Confusing hardware questions...

[firetoad]

OK, here goes nothing'... Anyway, my previous system had a single hard drive in it. This hard drive, would not capture my DV video properly via numerous capture software attempts, including DVIO. I would get enormous amounts of dropped frames. So, I purchase an ATA 133, 7.2K RPM Maxtor disc and attached to the system on an ATA 100/133 PCI Controller Card. Excellent results! I then had lossless capture etc. BTW, this is the system listed in my computer hardware bio.

Then, I purchased some new stuff, 8) , and rebuilt the system. The current system is an AMD 1700+ XP T-bred, ECS K7S5A with SiS 735 Chipset motherboard and all of the rest of the components from the old system. Anyway, I tried to do some DV vid capture last night and the stupid thing just kept dropping frames when capturing to the drive on the separate controller. Hhhhmmmm.... I tried several differnt types of capture software, including DVIO again. I noticed that whenever I used DVIO to capture to this separated drive, it would drop 17 frames everything several hundred MB. OK, to me that sounded like a problem transferring/writing data somewhere. That is, something was pausing and causing the the droppage. So, I tried to capture to the old system drive on the primary IDE channel with DVIO and I didn't drop a single frame. WTF! Does anybody know what is wrong with this stupid separated capture drive? Is the architecture of this motherboard just not suited to a separate PCI IDE controller card? Would I be better served just dropping the separated capture drive on the same IDE channel that the system drive is on? (BTW, I was planning on trying this tonight anyway, but wanted everyone elses' opinions too)

Thanks in advance!

[bunyip]

One setting to check on the IDE Channels is to make sure the transfer mode is 'DMA', if it's PIO it will be too slow for capture.

Check this through the 'Control Panel' -> 'System' -> 'Hardware" -> 'Device Manager' -> 'IDE Controllers' -> (Right click on Properties)

Chances are the Secondary IDE Channel is set to PIO.

But no promises.

[firetoad]

It is running in "Ultra DMA Mode-6." So, I know the transfer rate is up there. Sandra 2003 or whatever it is called is giving me a good data rate, but it is a little lower than it was in the previous machince. However, I think I figured it out with the help of someone from another forum. I put the controller card in the PCI slot that is shared with the AGP slot. Haven't had a chance to move it yet, but I would say that would probably be a large part of the problem.

[bunyip]

Yeah, that certainly doesn't help.

Let us know how you go so that we can add this to our personal checklists
of "'THINGS' that stop 'THINGS' from working" .

[firetoad]

Actually, it wasn't in the shared slot that I thought it was in. I tried the card in several slots, but nothing helped. So, I finally moved it to the slave of the motherboard's primary ide channel. Needless to say, it works much better in this configuration and I actually gained another MB/s of data transfer. It is even running one DMA level lower and it is running better and not getting the 17 frame, rhythmic interrupts as in it's previous configuration. Evidently, this mobo does not like a controller card. Go Figure! Anybody want to buy an IDE controller (up to ATA 133) for a good price