To RAID or not to RAID. That is the question.

[rennervision]

Hello everyone. To make a long story short, I've finally reached the point where I am about ready to transfer over 70 laserdiscs and countless VHS to DVD. I'll freely admit I'm a complete noob, but I've done quite a bit of research into the notion of using a laptop to accomplish this. I have, however, run into a confusing quandary and could use some expert advice.

My problem is this. I'm aware of the benefits of using two drives in a RAID 0 configuration for video capture. I was just about sold on the idea when I discovered you should not capture video on the same drive(s) used by your operating system. Since I am unaware of a laptop with three drives, I therefore do not see how I can have two drives in RAID 0 to capture and a third drive to boot up.

So I've been searching for alternatives, and wonder what everyone thinks (or if you might have something better to offer)...

1. I get a laptop with two drives, but not set up with RAID. My first drive is my boot drive. My second drive is a 7200 rpm drive to capture video. If I do this, should I also look into getting a capture drive that uses a SATA connection? Hopefully, this isn't necessary, as the new SATA drives are hard to get right now (if at all). Should I try to compensate with a faster CPU and more RAM? (If so - how much more?) And also, should the boot drive be a 7200 rpm SATA as well? (I'm not sure if that matters, or if I can get by with a slower 5400 rpm boot drive.)

2. I get a laptop with just one drive and use it as my boot drive. I then attach a Firewire 800 external drive (7200 rpm) for video capture. (Again, is SATA necessary? And will this option actually increase my chances of dropped frames as opposed to option #1?)

3. I get a laptop with just one drive and use it as my boot drive. I then attach a Firewire 800 dual external drive which contains two 7200 rpm SATA drives configured in RAID 0. (I sure hope everyone tells me this will be unnecessary overkill, because this is going to be a VERY expensive option!)

Thanks in advance for everyone's input.

[redwudz]

What program and video card are you capturing with? This makes a big difference, also the rate and resolution and the codec used for capturing.

If you are capping to AVI at DVD resolution, a fast drive, CPU and memory are generally necessary. If you use a DV device and transfer via Firewire, most any drive setup, CPU and memory will do.

I wouldn't bother with RAID unless you really have to. With RAID 0 if one drive dies, you lose all your data. It is faster, but do you really need faster? If you are talking an external RAID, then the speed would be limited by your interface to it. A fast drive won't help then. Maybe Firewire 800 or an external SATA drive would be quick enough.

If you really want to do this with a laptop, I would suggest an external Firewire hard drive. I use a ADVC-100 to transfer DV from a VCR via a PCMCIA Firewire card to my laptop occasionally. Works fine. I have a external Firewire hard drive for extra storage.

If you don't need editing, a DVD recorder would be easier and probably cheaper. Or forget the laptop and use a full size computer and you wouldn't need any external drives.

[rennervision]

I have gone back and forth on just getting either a DVD recorder or a new desktop, but I would really like an excuse to buy a laptop. The portability combined with my desire to play Doom III on a better video card would be an added benefit.

[redwudz]

I only have a laptop because I have to. I need the portability. The problem with laptops is they are rarely upgradeable. And to get one with big enough drives and fast enough for video processing is gonna cost you.

Not trying to discourage you, (too much ) but for the price of a laptop to do what you want, along with all the external drives and capture devices, you can probably build a good upgradeable PC and buy a DVD recorder.

For laptops, though, look around a lot. Some of the more obscure laptop companies may make a machine with everything you want. A external SATA jack would be really nice. But check what's out there.

[rallynavvie]

I'd recommend oh-so-much that you don't pruchase a laptop for doing this. You're going to get so much more performance for your money with a desktop. Be absolutely certain you need a laptop before taking that route, several of my friends thought they needed the portability of a laptop but the novelty wore off after a few months and now they're using them as desktops and rarely move them from home.

If you do get a laptop get the best one you can buy, and preferrably one with FireWire onboard so you can use a good external capture board like the Canopus ADVC-50. If you can get two hard drives in your laptop make both 7200rpm and capture to the second drive. Then use a software encoder to transcode to MPEG2 to a FireWire drive, then back to your secondary drive in preparation for burn to DVD. I'd even recommend using a FireWire DVD burner for this.

However if you go with the desktop you can build up a really great system that will allow you a lot more flexibility with components. Either way you go forget RAID 0, it's not needed for capture from a single source and it's really overrated for what it is. The only advantages to RAID come from using it on a grander scale (like nested arrays). Also the video card you use has absolutely no effect on video capture and encoding, that all depends on your capture device and your software encoder. For that I'd recommend the Canopus ADVC-50 for capturing to DV from an analog source (the ADVC-100 adds better digital-to-analog output but it doesn't sound like you need that) and use a good encoder like TMPGEnc to convert to MPEG2. Your choice on what you use to put the DVD together. I have the Adobe video suite but still use TMPGEnc for most of my MPEG encoding.

