Harddrives
 

This is one of the most important parts in a video computer system, and one I unfortunatly over looked.

A couple of monthes ago I purchased a 60GB Seagate harddrive. I knew what the minium spec of a video hard drive needed to be, (at least 5400RPM), and being that this harddrive fitted what I thought I would need I went ahead and purchased it. Once I had fitted the harddrive I thought that my prayers would be answered, 4 hours plus of video footage. I started getting problems when outputting the footage. The video would jitter, the only way I new how to get around the problem was to de-interlace the footage which re-rendered the whole video that then was jitter free. I thought that this was not the best way to edit, so I spent £50 to have it looked at by a computer video expert, they later diaganosed that the main problem was the harddrive although I needed a new CPU. When they performed a test to show how fast it can read/ write 100m/bytes of data it was not capable of the job. Even my year old 12 GB Maxtor system disk performed better than the Seagate.

I just thought I would let people know that choose your harddisk wisely, for video work.

All the best,

Ed Smith

Hi Ed

It was'nt that long ago the minimum recommendation was scsi drives, 10.000-15.000 rpm. I know a few people cling to the idea that 5400rpm drives might surfice but in reality the minimum is 7200.
One thing I've learnt the hard way is to ask and search and ask again before I part with hard earned pound notes, thats the whole idea of these forums.
I remember a good friend called to brag about his new hard drive (around 6 yrs ago) he'd just fitted a 1 gig drive, it cost him over £850.00 + the dreaded EURO imposed VAT and I thought you'll never fill that drive, Hindsight hey.

Regards

Peter

Still I'd double-check all kinds of things before giving up on the drive. Maybe it's still a configuration error?

I have a ridiculously low-tech setup and it worked fine with a maxtor 30 GB 5400 rpm drive in a firewire case.

It was connected to a 466 Mhz celeron dell laptop with a 6 GB!!! 4200 rpm system drive running Win 2k and Studio DV 7

I made 2 - 20 minute home holiday videos and one very carefully edited :-) 60 minute student film with that drive - all came out fine.

-------------------------------------------
1. OS?
2. DMA settings?
3. IDE configuration? - sometimes the order that you connect the drives to the IDE channels can boost or hurt your throughput.

don't fault seagate, as mentioned its the speed not the manufacturer. I've been using a seagate barracuda (7200rpm) and it performs perfectly...never had a problem.

Cheers guys,

I was not trying to say that Seagate is a bad harddisk manufacturer, the hard disk works fine as a system and storage disk. As mentioned I should have, put more consideration when purchasing the disk. And should have gone for a 7200rpm harddrive, but as ever I was in a rush to edit an 1hour video and so I bought the cheapest disk which I thought would be capable for the job.

Any ideas on what drives to go for?

All the best, and thanks in advance,

Ed Smith

One thing's for sure, Western Digital drives are the noisiest drives you can buy. Crunch, crunch, crunch, chug, chug, chug....

Edited 2002-09-24: I think I made a mistake. WD drives are the quiet ones. They were my Seagate drives that were the noisy ones.

Robert

Change the supply from Steam to Electric and you should be O.K.

Regards
Peter

I have used an DELL Intel Pentium 1gig CPU (LAPTOP) with the built in 4000RPM hard drive to edit and capture with no problems whats so ever. I now use Firewire drives.. some ATA66 5400 RPM and a ATA100 7200 all perfrom with no problems.

Solved my problem, just bought a 80gig Maxtor 7200RPM harddrive, i'm now really happy. :-)

I also bought a caddy system, anyone using these with more than one harddrive?

Cheers guys,

All the Best,

Ed Smith

Depends on NLE and OS
 

EditDV now Cinestream, was one of the NLEs that would work just fine with 5400 RPM drives. Now that 7200s are pretty common this is less important.

However, a lot of people overlook the drive settings especially on older OS like W98/95. You really must set DMA to enable to get these drives to work right. W2K and XP DMA enable is the default.

Nathan Gifford

I have a lot of different drives. I have a SCSI chain and a slew of IDE drives.
I find if you are running NTFS file system 5400 drives for DV are fine. The cost of these drives are not much different so 7200's are the more logical choice for video playback/Capture. 5400's are slightly more reliable so they make better system drives.
Funny reading this thread because My western digital drives are the quietest IDE drives in the system. I think all of the drives built before the last year or two make a lot more noise.

I often note in my own mind that my SCSI chains are the only components worth keeping after several upgrades over the last 6 years. They were very expensive but have more than paid for themselves and keep chugging along.

Rick

IDE RAID options
 

SCSI is a terrific platform for multimedia. However, as pointed out - expensive.

Another solution for speed, is RAID. A lot of motherboards now come with RAID support onboard with an ATA100 or ATA133 bus. I buy 7200 rpm drives because frankly, they cost not much more than 5400s these days (depends where you live too).

Buy two large capacity discs (I rely on IBM Deskstars, awesome drives, and IBM produces most platters used by other manufacturers) and utilize your RAID controller. Set it to RAID 0 or RAID 1, and you effectivley have 2 drives that act as one (two 120 GB drives, although 240 GB in combined capacity, function as a single 120 GB drive. But the trade off is a lot more speed since information is being written to both drives simultaneously.) It's not SCSI, but it's a cheaper alternative.

Of course, RAID0 and 1 are not designed for data restoration/backup, so proper back-ups are definatley encouraged. I may be purchasing a DVD-RAM drive for this reason.

I've always run a dual-drive system. My primary (and fastest) drive for the O/S and program files, and a large reliable drive for work files. Hard drives will fail eventually. Any product with moving parts will, the second hard drive is also a little insurance, usually you can recover vital info from a disc that's going bad before it's too late. :)

RAID 0 is different from RAID 1. RAID 0 is stripping the drives to act as a pair. In your example the 120gb drives when stripped as a pair are faster than a single pair and have 240gb as a capacity. Data (DV video) is split between each drive as it it being written to allow faster write and read times.

RAID 1 is mirroring. The data is written to both drives at the same time and is not split. One drive is an exact copy of the other drive. Total capacity is just 120gb. Useful for data backup but mostly useless for editing.

Jeff

Hey Guys....

I experimented with RAID 0 on a Promise RAID ULTRA100 controller card a few years back and found that the throughput wasn't that much better than a single drive, but, now I had the unreliability of 2 HD's instead of 1. At the time, I attributed the marginal performance gain to poor selection of the HD block size.I used the default block size of 1024Kb when I formatted the drives. What block sizes are you guys running? How much did you gain by going to RAID 0?

Thanx for any feedback you can provide.

Bill,

I use a Mac, so I don't know if this is any help, but HFS+ is 4000Kb. Depending on the file size and if it's read or write the perforance gain is from 0 to 70% with 2 drives. If you go with four drives (most controllers will do 4) your speed will at least double for most operations. Software RAID 0 can be slower than a single drive so it's best to avoid.

Jeff