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**DrMordrid** · 6 January 2000, 17:15

You didn't say how big it is.

IF it's your largest drive put that bad boy on the Promise IDE2 as the master and the CDRW as it's slave. Just don't put your temp files for CD creation on it. As long as you don't burn CD's while capturing video at the same time things should be fine.

One nice thing about the Promise cards is that putting an slow device on the same cable as a faster one won't slow the fast one down. Just make sure they both have their DMA activated.

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by DrMordrid (edited 07 January 2000).]

**Bixler** · 6 January 2000, 17:50

Dr.: Sorry. 13gig UATA66 WD. I'm currently running a 12gig udma33 for video storage...with few problems, but it's clear that I'm on the edge...a few stutters now and then, the usual indicators that the Hdwe is being maxed out.

Thanks for the prompt reply...I've been active over on the MH and GH forums, but I'll be here in force with LOTS of questions when I'm fully confident of the basic hardware issues. Shit! If it would just hold still, I could wrap my mind around it.!!!

**CMB** · 6 January 2000, 19:15

Hi,
I have just purchased a spankin' new UDMA 66 20gig drive. And ive made it my video dump file.

I had problems at first, not with the drive but with playing DVD's It seems that my DVD player likes to go it alone on my second IDE channel but i think i just got it fixed, seems ok now as i flashed my motherboard bios back to version 3, (version 4 just came out and thats what i was running)
so now my pc looks like this

First IDE channel
Master-12gig UDMA 33
Slave-16gig UDMA 33

Second IDE channel
Master- DVD drive
Slave-20gig UDMA 66

The 66 is running at 33 but i dont mind
matrox harddrive benchmark thingy gives me
C: 5-6mg
D: 5-6mg
E: 10-12mg a second

But ive never really trusted that cos with my old Motherboard i used to get 30-45mg a second....????

seems more realistic now though
:O)
What do you mean when you say you get jitters and are pushing the edge?
(touch wood) i have always been fine with vid capturing and playback!

**Bixler** · 6 January 2000, 22:17

CMB:

Just recently, I upgraded my main processor to a K63 400 @428. I dunno, the faster processor speed may solve the problem I referred to.

Here's what I noticed in a little more detail, and with my old (retired) K62 333:

With a long MJPEG capture (through my Marvel) I would get the VERY occasional jitter or slightly noticeable frame dropping--nothing major, just something that caused me to assume that something needed more horsepower before I pushed any harder.

In general terms, I guess I'd just like to know what matters more, the 'burst transfer speed' of an spiffy new Hard drive, or will the upgrade in processor speed take care of what I was noticing?

I'm not a power video editor by any means, but I do want full capability. I've gotten a small majority of opinions over on the General Hardware forum that I'll get more 'bang for the buck' by making the new Hdd my primary...I just wanted some opinions from you guys over here before I take the plunge and retire my trusty old udma33 3.1 boot drive and go through all the bios changes to boot from my Promise Ultra66 adapter with this new hard drive.

If a 30% processor speed upgrade will get rid of the jitters (very occasional) then I'm inclined to go with the majority. But if you guys think that the faster Hdd burst speed will make a real difference in smoother video storage & playback, then I'll listen, stick with my trusty old udma33 as my boot, and use this spiffy new baby for video.

'Nuff said?

------------------
AMD K63 400 Running @ 428
on SOYO SY5EMA
128M 8ns PC100 SDRAM
Marvel G-200 TV
w/DVD HW Card
DVD, CDRW (Both IDE)
Pri Hdd WD 4.1G UDMA33
Sec Hdd WD 12.1G UDMA33
Promise Ultra 66 HDD Controller
Win 98--running 98 Lite
(A GREAT program)

**Patrick** · 6 January 2000, 22:52

Hopefully you'll get some responses from people like the Doc who know a heck of a lot more than me, but I'd be real surprised if anyone here didn't suggest that you retain your old udma33 as the boot drive and to use your new drive strictly for video capture. Regarding processing power, I don't believe that CPU speed alone is going to eliminate jitters and/or frame drops. There's a heck of a lot of other variables involved (including having a separate drive to capture on). My C366 hums along nicely at 567 MHz, but I still have minor problems.

