HVR-DR60: changing tapes

[Piotr Wozniacki]

I've played with it after switching the cable from the front to the PC's back panel. The same file of 1.2GB could be copied once in just 1 min, but then again it takes over 3 mins! What's interesting, during those slower operations, the red lamp on the DR60 does not come up - at least not from the very beginning. During the quickest (1 minute) copy, it lights all the time.

Strange. And frustrating.

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Piotr Wozniacki

I've played with it after switching the cable from the front to the PC's back panel. The same file of 1.2GB could be copied once in just 1 min, but then again it takes over 3 mins! What's interesting, during those slower operations, the red lamp on the DR60 does not come up - at least not from the very beginning. During the quickest (1 minute) copy, it lights all the time.

Strange. And frustrating.

I suspect its an issue more in the computer and less in the DR60. I'll keep you posted on what I find as I go down my path of discovery. It will be a few days though. I'm headed to the beach to shoot some stuff for the weekend. Its bathing suit weather! :)

Chris

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Thanks Chris! My further observations:

- I had to switch auto defragmentation off; this alone took me from my best so far 1 min/1 GB transfer down to some 45sec/1 GB

- regarding the slowest transfers, here comes the most interesting part: it's the RAID 0 that the copy takes ages to and from the DR60! To a standard IDE drive, I can copy to the DR60 and back at 45 secs/1GB.

Now, go figure. All my diagnostic tools show everything is in perfect order with my SATA RAID (s) - 300 MB/sec transfers! I'm suspecting some conflict between firewire and SATA....

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Guys, I think I owe you explanation that my alarm was false. Somehow, my RAID 0 was misconfigured. All in all, the HVR-DR60 does not have the transfer limit of 50% real-time capture speed, like its predecessor the DSR-DU1; it performs like a regular (not very fast) 1.8" IDE drive. A file weighing around 1 GB can be copied in some 45 secs; 12 GB will thus take some 8 minutes vs 1 hour of capturing - huge time savings!

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Piotr Wozniacki

Guys, I think I owe you explanation that my alarm was false. Somehow, my RAID 0 was misconfigured. All in all, the HVR-DR60 does not have the transfer limit of 50% real-time capture speed, like its predecessor the DSR-DU1; it performs like a regular (not very fast) 1.8" IDE drive. A file weighing around 1 GB can be copied in some 45 secs; 12 GB will thus take some 8 minutes vs 1 hour of capturing - huge time savings!

Thanks for that info. That gives me something to experiment with when I get back home. I recorded a nice sunset here at the beach tonight.

Chris

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Thanks Chris for your cooperation. I'd like to add that setting the performance policy for DR60 in Device Manager (Windows) speeds up the transfers still further!

I have another question: apart from the VIDEO and USER partitions, there is some 32 MB free (unpartitioned) space at the end of the drive; while it's not much space, every little counts (and it's not very elegant). Do you think it's possible to re-partition the drive from within Windows and extend the VIDEO partition, deleting both the USER partition and that slack at the end, without disturbing the functionality of the unit?