What exactly do capture cards do?

[Andrew McDowell]

so when your editing hd you cant see what you are doing?

or am I crazy and read something wrong?

[John Hewat]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

John,

Here is the link: http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach

Run it on both of your disks and report the differences. Maybe I can figure it out for you.

Thank you for showing me this, however it's completely foreign to me.

I've attached the menu screen of the program, which shows that it detects D & E drives as one by the looks of things. I ran the test on D,E at 8mb and 32mb (whatever that means) and on my C drive at 32mb. But the results are all meaningless to me.

Do they look right to you?

[Harm Millaard]

John,

Your C drive (Seagate 320 GB) looks good with an average read performance of 58.4 MB and a CPU load of 3%.

Your nVidia striped Raid0 (D+E), with 2x250 GB, gives 113.9 MB and a CPU load of 7%. As I said earlier, a 2 disk raid0 nearly doubles performance in comparison to a single disk and the results bear this out.

The graphs show you that performance decreases when your disks get filled more than 60%.

In automobile terms, your C drive is like a BMW 320, your stripe (D+E) is like a BMW 740 (faster and more room) and you realize of course there is a model BMW 750L available that is even faster and offers more room and comfort, albeit at a price.

Your mobo has an nVidia chipset, I assume, and it does a very decent job of striping, although it is not up to Areca in terms of flexibility and CPU load, but then Areca is rather pricey, and the chipset is on-board. Like the difference between the BMW 740 vs. 750L.

I think you are all right with your configuration.

Hope this helps.

[Eric Shepherd]

Harm, how much lower than 7% would the Areca's CPU usage be with a 2 disk RAID? That doesn't seem bad for 113.9MB/sec.

Eric

[Harm Millaard]

Eric,

With an Areca ARC you could expect the CPU load to be around 4% or even lower.

Here is a recent overview (albeit in Dutch): http://tweakers.net/benchdb/test/191

As you can see from this overview, the A/V Storagemark 2006 results for a 2 disk Raid0, using WD 74 GB disks, gives an index of 247.7 with the nVidia nForce Pro 2200 but with an Areca Arc 1160 with the same disks it results in an index of 385.7. Significantly faster. BTW, a single WD 36GB Raptor has index 100. Missing in this list are the results for the newer Areca ARC 1231 ML card (PCIe), that utilizes the 341 IOP chip, instead of the older 331. This card will outperform the 1160 (PCI-X) by a wide margin.

The A/V storagemark 2006 is a weighted average of various A/V applications as indicated in the link I gave you.

Hope this sheds some light.

[Eric Shepherd]

Thanks for the info, Harm.

Is 4% really that large of a difference though? I mean, sure every little bit of extra power helps, but 4% seems pretty minimal.

Is that including the usual 0-2% cpu usage when sitting idle too, or just hard drive cpu usage?

Eric

[Harm Millaard]

Eric,

Every tiny bit will help, but it is more a question of how all those tiny bits add up to make a significant difference. In this example of nVidia versus Areca, 247.7 versus 385.7 (more than 50% faster) it is the combination of CPU load, cache size, IOP chip, the embedded software (ICHx-R version), etcetera that make this quite a sizable difference, even though the disks used were the same.

When looking at the list I linked to in a previous post, for me the most notable thing is that Areca HBA's are consistently at the top, while the better known brands like Promise and Highpoint are below average performers.

[Eric Shepherd]

Cool, thanks for the info. I didn't study the numbers too carefully but since you pointed it out like that, yes, that's quite a bit better, and using less CPU power in the process is a good trick! :)

I need to build a new desktop system to replace my Barton 2500+. I've been doing everything on P4/3.46GHz laptop for the past 2 years because it's faster than the desktop. I'll check into these boards. Are they available in the US?

Eric

[Harm Millaard]

Yes. Since I don't know if it is OK to mention name of outlets that sell these, I suggest to do for instance a search for Areca on TomsHardware and you will find many links to shops that have them.

[Eric Shepherd]

Cool, thanks, I'm quite familiar with Tom's Guide.. :)