If anyone cares to answer this, I've got a question somewhat along the same lines. My computer is configured with the boot drive and capture drive on one IDE channel and the Cdrom player and CD burner on the other IDE channel. Is this "wrong"? Any comments?

**Bixler** · 6 January 2000, 23:12

Patrick:

I've got what I would call the 'definitive' answer to my initial innocent question here:
http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000986.html

Note Haig's reply...he's one I trust that donates his time here with posts, but works for Matrox Tech support. If you are to take his answer at face value, as long as your Hdd comfortably meets the minimum sustainted transfer rates required by your software/hardware combo., more difference is made by the processor speed and other issues.

That was my ititial question.

Dr. Mordrid: I failed to mention that I'm keeping my other 12 gig UDMA33 on the system. FYI, one thing I KNOW about the Promise Adapter is that you have to keep the Hdd size approximately the same if you have more than one on the card...one of those dirty little secrets. If you mount a 4 gig and a 20 gig Hdd on the same channel on the Promise adapter, you lose 16 gigs of storage on the larger drive, 'cause the card "hacks" Windoze into seeing the card as a single drive.

Promise doesn't say much about it, but it is buried deep in their FAQ's!

**Patrick** · 7 January 2000, 00:17

Heh, heh... I know Haig very well. He's a great guy. However, if I'm interpreting his post correctly, I also guarantee that no one here will agree with him. It looked like he was giving you advice on how to configure ONE hard drive to act as both a boot and capture drive. Perhaps he misunderstood your original question. Anything and everything I've ever read here states that the boot and capture drive can NOT be one and the same if you want smooth video playback. I stand by my earlier statement that processor speed alone will not make much of a difference if something as elementary as ONE drive is being used in a system. I understand from your last post that this will not be the case in your system, and that's good.

I failed to realize that your old UDMA33 drive was almost as large as your new drive. I mistakenly assumed that the newer drive would be much larger, and that's why I suggested that it should be used as the capture drive. After reading the other thread, I can see why it might be best to do it the other way around because of the UDMA33/UDMA66 issue.

Is this Promise card of yours simply the adapter that allows you to use an UDMA66 drive with an older MB, or is it the Promise FastTrack 66 IDE raid controller? There might be some difference between how these two cards behave with different size drives connected. What you were stating at the end of your last post sounds an awful lot like what I've read about the FastTrack, but I haven't seen you mention that term.

**jeff b** · 7 January 2000, 04:38

Hard disk size is not an issue with the Promise IDE adapter card. Only the FastTrack RAID controller will have an affect on two disks that are dissimilar sizes.

Frame drops are more likely to come from Windows activity during capture and playback, than from anything else. The problem is the misnomer 'multitasking'. There is no such thing in windows. Nothing in Windows runs 'at the same time', but rather is parsed out in millisecond timeslices which make it 'seem' that things are running concurrently. Consequently, if ANYTHING else is running during capture or playback, it will take a timeslice, many times interrupting capture or playback. The most notorious activity of windows affecting NLE capture and playback is the swap file 'virtual memory' of windows, which accesses the system disk often. If captures or playbacks are made from the same physical drive, then the timeslice is usually too big to not interrupt the smooth flow of video.

Other things that will cause these problems are having the CD ROM drive set up to autodetect the insertion of a CD. Windows will go and take a look at that quite often, grabbing system resources to do so, and usually causing problems during captures and playbacks.

Since MJPEG captures and playbacks require only 3.1meg per second sustained rates, frame drops on separate drives which show sustained rates higher than that are usually caused by Windows activities, such as those explained above.

**Bixler** · 7 January 2000, 07:56

Hey Walrus, Jeff B and Patrick! THANKS for the pearls of wisdom. Actually, it ALL makes sense to me! (And I ALWAYS apply my own dim logic to any suggestions on these Fori before proceeding)

Quick answer to one of the questions above: It's a Promise Ultra 66 controller...NOT a RAID.

Here's how I intend to config, after gleaning the wealth of much appreciated comments and suggestions. And check my sig below which is my current (not new) setup.

