Necessity of second hard drive?

[Yakker]

Can anybody explain the advantages of having a second hard drive for video capturing and tell me how I should have my system configured for "optimal video capture and dvd burning performance".
If I have 2 hard drives, a dvdr burner, and a dvd rom, should it be something like this?
HD 1 w/OS on primary ide/master, dvd rom on primary ide/slave, HD 2 for vid caps on secondary ide/master and dvd burner on secondary ide/slave.
Or, if I'll be burning "from" vidcap hard drive should it be on a different ide channel than the burner?


TIA

[Jukka]

The good thing about 2 HDs is that if you keep all your docs / mp3s / vids / etc on the second one you can re-format you 1st HD and do a clean install of your OS (you still need to re-install the Apps).

Another benefit of having 2 HDs is that if you are re-encoding you can read from one and write to the other. This will be faster since in a 1 disk scenario (depending on the HD) the read head will have to keep skipping back and forth. NOTE: this needs 2 HDs, NOT 2 partitions.

Personally I would have both HDs on 1 channel and both CD/DVD on the other - some DVDs prefer it that way (apparently!).

[MrKGB]

AFAIK both HDs MUST be on the same cable.
BTW, you don't really need 2 HDs, you can just have 2 partitions.
I normally have 8 GB partition for Windows and applications, so it is possible to make a backup of the whole thing on 3-4 CDs.

[IJM]

My solution is to have... wait for it... THREE harddrives.

They are set up as follows:
Primary Master is my OS Drive.
Primary Slave is for my Data/Documents/Downloads.
Secondary Master is my DVD burner.
and Secondary Slave is my dedicated capture drive.

The idea is that I'll never be capturing and burning at the same time, so these two devices can safely share a channel. I'll capture onto the capture drive. Encode and author my DVD onto the 'Data' drive. And then burn from the 'Data' drive (on primary) to the DVD burner (on secondary).

Of course, you could just as easily make do with two.

I hope this helps.

Ian.

[matneaves]

i know what jukka means, is that whilst one drive is reading the other is writing, 2 partitions is still one drive head going back and forth while 2 drives is 2 heads

[TeeeRex]

Try this :-

Demux a large MPG from C: into an M2V and MP2 file on the D: in TMPGENc and TIME it.

Scenerio 1 - Using a single hard drive with two partitions C & D.
Scenerio 2 - Do the same with 2 hard drives (drive 1 is the C: & drive 2 is the D - doesn't matter if they are on the same channel or seperate.

Result - Scenerio 2 will BLOW AWAY the results from Scenerio 1 - SPEED is the primary reason for multiple hard drives (in this forum that is).

If you search the forum you'll find the technical reasons why but in a nutshell, the slowest park of a disk IO operation is the disk head having to Seek to the appropriate park of the disk to read or write the data, if the head is already there (ie C: reading) and already there to write (on the D then it doesn't need to seek so it's fast as it does a continuous read or write.

PS - Not important for encoding but essential for editing video and creating ISO's etc.

TeeeRex

[wingnut2003]

you can in most cases have a hard drive and a cd rom/burner or dvd drive on the same cable, but the problem is the ide channel will set itself to the lowest speed of the slowest drive. true some cd rom drives can't be set up that way. but it is best to have both hd and cd roms/burners and dvd drives on separate channels. another good thing to do is, if you can add another set of ide channels via a pci card, put the cd burner on one channel and the dvd burner on the other. thus you will have the hd's on on the first and second channels on the mb and the cd drives on the other channels on the edge card. this in theory will help in transfer speeds on all ide devices. just a thought.

[IJM]

Right, I've had a dig around the internet and this is what I've found:

1. Devices on the same IDE channel can only communicate one at a time. So they have to take turns to talk over the cable. So don't put your burner on the same channel as the HDD you're burning from. Also this makes data transfers faster between two devices on separate channels than between two devices on the same channel.

2. Most modern IDE controllers support independant transfer speeds for each device on the same cable. So, unless you're using an older motherboard (I don't know how old), your CD/DVD device should not slow down a HDD on the same channel.

One thing I am unsure about is mixing PIO and (U)DMA devices on the same channel. I have read that this isn't supposed to work, but that was from an older article and I don't know if modern gear can manage it.

This affects me because I've put my new UDMA-5 Capture Drive on the same channel as my DVR-104. I currently have WinXP set to operate the 104 in PIO mode because of the UDMA problems I've read about for this drive. I haven't tried any captures with this set up yet, so I suppose that a test is going to be in order to make sure that my system will operate both devices at the required level of performance.

I'll let you all know.

Ian.

