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catback
3rd November 2002, 18:53
Hi,

Anyone have their capture drive set as master and either a cd or dvd drive set as slave on the same cable? If so, did you experience any decrease in the hard drive's performance with this setup,especially when capturing video?

I have two ATA100 hard drives (UDMA 5) currently set up as primary master and secondary master (ie. each is on a separate cable). I use both drives equally for capturing video. I have a dvd drive that is UDMA 2 which I want to connect but I'm not sure if putting it as a slave will decrease the performance of the hard drive that is on the same cable.

Note that I don't want to place both hard drives on the same cable as master and slave because I want to keep the source drive (reading from) and destination drive (writing to) on separate cables/channels during divx encodes.

Thanks.

dvd_maniac
4th November 2002, 17:52
Ever think about purchasing a IDE-Raid card?
Putting the 2 drives onto a raid-0 array would give you the same if not better read-write speeds for your divx encoding and increase your capture performance, while at the same time freeing up your onboard ide slots...Again just a thought. For under $100USD it was worth it for me.

^^-+I4004+-^^
4th November 2002, 18:39
i don't think that this is so important on encoding
(encoding is slow process anyhow,and mainly because of CPU
i don't see hdd as a bottleneck there...even if you have 2x real
time "super cpu" machine,i think ata100 hdd has no problems with it...and on 1 channel/1 cable.....i didn't tested this though...)

BUT on capturing i agree that it's better to have dedicated hdd and
channel.......
(now i'm wondering how would i do it if i buy another big hdd for capture because i have 2-ide-channel-only mobo.....i guess i would count on the fact that i wouldn't burn cd's and capture simultaneously..heheh)

catback
5th November 2002, 03:44
Another question along these lines.

Say I have an ATA100 hard drive (master) and a CD drive (slave) on one cable. If I use the CD drive to play an audio CD while at the same time use the hard drive for some operation, will the hard drive still operate at ATA100 speeds in this situation or will it drop down to the CD drive speed?

Thanks.

dvd_maniac
5th November 2002, 05:45
the ata/100 is only the burst rate, not the actual transfere rate. So it very rarely operates at an actual 100. So I agree with ^^-+I4004+-^^ that it is usually not a bottleneck at hhd level so depending on your system you shouldn't notice a huge difference. I do however disagree that encode times do not suffer. I have tested this out between my two onboard cables, both hhd's on one cable and one on each and saw a definite boost in performance when using seperate channels. I tested this on tmpgenc (encode a piece of video and see the estimated total time and compare) When I went to ide raid-0 I now get SUSTAINED transfer rates at over 100, so I am now getting a pretty HUGE performance gain.

^^-+I4004+-^^
5th November 2002, 17:06
let us consider this question a bit:
(VD,mjpeg->divx conversion)

i've loaded 650mb avi(mjpeg) to VD and moved the slider...
always hdd is used for reading (red light on)
(so it's not in the system memory-->i have 320MB of ram)
during the encoding (my cel600) it outputs round 7FPS...
(25FPS at a bitrate i use are cca. 120-180kB/s)
let's add those 2(input+output)
.avi mjpeg has nominal bitrate of round 2MB/s(i compress,yes)
+ let's say 200kB/s of encoded divx and you're still pretty
close to 2MB/s

take in account that 2MB/s is LOT less (because there's no real time
performance...VD doesn't take video at nominal rate but much slower as it can't process it
that fast!)
and bare in mind that ata100 has at least 33mb sustained transfer rate
so you'll see that this doesn't matter_
("hub" between CPU/chipset is cca 266MB/s for i815 chipset,cca 133MB/s for older PCI connection of north and south bridge....no problems there too....)

all said i don't think encoding speed is gained by putting two hdd's in stead of one
i would prefer faster cpu always!

i don't know a first thing about tmpgenc (except that is painfully slow) but my VD experience shows that i would have no gain if i add another hdd etc.

capturing (as i said) is another question!

on to the next question--->

ata100 channel impaired by cd reproduction
it should be NONE!
cd-rom MUST play audio cd even without any IDE cable!
cd-rom can be used for this if for example i lack standalone cd-player
when played audio cd's cd-rom reader gives audio signal to soundcard and she amplifies it a bit (if needed) and passes it out!
no traffic on IDE bus whatsoever!
cd-rom plays audio "to" the soundcard NOT to the IDE bus!

also cd-rom is ata33 native,so even when used for data reading (IDE in use) i don't think it will destroy HDD traffics lines....
it will in some degree,but i don't think this matters on encoding also....

cheers

Ivo

catback
5th November 2002, 18:28
Thanks for all the replies.

dvd_maniac,

My motherboard (ASUS A7V133) has onboard RAID0 with a second pair of ide channels for this setup. Since I have two identical 120 gb drives, I was considering using them in a RAID configuration. However, it's my understanding that there is no backup provided when you have two drives in a RAID0. If one drive fails or has corrupt data, then the information on both drives become useless.

Is this true?

I use one of my drives as a backup of important data files since security is a higher priority than performance. However, if RAID0 provides the same or better level of backup/security, then I may have to consider it as a viable option.

If you know of any good online tutorials on RAID0, please post them. Thanks.

dvd_maniac
6th November 2002, 04:56
If you are using your raid card with striping, then no, there is no data protection. You should have raid-1 (Mirroring) on that raid channel though if this is more improtant to you. But this lags performance. Stripe=writes to two or more hard drives simultaniously byte1 to drive 1 and byte2 to drive 2. Ex. say you get 50MB sustained transfer rate per drive You should now get 100 sustained and 200/266 burst. Raid-1 = writes the same data to both drives. So slows perforamce.
But I don't see why you can't hook up one drive to the raid channel, this should solve all your problems and give you only one device per channel. Chek here for info on your motherboard Go to page 20 of pdfHERE (ftp://ftp.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socka/kt133a/a7v133/a7v133-105.pdf)
Bu the way, about how much vital info do you have? I have my two 80GB on raid-0 with OS and a seperate drive (another80GB) for performance+security. But only use about 6 gigs on it.
Good luck in whatever you come up with