Lots of dropped frames when using RAID - Why?

[gadgetguy]

(Gadgetguy sounds familiar. You wouldn't be someone well-known, would you?)

Nope.

[Jester700]

BTW: Sustained transfer is better at the beginning of the drive (inside) so best to place capture partition there.

Good tip, but you got it backwards; on hard drives, the beginning (and fastest part) is the OUTSIDE, unlike CDs or DVDs.

[Malchiah]

A good IDE 7200rpm drive, regardless of location, as long as it is NOT the OS drive, is fine for MPEG, AVI, even DV transfer...

You're using "SUPER UNLEADED" gas for no reason.

I completely agree. It's just for some reason, my system drive is performing better than my "super unleaded" RAID.
My question is not whether or not RAID is necessary. But, it SHOULD perform AT LEAST as good as my system drive, don't you think?!

[Malchiah]

Well folks... I don't understand. The SATA drives are not performing well at all.

I'm actually transferring DV to my IDE system drive with better performance. And last night I transferred a 20 minute clip without a single dropped frame.

Haha, I've even transferred good DV while downloading stuff from Limewire in the background. I know that's not normally a good idea, but I just wanted to test my system.

[nic2k4]

Hey Malchiah,

I had the same problem with an Asus A7V133a RAID controller (Promise Fastrack 100). The solution was to go to the Promise site and get the setup utility. After installing it, I found a setting to enable the drive's cache, which was disabled by default (later, I found out why it was disabled - the hard way). Once it was enabled, I could capture full frame analog video to un-compressed AVI at 20Mb/s, no dropped frames. But, once your done capturing, you'd better disable it again. It seems the drives don't properly commit their cache at shut down, which corrupts the array and renders it non functionnal.

You could also try the RAID facilities built into XP. I played with that for a short time, but I can't remember how that turned out.

[nic2k4]

BTW: Sustained transfer is better at the beginning of the drive (inside) so best to place capture partition there.

Good tip, but you got it backwards; on hard drives, the beginning (and fastest part) is the OUTSIDE, unlike CDs or DVDs.

I actually prefer to keep the RAID as one full partition and use Norton speedisk to move all the data after a capture, to the end of the drive.

[proxyx99]

Well folks... I don't understand. The SATA drives are not performing well at all.

I'm actually transferring DV to my IDE system drive with better performance. And last night I transferred a 20 minute clip without a single dropped frame.

Haha, I've even transferred good DV while downloading stuff from Limewire in the background. I know that's not normally a good idea, but I just wanted to test my system.

Never seen a dropped frame from a DV thing. I use IDE exlusively (thank God they had better deals on IDE that time, otherwise I'd be cursing SATA today). Doesn't matter if I transfer to ATA 100 or 133. I often listen to music, surf the web while transferring. Last transfer was 1.5 hr with datavideo dac-100 from VCR with 0 dropped frames or sync issues. Just don't know why RAID? ATA is easily capable of DV transfer, why complicate things? As to SATA, I just wonder what is the main issue here, gotta surf some more I guess.

[chris1379]

I haven't tried DV transfer on my SATA drive yet but I had problems with lines through the video on analog capture. I have an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo. I think the Capture card and HD controller were fighting for the PCI bus. I had no problems with any of my IDE drives so I just bought a 120GB Seagate. So far so good.

[Malchiah]

Well, just as a follow-up, I noticed something strange.

First, when transferring DV into the computer onto the RAID, the dropped frames appear to coincide with brief moments when the hard drive light stops. To me this says that either the drives are not keeping up (which I doubt) or there is some conflict with something else in the computer, or the RAID controller onboard the Asus mobo is not very good.

Now, since I've been using my system drive for the transfers, I've moved most everything else (files, mp3's, etc) to the RAID drive. And since then I've noticed that even a simple mp3 has difficulty playing from the RAID. It's slow to start, and sort of stutters when I try to skip to various places in the songs.

Soooo... clearly something is wrong. I have ordered a new SATA controller card from newegg. I'll eliminate the RAID and use the drives as two separate units. (For whatever reason, my motherboard only supports SATA when used in RAID.)

[SoundFX]

I've helped a friend install a Promise SATA controller for his WD 10,000 RPM Raptor. It wasn't much faster than my 7,200 RPM ATA-133 200GB Hitachi. His scored 61MB/s, mine 55MB/s which is more than fast enough for me.

But my Raid 0 scores over *200*Mb/s ... I'm using a RocketRaid 8ch SATA controller with 4 7200 SATA drives. I could get that up to 400 MB/s if I went to an eight drive array, but can't get them all in the case. I've changed both my P4 and my G5 over to this setup and have been EXTREMELY happy with the performance. Playing multiple layers directly off the timeline without rendering is fantastic...

[edDV]

I've helped a friend install a Promise SATA controller for his WD 10,000 RPM Raptor. It wasn't much faster than my 7,200 RPM ATA-133 200GB Hitachi. His scored 61MB/s, mine 55MB/s which is more than fast enough for me.

But my Raid 0 scores over *200*Mb/s ... I'm using a RocketRaid 8ch SATA controller with 4 7200 SATA drives. I could get that up to 400 MB/s if I went to an eight drive array, but can't get them all in the case. I've changed both my P4 and my G5 over to this setup and have been EXTREMELY happy with the performance. Playing multiple layers directly off the timeline without rendering is fantastic...

200 Mb/s = 25 MB/s but lets assume you meant megabyte.
As I said above single stream DV editing doesn't require more than a single ATA-100 drive. There is only a need for fast synchronized transfer when multistream realtime cards are used.

For most, the $100 (4channel) to $200 (8channel) RAIDcard + HDD costs would be better spent on a CPU horsepower upgrade. Stepping up into realtime card environments currently doubles the total system cost.

[SoundFX]

Sorry, did mean MB. Yes, it's very fast!! I'm not using any special realtime cards in my Vegas system, but I'm getting very near realtime performance. The money I spent on raid card and drives was comparable to the cost of moving from my current 3.0 ghz chip to a 3.6 and a faster MB (about $450). However, at least for my workflow (print back to DV) I feel I got superior bang for the buck. I always felt like the disk I/O was a bigger bottleneck. The G5 is even better, I just tried a six layer of DV test and it plays without rendering. I'll have to try some MPEG2 renders and see how it does. Very happy in any case. Happy editing...