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  1. Member pyrate83's Avatar
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    I am a little confused on what kind of HDD I should buy. Prolly won't do it for a couple months or so but I like to monitor the Sunday ads. I just see all different types(not brands) for connections and I don't know what I need to get for my system. Can anyone help?

    Thanks.
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  2. IDE for relative cheapness, SCSI for being fast (but expensive).

    At least:

    7200rpm
    and ~80Gbs

    SCSIs sometimes come with smaller sizes due to how much they cost.
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    I don't think SCSI is smaller in size due to price. I think they run about 36 gig max because if they went to 120, 160, BIG, they would lose their advantage over IDE.

    As is, last I read, platters were at least 11 Gb per square inch. You make aring around the platter 1/3 of an inch wide, seek times are cut to nil. Make it as wide as would be on 160, seek times skyrocket. (OK, 6ms to <9ms, but you see what I mean.)

    ATA 133, and SATA 150 have close to the throughput of a UltraWide SCSI, and whatever the 320 SCSI is. (Ultra Wide Ultra Fast?)

    SCSI's main remaining advantage is still daisy chaining, and having its own controller.

    Pricewise, they're out of our league.

    Any brand's ATA 133, 7200 RPM, 8 meg cache will do all you want. Maybe 2 ms, that's thousandths of a second, slowest to fastest.

    No capture card is going to need any more throughput than any of these can handle.

    Cheers,

    George
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  4. Member holistic's Avatar
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    My question every time someone asks a harddrive question is : what is the intended purpose

    If all you plan on doing is backing up your blockbuster DVD collection then 15Gb per DVD is reasonable - 9 for the original 4.4 for copy (single disk). In this situation capacity is the only issue and todays ATA133 IDE drives are so fast you won't see a difference between 5400/7200.

    If you are planing on doing DV transfers, then the above also specs apply.

    For analog (low compression) captures you will be needing, first a HUGE drive 120Gb plus and one that will do sustained writes in excess of 20MB/second.
    Until recently only SCSI or RAID array IDE were capable of these write speeds but todays batch of drives can manage it.
    In fact (read article below) Maxtor's 80Gb Diamond Max can do 29Mb/sec - impressive AND IT IS A 5400 spin
    Not ment as a slap in the face [g_shocker182/gmatov] but the idea of YOU MUST have a 7200 is absolute crap.
    For random access I could see it being an advantage (over an equivalent capacity drive) but for a constant stream of writing I cannot.

    ][

    From a discussion some ago
    https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=155878&highlight=

    Go here : http://maxtor.com/en/solutions/soho/per ... /index.htm
    and read the pdf file (bottom of article)
    There is another more important spec than speed , that being aureal density.
    http://hardware.earthweb.com/chips/print.php/1581411
    Quote:
    aureal density,or basically the amount of data that can be crammed onto each platter. The current high-end specification is 80GB per platter, which allows greater capacity with fewer physical platters per drive and can increase transfer rates while lowering real-world disk accesses.

    Although 'seek' and 'latency' times are important (and where slower spinning drives lose to their faster spinning cousins), it is the SUSTAINED writes that are the most important to video capturing. The current 100+ Gb drives have such a high aureal density, that it is a non issue these days for DV (3.7 M/b sec) AND they put in a good effort writing uncompressed NTSC video (~27Mb/sec.) Below is a link to a test of a Maxtor 5200 80Gb drive .

    http://www.barefeats.com/hard15.htm <-- Maxtor 80G 5200 test
    http://www.barefeats.com/hard25.html <--- more info
    http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/6076.htm <-- How I know the data rate of uncompressed NTSC !
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    Holistic,

    No slap. Only reason I even mention 7200s is they seem to be taking over. Seagate's whole consumer line, I think, is 5400. Other than that, Max and WD seem to be phasing out 5400s. As though they're using up their stock of those components.

    The price advantage, too, is not great, what, 10 bucks less for 5400?
    A 5400 also should run cooler, as they're 25 % slower, less frictional heat, that should help the life of the drive, and ease cooling of the entire system.

    And I've argued they're plenty fast enough for this work before, but if you reread the link you referred, you can see you're shoveling s**t against the tide if you think you're going to change many folks opinions.

    A magazine article said the newest drives are best, the ads say the same, someone read the article/ads, propounded that as gospel, and now there's a following of the converted. That is now the only drive to have. Period!!!

    For the record, give me a deal on a 5400, and I'll buy it. Give me a deal on a 7200, I'll buy that. Though what the hell I need any more for, I don't know. I've got near 750 gig between my 2 remaining machines, and all that means is I don't delete nearly enough trash files.

    Cheers,

    George
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  6. Member pyrate83's Avatar
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    I'm a big gamer so I want a faster and larger HDD than the 80 gig I have now. I also plan on moving my videos and possibly all of my music to that HDD. Then I would primarily use the 80 gig for just the OS. I have one empty bay right now and the manufacturer of my 'puter made the cable very easy to access to hook up the 2nd HDD. I guess IDE would probably be the way for me to go then right?
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  7. contrarian rallynavvie's Avatar
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    Faster rotational drives are also going to improve your video editing performance, for example when you're trying to jump to certain points in a huge video file in Premiere or something. I've never really seen wether faster access times improve games, but I can only assume it can since there are usually so many different files that games use during play. If you're going to run a game server than faster rotation is better. Another thing to consider is fragmentation. Sure a 5400 drive is fine for capture and encoding to/from, but if the file being accessed is fragmented to crap than the extra rotational speed (and lesser access times) are going to help you out a bit. But I'm assuming most of us defrag our drives regularly.

    I wouldn't leave that 80GB just for the OS. You should be able to put all your program files on that drive as well. This also makes things easier should you decide to make a backup of your boot drive. Use the second drive for storage of DVD images, works in progress, and for captures. You'll fill and 80GB quick with that.

    SATA is approaching Ultra160 SCSI in throughput and performance. I don't think its access times are as fast as the 15k rpm SCSI disks. Ultra320 (aka UltraExpensive) is pretty far out there for performance, but then so is the price. I think I heard that you need PCI-X in order to take full advantage of the U320 drives as well. Chaining drives is nice, but 15k rpm drives run HOT. If you really want to go nuts for performance build a U320 SCSI RAID system. I'm sure those become obscenely quick

    I picked up an Adaptec card that supports U320 and then got some refurbished U160 and U320 drives on eBay (you'll find a lot of server pulls there). My goal was to have faster drives to use for scratch disks and for game servers. My experiment worked well at the last LAN party I went to; I was able to run a BF1942 server as well as play on my own server from the same machine with no latency or performance issues, and there were 22 people playing at this party on my server so the load was pretty high. I also run Freelancer from that drive. Load times for maps and such are a bit quicker, but nothing to write home about.
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  8. Member SLICK RICK's Avatar
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    pyrate83,

    I just put 2 of these in my new system. Pretty good price and you dont have to mail in any rebates.

    http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?description=22-144-129

    SLICK RICK
    Originally Posted by lordsmurf
    Nobody likes a bunch of yackity-yack.
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  9. Member pyrate83's Avatar
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    That's not a bad price for a 200gig Slick 8)

    I also see you are trying to get more members to participate in the "who has the coolest looking computer" thread...nice.
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