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View Full Version : Low harddisk performance while capturing


junglemike
14th June 2003, 22:20
Hi everyone.
I am experiencing very poor hdd performance problem.
I have WesterDigital 40gb(7200rpm) alredy for years, but i deal with real-time capturing(wich take sometimes more than 50gb!) And so i decided to buy a new hdd: Maxtor 80gb(5400rpm). For some reason, unknow to me, perfomance of that new drive is _extremely_ slow. By test that i made, it cannot handle stream( real-time capture from tv-card) more that 2.5-2.6 megabytes/sec.!! While my old 40gb can handle 28-30 mb/s - it is more that 10 time more!. For example i just tried for test - to capture 768x576 uncompressed video with uncompressed pcm audio at 25fps pas (it is about 20 mb/s) - the 40gb hdd captures it without any problem. While 80 gb drops 90% of frames. I can understand that 7200 hdd would work better thatn 5400 but not 10 times! I am using win2000, all drives are ntfs, tried difragmenting, tried writing stream in different phisical disc places - at the beginning of disk, at the end, etc. Don't know what to do. I have also some 7 very old ancient scsi harddisk(from ancient server) that are more that 10 years old, and still, even they work faster than that 80gb. I have 3 operating systems on my comp 1-98,2-2000, 3-xp. In all the os'es problem is the same. Anyone having any ideas of what i could do? Any help is really appreciated.

erbuk
22nd June 2003, 14:00
Suppose you have checked in devicemanager that Ultra DMA 5 or 6 is enabled?

I have had some cable problems with one of my Maxtor disks (DM Plus 9 80GB). It was very unstable (lost the connecton with the mobo a few times and then crashed) when I used one ata-100-cable, but worked perfectly with another. I tried the same cable on a few of my other disks but with them it was no problems at all. When I put the cable back in the Maxtor it was the same story over again.

Heat could also be an issue, it gets much hotter than a 5400 drive. Have you checked temp and s.m.a.r.t-status with a monitoring program (like Dtemp or Speedfan).

Just a few theories, fact is that it could be anyting. But I have had no problems with speed or reliability with my DMP9 once the cable was changed.