1. Ghost my old 3.1 gig over to the new drive.

2. Change the Bios to make the machine boot from my Promise.

3. New drive will be primary on the Promise, and all alone with a single primary DOS partition.

4. Second Promise channel will have my old UDMA 33 12 gig as master for video capture and transfer. My CDRW will be slave.

5. Onboard Primary IDE will have my DVD alone on it's channel (in order to keep the DVD daughter card happy)

6. Onboard secondary IDE will have my old boot drive alone on it's channel for backup, storage of CD burner disk images, and other archives.

I suppose the only real pick-em option above would be to put ALL my HDD's on the Promise, (If there isn't a size difference issue) and let the DVD and Burner occupy the Onboard IDE's.

Any hints on that option?

God! It's good not to have to learn all this by trial and error! THANKS

------------------
AMD K63 400 Running @ 428
on SOYO SY5EMA
128M 8ns PC100 SDRAM
Marvel G-200 TV
w/DVD HW Card
DVD, CDRW (Both IDE)
Pri Hdd WD 4.1G UDMA33
Sec Hdd WD 12.1G UDMA33
Promise Ultra 66 HDD Controller
Win 98--running 98 Lite
(A GREAT program)

**Walrus** · 7 January 2000, 16:34

Bixler: Just for the sake of making it easier to load OS's, I recommend one's boot drive be on your built-on Ultra-33 channel. (I've had horrible experiences loading NT and Linux onto a SCSI drive, when I had Ultra-33 and Ultra-66 drives also present) In fact, I'd recommend you keep your current primary where it is and keep it used for boot drive purposes. This gives you 2 available drives that can be used for whatever you want (apps, video editing, burning, etc). If your DVD really is finicky about being alone on a channel (though I usually find they're fine sharing one) then put it alone on your onboard 2nd channel. Hook the two other drives onto your Ultra-66 channels and pop your CD-RW as slave on one of them. If you really want your new drive to be the boot drive, hook it into your onboard controller instead of the 3.1 gig. Don't worry about putting your Ultra-66 drive on a Ultra-33 channel. The reality is NO existing IDE hard drive can even come close to saturating Ultra-33's available bandwidth. The only real importance of Ultra-66 right now is for IDE Raid configs. Maybe in a year or so we may have an IDE drive finally break the 33 meg a second barrier, but thus far the best I've seen is one that can handle 13.5 megs a second. (IBM 7200 RPM 20 gig)
Good luck!

**Patrick** · 7 January 2000, 17:09

Walrus, thanks for all the information. When I had this computer (it's my first one) built for me just over a year ago (and then added to since), I didn't know anything at all and just trusted that it had been configured properly. I guess not! If I understand you correctly, it sounds like I should have things set up as follows:

IDE Channel 1

Master - Seagate Medalist Pro 9.1Gb 7200 RPM (boot drive)
Slave - Liteon 32x Cdrom drive

IDE Channel 2

Master - WD Expert 18Gb 7200 RPM (capture drive)
Slave - HP 7200i CD-Writer Plus

Sometime in the near future I'm interested in getting a Promise FastTrack and adding a second WD Expert 18Gb drive to run in tandem. What would the best setup be in that situation? Also, is there really any need to get the newer FastTrack66 to use with the Expert drives, or would they work just as well for video capture running at UMDA33 with the original FastTrack?

I certainly appreciate any more information that can be shared.

