Setting up new Hard drive

[Farmerbright]

I have a new 60gb harddrive under the tree that I will be adding solely for the use of video capture. How should I set it up? I have searched the forum and found I have more questions than answers.

I'm running Win98 and will be capturing with Vdub and Huffy, mostly 352x480. I have mostly made short captures using about 3gb of hd for stuff like music videos and clips to send to friends, mostly experimenting with settings until I could get a dedicated drive.

I understand I will be setting it to a fat32 and that will limit my capture sizes. I also read that Vdub can compensate for this with mutiple avi files; how does that actually work? Automatically, different names?

Do I need to make partitions on my drive? One for capturing, one for encoded mpeg files before burning, etc?

When capturing do you recapture with the same file name all the time so you won't have to delete your file, or do you capture for a while and then when finished just format that drive?

Thanks,

Farmerbright

[Nelson37]

Drive should be only drive on cable for best performance, unless 2nd drive is identical. Only one partition.

VDUB capture segmented AVI, will auto name AIV 01, 02, etc. Most progs will automatically import all, or frameserve.

Periodically format your capture drive.

[Farmerbright]

Thanks,Nelson. I was just trying to prepare so I would make as few mistakes as possible.

Farmerbright

[Bagmaster]

If you upgrade to Win2k or XP you won't have the 4 gig limitation for the capture file size, just make sure you install in Ntfs file format instead of fat 32. Win2k installs only as ntfs, XP can be installed as fat 32 or ntfs. Also like the other post, install the new hard drive as a stand alone drive on it's on controller unless the other hard drive is the sams as far as being ata 66 or 100, make sure dma is enabled for both hard drives and make sure you're using an ata 100 or 133 cable for them.

It would help a lot if you updated your system specs in your profile so people can see what you're working with as far as hardware.

P.S> ATA cables have to be hooked up a specific way to work properly. The blue connector on it has to attach to the ide controller on the motherboard.

[Hong Kong Phooey]

In order to use your new hard disk & at optium speed, you need to make sure that your hard disk(s) share the primary ATA cable, & your CD/DVD rom/Cdrw drive(s) run off your secondary cable.

Once physically connected you then need to use your Windows 98 startup floppy,(or if you haven't got one acess your Control Panel/Add remove programs & select the startup disk tab,use a blank floppy & it'll create a startup disk for you.

Reboot with the start up disk & you'll need to type in FDISK to use that program. Check out with Microsoft's site or do a google for a complete explanation. Basically you need to use FDISK to tell windows how you want the disk partitioned. Once done you'll then need to format it. Be careful how you use FDISK though because if you use it on your primary drive by accident you'll lose your all your data.

[Jester700]

If convenient, use the above advice to keep your new drive separate on its own channel. BUT - if it ISN'T convenient, I've never had a problem sharing a channel - with my system drive OR an ATAPI device. Further, somebody did a few tests once to see if this "common wisdom" held water and found that in his system it did not.

Now, that's surely not conclusive evidence of anything, but I'm just saying, if you NEED to share a channel for whatever reason, give it a shot - it might work OK for you.

[jarvis1781]

bagmaster: windows 2000 can also be installed as fat32 I HAVE DONE IT!

[OptimusPrime22]

How do you setup a second hard drive when you have two cd roms and you want to have the drives and cd roms sharing a channel together. I heard that makes it better to copy cds on the fly.

[Jester700]

bagmaster: windows 2000 can also be installed as fat32 I HAVE DONE IT!

Mine is setup this way. FAT32 on my 10GB system drive, NTFS on my 80GB capture drive.

[Jester700]

What makes CD copying better on the fly is not having source & burner on the same channel, so you're right. The common wisdom is that having ATAPI devices on both channels then slows both HDs down. But as I wrote, I've not experienced this, and at least one other has disproven it somewhat. There should only be a slowdown when that second device is accessed, at any rate.

For me, this is all moot. With all my devices set for DMA, and considering that my burner has "burnproof" tech, I've set mine up a few different ways and it never seems to matter. No probs - not even copying on the fly. Hopefully this will also be the case for you.

[Nelson37]

When two drives of dissimilar performance are paired on the same channel, there will almost always be a loss of peak performance. This can at times be huge, usually fairly minimal.

There are exceptions to every rule, numerous field experiences and many, many lab tests point quite categorically to this being a problem.

Now, for many, the performance loss is slight and not noticeable in most situations. Copying data to the HD at the rate of 10-20 gig per hour or more is NOT most situations.

Primary or secondary channel makes no difference whatsoever.

[jonhildrum]

please take a look here

http://www.maxtor.com/en/documentation/white_papers/ata_video_storage.pdf