can't capture to new IDE stripe

[hardhatmac]

I just intalled a new Promise brand IDE 133 RAID card and hooked up two Maxtor 300 GB HD's to it and striped them....everything works well untill I try to capture via firewire to the new stripe. I can capture fine to a regular single IDE drive but NOT to the striped ones.

I've tried using vegas video and VT3 but it allways reports droppped frames and what ever video is able to be recorded looks like garbage....

VT3 says the average read/write speed to this stripe drive is 81 Mb/s and the single IDE is rated at 30 Mb/s....why would a faster drive drop frames and a clearly slower drive capture just fine?

any ideas as to why this drive cannot be captured to??

thanks!

[edDV]

I've got a Promise Fastrack 100 RAID card and it has worked fine in either RAID zero or as a normal IDE controller. I used this in an old PIII machine to speed ATA 66 drives for MJPEG (Pinnacle DC-30plus) and DV capture with no problems out to 9MB/s.

Thoughput measurement on those drives got over 40MB/s (320 Mb/s).

Newer ATA-100/133 drives are able to handle the MJPEG rates without RAID so I now only use the card as an EIDE port expander. There is no longer a need for RAID zero.

Regardless this card has worked in various PIII and P4 machines without problem. The Fastrack RAID is set in firmware before Windows boots. It operates at the bios level and is seen equally by Linux, DOS or Windows as a single drive. There is no way it should be seen differently by one application under windows.

PS: are you trying to capture uncompressed without using huffyuv? Even that old PIII machine managed huffyuv at ~30 MB/s.

[hardhatmac]

hmmm...my computer knowlegde is somewhat limited so I might not understand alot of the numbers....

let me list my configuration:

dual 2.4 Xeon proccessors
1 GB ram
5x SCSI stripe (200 total GB) @ 126 Mb/s
2x IDE stripe (600 Total GB) using the promise card @ 81Mb/s
1 IDE = 250GB connected straight to motherboard @ 30 Mb/s
1 IDE = 200 GB connected straight to motherboard @ 29 Mb/s
1 IDE = 40 GB connected straight to motherboard

I'm trying to caputre SD video to an AVI through firewire

I can capture just fine to all the drives EXCEPT the one listed in red

I don't know what huffyuv is....so I doubt I'm using it...

[edDV]

hmmm...my computer knowlegde is somewhat limited so I might not understand alot of the numbers....

let me list my configuration:

dual 2.4 Xeon proccessors
1 GB ram
5x SCSI stripe (200 total GB) @ 126 Mb/s
2x IDE stripe (600 Total GB) using the promise card @ 81Mb/s
1 IDE = 250GB connected straight to motherboard @ 30 Mb/s
1 IDE = 200 GB connected straight to motherboard @ 29 Mb/s
1 IDE = 40 GB connected straight to motherboard

I'm trying to caputre SD video to an AVI through firewire

I can capture just fine to all the drives EXCEPT the one listed in red

I don't know what huffyuv is....so I doubt I'm using it...

First bits and bytes

1MB = 8Mb

The following are sustained data rates.

An EIDE ATA 100 7200RPM drive should score 30-55MB/s (varies inner to outer platter)
A SATA Raptor 10K RPM drive will score 50-90MB/s
Modern SCSI drives might reach into >100MB/s

A DV or HDV firewire stream is only 25-35 Mb/s (3-4MB/s).

Any of your drives should handle a firewire transfer with ease.

Uncompressed SMPTE 259M (SDI) ranges 270-360 Mb/s (~35-45MB/s) sustained. A RAID is normally required at these sustained rates to normalize inner to outer platter variablity and provide safety margin on the combined bitrate.

If you aren't capturing uncompressed, there just isn't a need for a RAID with modern drives, even slow notebook drives.

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_3.html

Your problems with the Promise card are abnormal and may be an issue at the motherboard bios level. I suggest you find a different solution.

Huffyuv is a lossless realtime codec that allows ~2-2.5x compression on uncompressed captures. It is usually used for raw framebuffer captures not with serial digital input.

[hardhatmac]

I'll look into another solution and also do some more tests to see if I can narrow down the problem more...

the only reason I did a RIAD of the two IDE's is because I got so sick of having to split things between a mess of 250/300 GB drives...and faster is allways better....

I'll get back to you on what I find out...

thanks for the help so far...

[edDV]

I'll look into another solution and also do some more tests to see if I can narrow down the problem more...

the only reason I did a RIAD of the two IDE's is because I got so sick of having to split things between a mess of 250/300 GB drives...and faster is allways better....

I'll get back to you on what I find out...

thanks for the help so far...

The downside of RAID zero is if you loose one drive, you loose the data on both.

[Scorpion King]

Try moving the Promise card to a different slot. Some motherboard manuals show which slots share resources. You may find a better location.