IDE vs SATA Hard Drive for Capturing To?

[Colindale]

I think your problems with SATA drives are due to some crappy cables, mine floped around in the back of the drive, I had lockups and corrupted data mainly on bootup, when the computer was cold.
And, they are faster!. I had an increase from 850 meg a minute to 1087 meg a minute when backing up my data with Drive Image on the second SATA drive.

[Ward River]

I hate to break the news to you folks, but there is not a CPU on the market that's fast enough to take advantage of the speed increase of a SATA drive over an IDE drive. There is not a CPU on the market that encodes video fast enough to be slowed down by even an old 5400 drive. Now, you folks can jerk yourselves off till you're raw trying to convince yourselves otherwise if you like, but it's not going to change the fact that your encodes do not go any faster because of a SATA drive.

Regards,

[edDV]

Where there is smoke, there may be a design flaw. Either the mobo SATA drivers or Windows Direct X is causing these reports of dropped frames using SATA.

Current HDD hardware drive technology is inside the performance envelope for EIDE or SATA for sustained transfer. Maybe 10K RPM Raptors are touching the envelope but the differences are small.

I can't think of a single channel video transfer that needs more sustained transfer speed than a current consumer 7200 RPM EIDE drive can deliver. If you are talking realtime video processing hardware that needs 4 to 6 synchronized DV or SDI streams, then you are in RAID territory.

What are you guys doing that requires > EIDE single drive ATA100 sustained speeds (~45-55MB/s)?

[rhegedus]

BUY SATA !!!!! IDE is dead, why whould you go down and not up ????

:P

Your SATA drive does the same job for video that an IDE does and it doesn't do it any better but it costs a lot more money. So you know how to spend your money stupidly on stuff you don't actually need. Bully for you. Are we supposed to be impressed or something?

Agreed.

I've been capturing DV for years to IDE drives without dropped frames if you set it up properly. No when you drop zero frames from a 3 hour capture, how can you better that?

I hate to break the news to you folks, but there is not a CPU on the market that's fast enough to take advantage of the speed increase of a SATA drive over an IDE drive. There is not a CPU on the market that encodes video fast enough to be slowed down by even an old 5400 drive. Now, you folks can jerk yourselves off till you're raw trying to convince yourselves otherwise if you like, but it's not going to change the fact that your encodes do not go any faster because of a SATA drive.

Tell it like it is

People are falling over themselves to get the latest, biggest, fastest gizmo. For what? Despie any pretentions we may have to being sooper dooper video editing/encoding masters, truth is, spending hundreds of $ for the lates gadget that shaves a few minutes off out of a few hours just isn't worth it.

[Sillyname]

The only benefit I see of SATA over IDE is that there are less wires to go bad on the cable and they're thicker. This alone is worth going with SATA. Not any false claims of speed increase.

[Cobra]

I am running a single SATA drive on my RAID controller. You just set it to IDE mode.

Please remember the original question:

Which of the two types of hard drives is the better of the two to capture video to? I hope IDE Drives are adequate, I have already sent my money to pay for it.

I think essentially it has been answered - video capture will fail to saturate an ATA133 interface so it will be fine. SATA will work just as well but offers no advantage, but can be slightly difficult to set up.

[Gurm]

Ok, to all those poo-pooing SATA running faster, I offer you this:

THE IDE BUS SATURATES VERY QUICKLY.

Is a single SATA drive of equivalent specifications faster than a single IDE drive of the same specifications? Assuming that the IDE drive is the ONLY device on the bus, no.

Now, add a SECOND IDE drive to the bus, and neither one of them ever really gets even HALF of the bandwidth. The bandwidth contention is so severe on IDE that it quickly renders each drive MUCH slower than 50% of the theoretical maximum.

Hence, the single Seagate that I have running off the secondary channel of my nForce2's onboard controller runs very nearly as fast as the Seagate and Samsung SATA drives on my SATA controller.

BUT were I to add another SATA drive to that chain, it would no longer do so.

Someone else said that the smaller cables make it worth it - I say that the different INTERFACE makes it worth it. Just like SCSI drives have for years been the same as IDE drives just with a different I/O board on them... but have CLEARLY been better.

