Hi all!
:)

I have a quick question:

- Is there any truth in the theroy that with video capture, you are better off with two hard-drives instead of one?

Most "Experts" I talk to, say that two 7200RPM drives are required for reliable video capture.

On the Primary IDE interface, the primary drive is, naturally, your main boot drive with(in this case) XP Pro on it, and the slave is the DVD-writer.

On the Secondary IDE interface, the primary drive is another 7200RPM drive, and the slave is another IDE device(if any).

The reason seems to be that you setup the Primary Master with the capturing/editing software, and tell the software to dump all the captured video to the Secondary Master drive.

Apparantly(so they say), this releives the stress on the system, as the capture software can write to the Secondary Master drive, while XP can read/write to the Primary Master in the normal way, for system admin, without having to try to save captured video at the same time.

What do you guys think?

It sounds reasonable to me, but I won't buy another HDD until someone here gives me their thoughts on this issue.

Thanks guys!
:)


MM.

I would be a bit sceptical since even if the second drive is the place to which the data is being dropped "the system" still has to process what is going on. I would think the video card would be the most important bit of hardware - as seen with WinXP VCE (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1766) - but there are far better hardware experts around than me.

There is a little truth to that related to how IDE works. With IDE, each mobo slot represents a single channel, able to support two devices - one master and one slave. But here's the kicker, the IDE channel can only use one device at a time, so while the hard drive is being accessed, the DVD writer (in your example) is inactive on the bus. The IDE controller is able to flip back and forth very quickly, but still, you take a performance hit whenever your system is accessing both drives at once. By putting two hard drives on separate IDE channels, you aleviate this bottleneck because each channel is accessing its own drive and so both are available at the same time. This is why working with IDE can be a real pain sometimes, because you have to try and think how to most efficiently arrange your drives.

The reason I said there is a little truth to that is because while it's nice to have two hard drives on separate IDE channels for the most efficiency, it's not needed with today's high speed hard drives. If you have a 7200rpm hard drive of at least 60GB capacity, you can be reasonably sure that it's fast enough to handle Windows and video stream input at the same time. If you have a 7200rpm hard drive with an 8MB cache, no problem! Most video editing software that I've seen simply requires that you have a hard drive capable of 20MBps constant throughput. Most higher capacity 7200rpm hard drives hit 25-35MBps without a problem, and those 8MB cache versions can hit 40+! :eek:

SATA hard drives are even faster, hitting 40MBps at least, and some of the newer ones can even hit 50. The Western Digital 10,000rpm Raptors hit more like 55-60 on average. And I suspect those NCQ SATA II drives can hit Raptor speeds on only 7200rpm.

So yes, there's some truth to what the "experts" say, but they are speaking mostly to people with older hard drives. Hard drive performance gets worse the older it is. I think I have an old 1.7GB hard drive that can hit a whopping 4MBps!

That's great - thanks to both of you. I will not get another drive(or maybe I will - can never have enough space, eh?(were video editing is concerned...) I have an Athlon XP 3000+ CPU, 720MB DDR RAM, UniChrome 8x AGP, 120GB 7200RPM Seagate. All XP's eye-candy is turned off(looks like Win98 GUI), so it runs like a rocket!