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

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

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

Here's what I suggest everyone do... head over to Canopus' site [ http://www.justedit.com ] and grab the file they made available for people considering their products. One such program was called RAPTOR TEST. A small windows utility (200k) that could run within it's own folder (or even a floppy).

This program tested things like Video Overlay, Machine Info, and pertinent to this thread: Hard Drive Performance.

Specifically, what it tested was the SUSTAINED TRANSFER RATE of a chosen drive. While the Hard Drive marketing weenies are busy BS'ing the public with the BURST transfer rate, it's the SUSTAINED transfer rate that matters for video work.

True, a single 7200rpm IDE drive should be adequate nowadays for DV work, but as a drive reaches it's storage limits, performance is affected. This is why I chose to use an IDE RAID as my primary video drive.

My system consists of a 10gig C: drive for the OS and programs, a new 120gig D: drive for video clip storage, and a 60gig RAID for current video projects on E. The RAID is made up of a FastTrack66 with a pair of Maxtor 30gig 7200rpms. Here's a result of the Canopus test:

C: 10gig Seagate IDE around 90% filled
Read 3.9mb/s
Write 3.6mb/s

D: 120gig WesternDigital IDE around 45% filled
Read 26mb/s
Write 20mb/s

E: 60gig FastTrack IDE RAID around 15% filled
Read 32mb/s
Write 29mb/s

The 120gig D: drive is about 2 weeks new. It was previously occupied by a 40gig 7200rpm WesternDigital and I can assure you as a single drive, it's performance was nothing like the new 120gig. It was a while since I last ran the test, but the 40gig turned numbers like 18 for the Read and less than 15 for the Write. I attribute this to the newer 120gig probably having more platters... and more platters concurrently being read by more drive heads should bring up the numbers as expected.

For pair of drives still using the ATA66 interface, that RAID is no slouch.

As for the issue of sound, I wouldn't hold any one company to be better or worse than others. I've built PLENTY of computers over the past decade to report that noise will vary from one hard drive model to another. I've had IBM drives that were whisper-quiet and others that emitted a painful high-pitched whine... I SWEAR that I must have lost 5% of my hearing from being subjected to a pair of those for a year before I got fed up.

Other software which enables you to test your drives, include Pinnacles DV expert.

Can someone explain what a RAID system is and how it benefits computer editing?

Cheers,

Ed Smith

Here's a cute little piece of freeware that does quite an adequate job of looking at hard drive thruput speeds. This is free and rivals the $50 HDTACH used as a benchmark by many consumer websites. I've used it with very good results. One of the nice things about this diagnostic is that is shows you your hard drive performance as the data location varies across the disk platter. You can see for yourself how much loss in thruput occurs as you move towards the center of the platter and linear speed is lost due to the decreasing radius.

http://www.geocities.com/vgrinenko/DiskSpeed32/

A quick and dirty explanation of RAID....RAID comes in RAID 0, 1, 2, etc. The most useful for video editors is RAID 0 which allows two hard drives to be ganged together such that data files are written in blocks that alternate from one drive to the other. The advantage is that since you're writing to two HD's at once, the thruput is increased, altho' not quite doubled. The disadvantage is that if one drive fails, all your data is lost....reliability is approximately halved. These reliability concerns are addressed by things like RAID 0+1, which provides for a 4 disk array in which two disks are mirror images of the other two. In order for RAID to be implemented, you have a choice between software RAID, which is included in Windows 2000 disk management tools, or hardware RAID controller cards such as PROMISE, HIGHPOINT, etc. For a video editor, the increased thruput of RAID systems can make uncompressed video a reality....check out www.medea.com for pre-packaged video RAID system add-ons.

Cheers Bill for the info on RAID.

All the best,

Ed Smith

Adaptec has a hardware raid card too. Promise has very nice
products for not much money. Keep in mind that windows
2000 software raid is *ONLY* available in the SERVER editions!!
(Windows 2000 Server, Advanced Server & Datacenter Server).
Not in professional! So XP at the moment has not support as well.
Oh. And to enable software raid you need to upgrade the
harddisks you wanna raid to DYNAMIC disks (default is BASIC
disks).

Good luck.

Not sure about the Adaptec, but the Promise card is effectively a software RAID after the system boots into Windows because of how the drivers work. It's hardware RAID in dos though.


ALL flavors of NT (NT4/2K/XP) support software RAID.

The "SERVER" versions allows the added feature of being able to MIRROR the boot drive.

George

Sorry to disagree, Rob, but, my Win 2000 Pro(not server) has software RAID.

other reasons why persons choose SCSI over EDIE has nothing to do with speed. on a SCSI drive it can be reading and writing at the SAME moment in time. EDIE can only write or read at the same moment in time it cannot do BOTH ...

also when SCSI drives on on a dasiy chain - any drive in the chain can be reading and writing at the same MONENT other drives in the chain are reading/writing. on a EDIE channel , master -slave, only one drive can be doing a read/write at a time. so if you need to copy files from master to slave - it must 1st read data off master and then write that data to slave ... on a SCSI chain while the 1st drives is reading the data the 2nd drive is writing it at the same time.

Just like to update the rest of the DVInfo.net peeps on my purchase decisions.

I decided to buy a Sarotech Firewire enclosure from a local Chinese shop and an IBM 120gb Deskstar drive from a different local shop. So far so good.

The Sarotech is a Korean brand. The enclosure is moulded plastic. It was easy to get the drive screwed into it. It has a fan, power switch and includes power cable and FireWire link. It is not quiet. In setting it up I came across only a couple bumps. The default jumper settings were set to a 16 head Master not the 15 that other pages online suggested.

Also, being a dumbass, I did not format the drive and I wondered why it was being detected but didn't show up as a drive letter. :)

So far so good.