SCSI vs ATA for capturing?

[crokett]

I got a new machine that has an ATA 100 U-DMA drive. I also have a 7200 RPM U/W SCSI drive. If I want a dedicated drive for capture, which drive should I be using? System is a Windows XP box w/P4 2.4Ghz/768MB RAM so is drive speed even a factor?

thx

[SingSing]

Run the HD performance test with Sandra lite 2007, and decide yourself. Go :
http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?dir=dload&location=sware_dl_3264&langx=en&a=

[normcar]

Are you capturing in H? If not, then the ATA Harddrive will be enought. Save your money, and buy more storage. Storage will get eaten up quickly when capturing video.

[Nelson37]

If you are capping MPG, it should not matter. If AVI, it might.

The speed tests from most softwares are virtually worthless. You are not evaluating a sprinter, but a marathon runner. SUSTAINED throughput is not evaluated in a 30-second test.
A fraction of a second of less-than-maximum performance means multiple dropped frames.

The problem for AVI capture may well be the capacity of the drive. You can easily hit over 1GB per minute, though Huffy will yield about 2-3 minutes per GB. A 30GB drive would not handle a 2-hour movie. You could add another drive and go RAID, but most RAID are optimized for Reading, not writing. Considering the expense, probably just not worth it. I have 5 or 6 9GB SCSI drives and a memory-equipped controller laying around, just not worth the hassle to hook them up.

I do real-time MPG anyway, haven't dropped a frame in years.

[Scorpion King]

You should not capture to the same drive your operating system (Windows) is on.

I always turn off system restore on my capture drives

I always turn off Recycle Bin on my capture drives

I would imagine that either drive is fast enough. I would try the largest one.

Good luck.

[edDV]

U/W SCSI 2 or 3 will be a very old drive (~8-10 years). I wouldn't use that for the OS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI

Both will be fast enough for anything other than uncompressed. New drives are cheap and faster. I wouldn't bother with SCSI.

I still have an Adaptec 2940 U/W controller and a box of drives from the "old" days of SCSI and Premiere 4.1

[discguy001]

have you considered the WD Raptor drives? 10,000rpm SATA, I use a 36GB model as my system drive and a ATA raid array for captures. I think they make Raptors in 150GB models now...

[edDV]

have you considered the WD Raptor drives? 10,000rpm SATA, I use a 36GB model as my system drive and a ATA raid array for captures. I think they make Raptors in 150GB models now...

Those are too expensive and too small when cheap 7200 RPM drives do the job equally well.

[jagabo]

Two 150 GB WD Raptors, $450.
One 300 GB WD Caviar, $70.

[lordsmurf]

SCSI is overkill for a workstation, video or not.

[harley2ride]

I agree with lordsmurf, unless of course you build a pc just for storage and transfer of data, and then scsi might be of some benefit when transferring avi and mpeg files from one pc to another. I know that on my two video editing pc's, my hd space was getting slim, so I first did compressed backups to an external hd, then transferred all my video files/projects to another pc that has lots of hd space, but a small processor (athlon 600 area) pc... Having a faster hd or scsi might be beneficial in that respect. It took me hours with my sata to ata7200 drive to make the transfers. If I did this on a regular basis, scsi would definatly be of benefit.

[Scorpion King]

[edit quote]
[edit url]

Like I said above, I would imagine that either drive is fast enough. I would try the largest one.

Good luck.

[jagabo]

Ultra-Wide SCSI, known as UW-SCSI, offers a maximum data transmission rate of 40 Mbps, better multitasking performance and more drive connections than Ultra EIDE. Most UW-SCSI drives run at 7,200 or 10,000 rpm and have internal buffers of between 512K and 1M. UW-SCSI offers the best price-performance ratio.

http://www.gcn.com/print/18_5/34627-1.html

Like I said above, I would imagine that either drive is fast enough. I would try the largest one.

Good luck.

Dated 1999

[Scorpion King]

Dated 1999

Every search I ran on UW SCSI said 40MBps but I see the one I quotes said only 40Mbps. UW SCSI is 40MBps.

If he actually gets the 40MBps the drive should be fast enough for normal video capture. It might be pushing uncompressed avi though. By the calculator that 40MBps would yield 2.4GB per minute. Uncompressed 720x480 with 16bit audio is about 1.25GB per minute. Might be ok.... but I'd bet it would drop frames, I don't know.

And that "Dated 1999"... I can't find any new stuff on U/W SCSI. Maybe that was the new stuff.

Later

[edDV]

Dated 1999

Every search I ran on UW SCSI said 40MBps but I see the one I quotes said only 40Mbps. UW SCSI is 40MBps.

If he actually gets the 40MBps the drive should be fast enough for normal video capture. It might be pushing uncompressed avi though. By the calculator that 40MBps would yield 2.4GB per minute. Uncompressed 720x480 with 16bit audio is about 1.25GB per minute. Might be ok.... but I'd bet it would drop frames, I don't know.

And that "Dated 1999"... I can't find any new stuff on U/W SCSI. Maybe that was the new stuff.

Later

A new ATA-100 or better will be faster than SCSI-3 but my point was you don't want to trust your main OS data to a 7 year old drive. If these were acquired used, you can bet they were retired from a heavy duty server with the equiv of 300,000 miles on them.