Hard drive selection...

[bhold]

I just got a Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm HD with the 8MB cache. In my system I already have an almost identical drive (Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm) but it has the 2MB cache. Which one should I use for XP, and which for video editing. Will I see better performance from putting the 8MB version in as the os or video drive. Did a search but did'nt really come up with anything. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[SIRCOOKS]

those 8mb cache thing in to my knowledge have nothin to do with capturing or editing, they are only for seeking information quicker, and making the hd perform better..holla

[ZippyP.]

But for captures you need all the speed you can get, so it might be better to use the one with more cache for that.

Then again, the OS drive is the one that's always in use, so maybe it should be the faster one.

Sounds like you need to decide what suits you best. 8)

[rhegedus]

Hmm - I'd be surprised if the difference is noticeable. I recently read a review of an IBM 120G Deskstar with 2Mb cache and a Maxtor / Western Digital 120G with 8Mb cache - there were no real differences between them.

http://www.computershopper.co.uk/

Reviews>Archive

[sterno]

But for captures you need all the speed you can get, so it might be better to use the one with more cache for that.

The cache won't really help with that because when you capture you have a constant stream of data being written, saving the data in a cache won't do any good. I've heard that some of these newer drives with very large cache actually do worse for capturing than drives with less cache. The drive tries to cache things anyway and drops frames when it has to flush the write buffer out to disk (if it's set to cache writes, which is usually a bad idea anyway on a Windows PC) or when it decides it should be doing a read-ahead to load the buffer.

[Hardcoreruss]

Go for the one in the cache, I think the difference will be negligible but if the extra is there use it !!

[bhold]

From what I have read, It seems that the thing to do is use the 8MB version for Windows, and the 2MB for video. I also have RAID on my mobo, but don't think it will really do anything special compared to regular ATA/133, anyone experience otherwise? Thanks to everyone for their help.

[ktnwin]

I would recommend to use the one with 2MB cache for capturing. Anyway, during DV capturing, you only need a constant stream of 4MB/sec writing to the drive (which normally can sustain way above 50MB/sec).
A really big cache (8MB) can hurt when the drive cache too much write data then having to write huge amount of data to the media in some circumstances.
Remember the simple capturing rule: HDD must sustain a constant data rate (min 4MB/sec for DV). I have used 5400RPM drive (UDMA 33 only) on 266Mhz system with only 64MB RAM and never drop a single frame when capturing DV.
I think it's more important when you output your edited movie back to DV tape. If the system/HDD cannot sustain the 4MB/sec transfer rate, then the edited tape will have hickups in there.

[SaSi]

From what I have read, It seems that the thing to do is use the 8MB version for Windows, and the 2MB for video. I also have RAID on my mobo, but don't think it will really do anything special compared to regular ATA/133, anyone experience otherwise? Thanks to everyone for their help.

Good choice. The 8Mb cache will help to dramatically increase the Windows performance. Make sure you put your virtual memory file on the system disk, with a fixed size of 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have.

Cache will not help capturing or any other type of sequential access of long files. Prety fast the cache is exhausted and the disk is only helped by the prefetch (for reads) that is done in system memory. So, the only thing that can improve capturing and conversion processes is more RAM - to increase the system cache the OS will use. Which in turn will not do miracles, as no matter how much RAM you through, it won't be 2-3 GBytes to make a difference. At least not yet...