[rennervision]

Thanks, rallynavvie. I think there are pros and cons for whichever route I take (desktop, laptop, or DVD recorder). I've given each one serious consideration, and a new desktop is not out of the question. The only problem is I wanted to hold off on building a new desktop until Windows Vista and the new Direct X 10 video cards came out. I've also not decided whether I want a new desktop that supports SLI. But that's another issue.

As for capturing video, I asked in another thread about using the laptop's onboard S-video input. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this input is used for, as I've been told there's no such thing. (But I've seen a number of high profile media and gaming notebooks with an S-video input.) At any rate, would this input be a poor choice for video capture, and do you think I should stick with using the Canopus ADVC-50 instead?

[rallynavvie]

They may have an S-vid out so that you can display your monitor to a TV instead, I haven't seen many at all with analog video inputs like that.

[SaSi]

I think that using a laptop is not out of the question. However, you need to gear yourself accordingly.

1. Since you cannot have many large disks in the laptop, you need to get the Hard disk as external. Get a USB2IDE external box and use a normal 3.5" disk @200~400Gb for storing the captures.

2. Use an external, USB2 capture device. Two main routes here: either a Hauppage or similar USB TV/Capture device that contains an MPEG2 hardware encoder or a Canopus capture device that captures to DV (I think).

The external capture devices with h/w encoders offer the benefit that there is no strain on the PC CPU during encoding and in general are more reliable.

Regarding the RAID-0 benefits, they offer fast read and slightly slower write. If you are capturing with s/w encoding, then RAID-0 won't offer you much. When editing, I have found out that the benefits of using two separate spindles (one for read and separate for write) is extremely beneficial.

Regarding safety of data, what I do is keep generations of capture data on separate spindles (I have 10) until the video is safely on a DVD. You could capture to an external HD, use a second HD to store the editited/trimmed video and another disk to store the final encoded video and to the authoring there.

Apart from hardware failures, this can also save you time in case the encoding fails at some time, you don't realize that the video is corrupted and you have to re-capture and start from the beginning.

Since most descent laptops come with 3~4 USB ports and also offer at least 1 FW port, using external devices is pretty easy and you keep your laptop small and portable.

[rennervision]

So SaSi - you would go with a USB2 external drive rather than Firewire-b (800)? I was concerned about dropping frames if I didn't at least use Firewire-a (400), but, of course, without any real experience in any of this I'm just giving you my best guess.

[studtrooper]

Well, think about it for a sec. USB 2.0 maximum throughput is around, what, 480mbps (60MBps)? Firewire 400 is exactly that, 400mbps (50MBps). Of course we can deduce from there that Firewire B is approx. 2x faster than that. Normal non-RAIDed 7200RPM HDDs CANNOT sustain trasfer rates averaging around 50MBps or more. If your capturing RAW video at even half your HDD's max rated speed, you'll be out of space in an hour or two (depending on how big your capture drive is)

[rallynavvie]

The biggest reason for 1394b is that you can sustain greater bandwidth between several devices on the bus, not so much for a single device. It's better used for multiple-drive enclosures and such where it used to be only SCSI had the ability to do such things (cable length limitations and all).

[ofbarea]

I do prefer firewire external disk/DVD cases to USB2, because CPU utilization is higher when using USB. Also 1394a cases are faster than USB2 because of the overhead intrinsic to the USB2 protocol.

[rennervision]

Thanks everyone.

At this point I'm leaning towards my first option. I'll be getting a laptop with two internal 7200 rpm hard drives (one for the OS and one for video capture). SATA drives will be nice, but unless I can actually find a laptop that carries them, I'll probably just stick with IDE. I can then use external drives to regularly backup the internal ones. I'll also get a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB of RAM, and Windows XP Media Center 2005 to go along with it.

If anyone thinks this is a bad idea, I'm open to hearing any objections. Now I just need to find a decent firewire capture card for video, and one that is bit accurate for audio.

[redwudz]

For capture, I'd vote for a Canopus ADVC-110. Locked audio sync, and you can use it on about any computer or OS that has a Firewire input. You will have to encode the DV to MPEG-2 for DVD authoring, but editing is easy with DV and you can frameserve the edits or filtering to the encoder directly to save drive space.

I use VirtualDub for simple edits and filtering, then frameserve that to TMPGEnc Plus. You have much more control of the quality this way. But there are many more editors and encoders out there also.