**Walrus** · 7 January 2000, 17:43

Patrick: Yes, you may run into problems with your IDE setup for a number of reasons. First of all, you should try to isolate your capture drive as much as possible (if it's IDE). The basic architectural difference between SCSI and IDE (well the main one that matters here) is that IDE only allows a single command at a time on each channel. That means if one device is being accessed, the other is blocked until the command is complete. So that means that if when capturing, if Windows decides it wants to access something on your boot drive, it blocks your capture drive for a split-second. It also means when you try to copy from your CD-ROM to your CD-RW, you have a situation where when you're trying to read the data off of your cd-rom your CD-RW is blocked from getting data to write and will hit a buffer-under run if it isn't unblocked before it's buffer runs out. (which is why SCSI is MUCH better for CD writing) Tip: Put the hard drives on seperate channels in the master positions. Put the CD-RW on the channel opposite of the hard drive you usually burn files from and the cd-rom on the other channel. For instance, if you normally burn cd-roms from files on your boot drive you'd have your boot drive and your cd-rom on your 1st IDE channel and your capture drive and your cd-rw on your 2nd IDE channel. One other thing you'll notice is that when you try copying files between your two hard drives, it will copy a LOT faster. (I found a 10-fold difference in copy speeds between IBM U66 20 gigers copying between channels vs copying within the same channel)
Incidently, my current system config is as follows:
Windows NT 4.0 SP5
Abit BP6 (2X Celeron 366s overclocked to 550)
256 MB PC100 Ram
Matrox Marvel G200
2X Intel 100B NIC
SB 64 Value (ISA)
Creative Labs DXR2 DVD Decoder
on Ultra-33 IDE-1: IBM 20gig Ultra-66 7200 RPM
on Ultra-66 IDE-1: IBM 20gig Ultra-66 5400 RPM
on Ultra-66 IDE-2: IBM 20gig Ultra-66 5400 RPM
on my Tekram 390F (Ultra-Wide controller) I have the following hooked onto my Ultra-Wide connector:
IBM 9.1 GB Ultra-2 Wide 7200 RPM
Quantum 4.5GB Ultra-2 Wide 7200 RPM (currently my boot drive, though I'm going to make my 20 gig 7200 rpm my boot soon and give this to a friend)
on my external SCSI connector I have the following:
Toshiba 32X CD-ROM
Pioneer 6X DVD-ROM
Onstream SC50 Tape Drive
Yamaha 6X4X16 CD-RW
Ricoh 2X2X6 CD-RW (can't burn anymore)
Iomega 100MB Zip Drive
Umax Asta 610S Scanner

Amazingly, it all works

**Bixler** · 7 January 2000, 18:05

So, Walrus:

The facts that I glean out of the wealth of Information you posted above (THANKS), is that UDMA66 is a pipe dream? One of those lab test specs that matters not in the real world?

I don't personally care, I didn't buy the Promise Ultra66 for any extra speed, but to allow two cranky IDE devices to get along. (my DVD and CDRW)--both of which recommended being Master on their channel (Why? I have NO idea) I just assumed that my primary boot drive should be master on it's channel too, so...there you have it.

I've popped the thing in already, as I posted my intentions above, and booted up without a glitch, so I'm currently running and booting off the Promise card. (As you know, Windoze thinks its a SCSI device)

I'm not one to dismiss good advice, and will keep your recommendations in mind should problems occur.

Remember, I'm not looking for any serious performance upgrade here...I didn't expect that anyway. I am concerned about conflicts, crashes, and other anomolies.

Oh, by the way, JeffB corrected me correctly on the Hdd size issue. That does apply only to the RAID...sorry to confuse anyone.
Thanks for staying near.

**Walrus** · 7 January 2000, 22:51

Patrick: I'd say the config you listed will be optimal for your system. As for whether or not you need a U66 capable Fasttrack, it all depends on how fast the WDs are.. If they can beat 17mb/sec each, then there may be a reason to go for the Ultra-66 version of the FastTrack.. (unfortunatly I have no idea how fast the U66 WDs are as I only deal with IBM drives as a rule) Though if 33mb/sec is adequate for your video capture needs, then there's no reason to go beyond the U33 version.
Bixler: I would not quite say that U66 is a pipe dream. In RAID configs, it's quite nice as long as the drives you're dealing with are fast enough, but in non-RAID configs it's useless as of right now. I read a post somewhere on here talking about a Maxtor drive beating 20 MB/sec.. With that in mind, U66 may be useful fairly soon even for non-RAID configs. As for your system, who cares what advice you follow as long as your system works as you need it to. Just remember, it's easier to get something that works to be fast than it is for something that's fast to work.

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So What would you do with a new UDMA66 7200 rpm HDD?

So What would you do with a new UDMA66 7200 rpm HDD?

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