[rhegedus]

And this effects capturing how?

[gadgetguy]

I am running a single SATA drive on my RAID controller. You just set it to IDE mode.

On my MB that is not an option. I have installed the latest and last BIOS upgrade for my MB and there is no option for setting IDE mode. The capabilities may exist within the Promise controller, but there is no interface to enable it. In my BIOS the only options are to Enable/Disable SATA and make it boot 1st or not. When the drive is installed and you enter the FastBuild utility, the only options are defining a Mirrored or Striped array. I cannot select an IDE mode that would allow the system to see the drives as seperate devices. I have no problem accepting that this is a limitation of my motherboard and that your system doesn't have that limitation.

I appreciate the comments attempting to help fix my "problem", but I've reached the point of diminishing returns, and I'm not going to spend any more of my time troubleshooting what, for me, is a non-issue. I can capture with 0 dropped frames, I can process my video without problems, and my SATA drive works just fine for storing my files. The fact that I can't use a particular hardware combination for a specific task is not that important.

I have not condemned SATA as an evil entity, nor have I criticized anyone who has had a different experience than I have. I have only related my experience so that others won't be surprised if they run into the same difficulties that I did. I thought sharing our experiences is why we are here, and what Tom asked for.

[pfh]

some bios have "hidden" extra settings that's available by tapping certain keys- just a thought.

[Tidy]

SATA has a faster theoretical maximum transfer rate. In reality the transfer rates are just about exactly the same. In fact I se a RAID 0 parallel ATA setup for all of my video that blows SATA out of the water. I would ignore the cussing blowhard that sputed how great SATA was earlier. It is just more expensive and offers very little if any bang for the buck over PATA.

[waheed]

I hate it when people say SATA is more expensive. this is not true. An exmaple from my local PC Store:

Seagate Barracuda 200GB IDE £71.66
Seagate Barracuad 200GB SATA £71.66

Prices between SATA and IDE are similar.

[SCDVD]

Sorry to interrupt this recreational equivocation but this type of problem is often a system issue. Background tasks that are running in Windows can steal chunks of time that in turn interrupt other operations such as data transfer. To check what other applications are running, do a CTR, ALT, DEL and look at the tasks that are running. If you see anything strange, dig into it to find out what it is. If you do a Google search on any of the ambiguous names shown you may learn more. It is also good to frequently do spyware scans with products such as Ad Aware or Spybot Search and Destroy. These programs will find and eliminate many lurking gremlins that also chew up system resources. Another way to get an idea if you have lurking tasks running is to listen to your hard disc when you system is idle (or supposed to be). If your disc drive is busy, this is an indication that tasks are running that you don't know about.

If you have an adequate system with good cables and proper setting including DMA, either SATA or IDE will do the job just fine. You will get a lot of "My daddy drove Fords, so Fords are better" on this site. Just chalk it up for what it is. If you take a systematic approach to cleaning up your system, you will find the problem and then either SATA or IDE will do the job just fine.

[Tidy]

I hate it when people say SATA is more expensive. this is not true. An exmaple from my local PC Store:

Seagate Barracuda 200GB IDE £71.66
Seagate Barracuad 200GB SATA £71.66

Prices between SATA and IDE are similar.

Not all of us live in the UK and here in the states in a lot of places SATA is indeed more expensive.

[waheed]

My mistake.

[dfgh11]

I recently bought an SATA drive and started using it with my board controller. It worked fine for a week and then kept becoming corrupt. So after testing the drive with WD diag tool, it seemed fine. I bought an adaptec controller card. For about a week now, there have been no problems with corruption - so far. However, I cannot capture on it without dropping about 10 frames a second, which also happened on when using it without this controller card. Now it can't be the system, as I have 4 other ata drives that cature without any drops. I've tried numerous amounts capture software,but the same problem occurs on all. I just don't know what the problem is. I would say perhaps it's the drive, but it's only about 3 weeks old and it's not showing any errors when I run a diagnostic.

UPDATE

Ok. I switched the PCI slots around and found a configuration, that stopped it dropping frames. So I guess, anyonehaving trouble with frame drops on sata via a controller card, should try something similar. Took me about an hour and a half, but it was worth it.