A Question About DVD Authoring & Hard Drives

[Tom Saurus]

Currently I have two hard drives, and I will soon be getting a third. My questions have to deal with taking a file that is on the C Drive, which has Windows XP Pro on it and the E Drive which is my capture Guide. I am short on room and I have put mpgs on both drives. Now there seems to be a noticeable difference in how fast the task of DVD Authoring takes between the two drives. What I mean is how fast it makes the Video & Audio TS Folders which I then make ISO's Images of.

The E Drive which is really severely defragmented, and despite this it goes about the task of authoring faster. Stuff I have on the C Drive takes significantly longer, this in spite of it being defragged lately.

What caused this? I am planning on storing all the mpg's that need to be authorized on the third drive which I am getting soon. I figure that will be a better way of organizing things. It is going to be a 300 GB hard drive.

Thanks in advance for any information you can give me on this issue. I also started a thread in the "Computer Forumn" about capturing and the energy saving modes that is built into the computer, which are Standby and Hybernation. Sometimes a movie comes on late at night and I hate to think of the computer just running all night. Any advice about that issue is greatly appreciated as well.

[ROF]

The drive interface, rotational speed, and cache size all play an important part in the speed performance of your drives. Without knowing anything else i'm going to say the difference you are seeing between these drives is caused by one or all of the above being different amongst your current drives. When purchasing a new drive do not accept anything less than 8MB cache and 7200RPM. The larger cache and faster the RPM the better. If adding to a newer system board do not waste money on a PATA drive.

[redwudz]

Your boot drive may be taking time out to do OS processes in the background and that may be making it slower.

I use 4 drives, Boot, Edit, Archive and Backup ( For backup and extra program storage.) The Boot only holds the OS and the active programs. The Edit gets the most work. I process the files to the archive drive till I burn them. I defrag rarely, as the drives rarely need it.

I think when you stop using your boot drive for video storage/processing, the transfer speed should go back up.

You can test the transfer speeds of your drives with a program like SiSandra or similar. Here's a freeware version:

http://www.overclockersclub.com/downloadcenter/?action=file&id=56

[Krispy Kritter]

Most likely because when using the C drive, the drive is doing double duty. It is reading the data that you are working with, the cache file for the software doing the authoring is most likely on that drive, then the new file is being written to that drive.

[Tom Saurus]

ROF & redwudz: Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.

ROF: All my drives are SATA and I know for a fact that they are 7200rpm. I can't remember what the cache size is though.

redwudz: I was wondering if the drive that you call "Edit" is that your drive that you capture to? I have room for 4 hard drives in my computer. Now would I be better off to have a RAID configuration for the Main Drive with the OS System, and then an capture and storage drives?

Thanks once again to you both for answering my questions. It was kind of you to take the time to share your knowledge about this subject.

[Tom Saurus]

Krispy Kritter: Thanks for the information you provided; it was kind of you to take the time. It does make alot of sense, double duty for the C Drive would logicaly take more time to accomplish the tasks.