something wrong at the hardware level.

Ian

[ian follow]

Hi Jester700,

It was my fault after all. When installing new drive I disabled UDMA in BIOS. Stupid. Now everythnig is fine and I have 720 x whatever at 25 fps,

Ian