[jnk76]

My old set-up had:

HD1 - primary master
HD2 - primary slave

A05 - secondary master
DVD ROM secondary slave

I would never rip and burn at same time so this was best configuration.
I also recommend a ROM drive because it should extend life of Burner.

I understand the concept of having two drives may prolong life but I never noticed any improvement. I think that most of the time the bottle neck was not writing and reading from HD but the computing in between.
If copying huge files in explorer......then maybe. I have never benchmarked it though.....would be interesting benchmark though.

New setup:

I got new kick @ss machine which is used for everything but burning.

The old machine now burns through local lan (crossover cable) at 2X speed with no problems.

I can even be running CPU intensive programs like CCE on new machine and it still goes full speed while the old machine is grabbing files from it.
Currently the new machine only has 1 ATA 100 80 GB drive but I am putting another 40 GB shortly. In future there will be two SATA drives in there probably running Raid 0.

I highly recommend having 2 machines because during burning before you can do nothing. I always burned on RW first as well so I always lost 1 hour min. That was my biggest bottleneck which is now totally eliminated.

[Psycho_Dad_Rules]

Hi,

This is the setup of my extra PC:

Promise Ultra ATA133 Pri. Master -> HD1
Promise Ultra ATA133 Sec. Master -> HD2
Onboard Ultra33 Controller Pri.Master -> DVD-Rom
Onboard Ultra33 Controller Sec.Master -> DVD-R(W)

This way i only have one device connected to each controller (Only masters) and they can't/won't bother eachother.

But this works even better for me (My Main System):

Promise Ultra ATA133 Pri. Master -> HD1
Promise Ultra ATA133 Sec. Master -> HD2
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI ID2 -> DVD-Rom
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI ID3 -> Plextor 40x
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI ID4 -> Yamaha CDR F1 44x
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI ID5 -> 6 Disc External CD Changer

Greetz,

pSyChO dAd

[paulgab]

Hi,

This might be a bit off topic but in a way related if you intend to build a new rig. Talking about IDE performance, for AMD based PC, you might want to consider a SiS 746FX based mobo. It has a very good performance on IDE and CPU intensive apps, e.g. video encoding, capturing and ripping. Way ahead than the KT400 and a bit better than the nForce2 in terms of IDE and CPU performance.

[txpharoah]

Some bad advice above. Partitioning is worse than a single drive. Always. It's still the same drive, but now you've added more to the headers of the disk. Capture to a drive that does NOT house your OS. That's all. And two drives on the SAME CABLE will also be slow. Put them on opposite IDE channels for peak transfer speeds. Data can only travel one way at a time on an IDE cable. It will pause to read, then pause to write. Continuous flow only happens on opposite channels (or OTHER channels if you have more than 2 in your system ala an expansion card or RAID). That's another reason to put your DVD-ROM opposite of your HD for fastest transfers of data. Don't believe me? Try to put both a CD-R and CD-ROM on the same cable and try to clone a disc. Then sit back and watch the buffers go haywire. This is simple computer physics.

[Will Hay]

My solution is to have... wait for it... THREE harddrives.

They are set up as follows:
Primary Master is my OS Drive.
Primary Slave is for my Data/Documents/Downloads.
Secondary Master is my DVD burner.
and Secondary Slave is my dedicated capture drive.

I have this, although my two drives, which I call storage and video, amazingly enough, :lol are on a RAID card (but not linked) as I have a dvd-rom and cdrw.
I find the three hard drive suggestion the best, but not if your OS hdd is large enough to store all your data of course.
Mine is 30gb (the others are 80gb and 120gb).
Will

[IJM]

I have this, although my two drives, which I call storage and video, amazingly enough, :lol are on a RAID card (but not linked) as I have a dvd-rom and cdrw.
I find the three hard drive suggestion the best, but not if your OS hdd is large enough to store all your data of course.
Mine is 30gb (the others are 80gb and 120gb).
Will

Ah yes. Great minds think alike... or at least in the same ballpark anyway.

If I could have bought a SCSI DVD-RW Burner, I would have put that alongside my CD-ROM. But alas, everything is IDE these days.

Fortunately, I tried a burn on a DVD-RW in UDMA mode last night, and it worked! Having read all the posts regarding using a Pioneer 104, with a VIA mobo, an AMD cpu, firmware version 1.30 and WinXP Pro SP1, I had pre-anticipated the problem, and I'd been using PIO mode.

However it seems to be working in UDMA mode... apparently against all the odds. (Just wait until I have to update the firmware for the 4x media protection, I bet that'll spoil the party).

Because it was sharing a channel with a device operating with PIO, I wasn't sure if my new capture drive was going to play ball in the UDMA-5 park. Hopefully, it looks like it's not an issue.

Ian.