New drive recommendations? DiamondMax 40 or wait for Plus 40?

[cjyo~]

I am selling one of my Seagate 9.1GB UWSCSI Barracudas and looking to buy a new UDMA video drive to replace it.

I am looking in the UDMA66 30-40gb range. The Maxtor DiamondMax 40 looks good, but should I wait for the Plus 40? Are there any other 30gb+ drives I should take a look at? Will I notice the difference between 7200 and 5400 rpm in video editing? Will I have a problem with recognizing a big drive on an Abit BH6 mobo, or problems with running at only UDMA33? (No plans to buy a Ultra66 controller yet.)

Any suggestions are welcome and much appreciated!

------------------
Please visit http://spincycle.n3.net - My System: Celeron 300a(@450/2v),ABit BH6, 128mb ram, Win98, Marvel G200TV, Diamond MX300, IBM 8.4gb UDMA Deskstar system drive, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI, 2x 9gb Seagate Barracuda UWSCSI video drives, Hitachi GD-2500 DVD-Rom, UltraPlex CD-Rom, Plexwriter CD-recorder, Viewsonic PT775, Soundworks 4.1 speakers

[sscheppel]

I would not even consider selling your Barracuda drive. I was using an Apple G3 with 2 of those 9gig drives and I know if you switch to the Maxtor you will see some dropped frames as the CPU usage will increase.

[Pooh]

sscheppel

You are talking drivel. I have a 36Gb 5400rpm Maxtor drive and even when I am capturing at over 7Mb/sec I get 0 dropped frames. I have a DC30+ and a PIII500. My Mobo is a SOYO 6BA+ III. I also used 2 17Gb Maxtors with my BH6 and has similar experiences.

Norton utilities benchmarkes the drive at over 15Mb/sec and the Miro drive benchmark returns about 20Mb/sec.

Is you detailed evaluation based on experience or on some misguided notion you may have.

Cjyo~ - I would go for the 5400 drive as it's a fair bit cheaper and plenty fast enough for A/V.

A word of warning to all however. Award BIOS based mobo's have a problem in recognising greater than 32Gb, see
http://www.maxtor.com/technology/infobulls/13027.html for a description.

Maxtor has a workaround for this until the mobo manufacturers sort out their BIOS. You still get the full drive capacity ond performance.

[cjyo~]

To be honest, after a year of reading the forums and other video/hardware sites (and tweaking all sorts of settings), I am still not able to escape a few dropped frames in capture and playback at full rez on a ten minute project(even with UWSCSI). AVI_IO has been my best solution, but it's not perfect. The Barracudas didn't solve my problem.

I need more storage space and I don't plan on upgrading to bigger SCSI drives, so the Barracuda is no big loss. (Do you want to buy the other one?)

I plan to move up from my Marvel to a DV system in the future, so I'm hoping the DiamondMax will stay with me through my next mobo/cpu upgrade at least...

Regarding the 32gb limit on Abit Award boards: the latest Bios update on the Abit site, says it adds support for 37gb drives (I hope it works).