Hard Drive speeds for capturing

[veedub]

I am purchasing a Dell Inspiron notebook and have the option of getting a 4200rpm, 5400rpm or a 7200rpm drive. Does anybody have any thoughts on how well these hard drive speeds will work with video capturing. I initially plan to be capturing through the firewire port from DV camera but also (if such things are available) will want to capture from an external analog capture device through the fire wire port. Will the slow drives keep up with doing this or will their lack of speed cause them to drop frames. Basically i have a choice of either a 30GB 4200rpm, 48GB 5400rpm or 32GB 7200rpm. I would greatly appreciate some feedback. The notebook will have a 1GHZ processor and to start with 256mb of RAM so I am also presuming this will be enough of these resources also. Is there anything else i should consider.
Thanks

[veedub]

I suppose further to this I want to be able to capture at a high resolution also for full screen stuff so please take this into consideration with any replies.
Thanks

[Stansell]

I would go with the 7200 RPM drive. The slower speed can cause you to drop frames or the record buffer will overflow and it will just stop capturing all together.

Too bad you can't get the 7200 RPM with 48G.

Also - do you know what speed connection the drive uses? Is it Ultra ATA 100/66 or 33. You'll want to try to get 100 if you can.

[HillJack]

I just picked up an IBM 60gig 7200RPM drive yesterday and tried capturing to it last night (vs. my Maxtor 40gig 5400RPM drive) - Both use ATA33 (My motherboard doesnt do ATA100).

5400RPM - drops about 50 frames in 1 hour
7200RPM - drops about 40 frames in 1 hour

Keeping in mind that 1 hour of video has 108,000 frames and to me, dropping 40 or 50 makes no difference... IMO, it makes no difference what you get other than the bigger the drive, the more you can capture.

I have a PIII-550 w/384MB RAM, an ASUS V6800 Deluxe and WinME and use VirtualDub.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: HillJack on 2001-07-28 07:52:06 ]</font>

[Stansell]

Hi HillJack,

You didn't say what resolution/compression you were capturing with. I think a faster drive (with ATA 100 vs 33) could make a difference if you were trying to capture at higher resolutions or low compression. If the drive is too slow, you may not be able to capture at all at a higher resolution.

[wildcatfan]

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On 2001-07-28 01:35:57, Stansell wrote:
I would go with the 7200 RPM drive. The slower speed can cause you to drop frames or the record buffer will overflow and it will just stop capturing all together.

Too bad you can't get the 7200 RPM with 48G.

Also - do you know what speed connection the drive uses? Is it Ultra ATA 100/66 or 33. You'll want to try to get 100 if you can.


</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>


7200 vs 5400 rpm doesn't always mean squat. It depends on the areal density of the disk and all. a hypothetical for instance would be a 40 gig single platter 5400 drive vs a 10 gig single platter 7200 drive. The 40 would have a way higher areal density and therefore write more data more quickly.

Also even though dma66/100 is great and all it really doesn't mean squat when video capturing in my opinion. Because....it can only read/write that speed to the buffer (small when talking of video capturing) in short bursts. When vidcapping you will be writing long continuous chunks of data so the buffer will useless for the most part. To find the best drive you need to somehow find the INTERNAL data transfer rate (hard to find sometimes).

Now with all that being said. If you are using ANY compression when you capture such as mjpeg or divx or straight to mpeg1/2 then any decent drive should be sufficient.

Michael