New Hard Drive, What size??

[energy80s]

Yes, I also only use 5400 rpm drives. The faster ones only help with file transfer between the drives (or partitions) themselves. Also faster drives run hotter and are noisier. There are absolutely no problems using a 5400 drive to capture with. Also they are cheaper. Althought its nice to have hundreds of gigs of HD space, you are better off with just 80 or so and burning off your "creations" every week rather than letting stuff accumulate over many months. Plus if the HD stops working (and this has happened to me too) you don't loose too much material.

[xed]

It's interesting that you remark you drop zero frames with your 5400 rpm drives. I use an external Medea RAID array, an older one I got dirt cheap used, for storing edited video files. Now, my experience (running Win98SE) is that I get no dropped frames on capture, but occasionally get a dropped frame during playback. This shows up as a barely noticeable stutter in the audio & video. The problem ain't a defrag problem, and it ain't really even a problem -- it just shows up occasionally, say one out of every 8 or 10 playbacks of an AVI file.
I'm curious what OS you're using and what type of computer. My machine is an older P 3 450 with 128 megs RAM. My OS is also an antique, so who knows? Maybe that's the reason for the occasional glitch on playback.
Incidentally if I stop playback and start it again fro the beginning, there's usually never a glitch a second time. Thermal recalibration?
Wouldn't thermal recalibration cause occasional problems no matter what the drive spindle speed?

[vitualis]

but occasionally get a dropped frame during playback. This shows up as a barely noticeable stutter in the audio & video. The problem ain't a defrag problem, and it ain't really even a problem -- it just shows up occasionally, say one out of every 8 or 10 playbacks of an AVI file.

May be an inefficient media player problem instead...

Thermal recalibration?
Wouldn't thermal recalibration cause occasional problems no matter what the drive spindle speed?

I could be wrong but I didn't think that modern HDDs (i.e., anything bar some very old ones -- < 1 Gb range) required or performed thermal recalibration anymore...

Regards.

[Greg12]

I have a 866MHZ P3 Mobile on a Dell Inspiron 8100

I have a 20 gig 5400RPM drive running in UDMA Mode 5.

I don't have capture problems.

[hothandiman]

Well, first there ws the 78, then the 45, finally the 33!!, But I have a BIG 10" record of the band that plays the blues

[Nelson37]

Coupla tidbits.

First, rotational speed is important but is not necessarily an ironclad indicator of superior performance. Some 5400 RPM drives have faster seek times and throughput than some 7200 RPM drives. Head mechanics and buffering can make a big difference. Seek, random access, and throughput are really the only numbers that matter, not RPM.

Partitioning - all drives are partitioned, even if they have only one. Most important is to have seperate physical drive on seperate channel from OS drive, having one drive with an OS partition and a capture partition does nothing to solve the problem. Partitions do insulate you on certain commands like format and del *.*, but if the drive is capture only then these errors are less critical.

IBM Deskstar drives do seem to have unusually high failure rates, in fact there is a class action lawsuit ongoing concerning this problem.

One of the early answers was correct, get the biggest drive you can afford, as long as it is modern, from a reputable manufacturer (Maxtor and Western Digital are my personal favorites), and the price is within reason. Check those performance numbers, do not rely on RPM alone.