Capturing and HD speed.

I will be entering the area of "Capturing" very soon and would like to know if my current hard drive set up will be adequate for the capturing process.

Currently I have 2 40gig Western Digital's. My "Master" is 5400rpm and my "Slave" is 7200rpm. I have seen a post on here about this (Sorry, can't find it now) but I would like to know if I need to switch these around.
I would like to capture some files from cable to my slave drive, that is why I have it as the 7200rpm drive. The software will be on the 5400rpm drive. Will this cause any problems with the process? I was trying to keep the faster drive available for where the file will be written, so as to keep up with the capture *IF* I decide to capture directly to mpeg (VCD).

Thanks for any and ALL responses

[Vejita-sama]

There should be no problem. There are people captureing with 300mhz machines on 5400rpm drives with no dropped frames. Your software and card make more of a difference.

[rhegedus]

Can't see any problem with it, just so long as you change the default target directory to your capture drive (most capturing software will write to the same drive as the software unless instructed otherwise).

Regards,

Rob

Thanks for the answers! I thought this would be the way to go. I have yet to install the AverTV Stereo so thanks for the info on changing the target drive/folder for the capture.

Thanks again

[alfisti]

Now I'm confused though. I've got a 733 mhz machine (Compaq Deskpro EN) and I'm trying to capture off my firewire card from my camcorder, and it drops frames, even in native AVI format.

Using MyDVD to capture natively in MPEG-2 produces very bad video - lots of dropped frames, jerky video, missing whole sections... unviewable when I burned it onto a DVD.

I ran the test package that comes with TMPGenc and it has a huge frame loss - like 50%. I checked my settings and the drive is running in DMA Mode 5. I did NOT disable the NIC or really anything else - can all that make THAT MUCH of a difference?

Is it possible that this machine just isn't fast enough to capture DV through my firewire card? It seems unlikely.

Thanks