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Author Topic: External Firewire Hard Discs - Need Opinions Ron Lacheur Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 650 From: British Columbia, Canada Registered: Feb 2002 posted 09-28-2003 12:18 PM                     Floppy has it's own channel.  |  IP: Logged Stephen Furley Film God Posts: 3059 From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England Registered: May 2002 posted 09-28-2003 12:19 PM                     Bobby, the floppy does not normally use IDE, it has its own interface on a separate bus. I think LS-120 drives, which could read ordinary floppy disks as well, had an IDE interface, and old Apple Mac's used something totally different, but I'd be surprised if your floppy was IDE. It is possible to have three IDE channels, each with master and slave devices; I've never seen it done, and I don't know of any machine that has it built in, so you'd need an extra card to get the tertiary channel. Not all cards can be configured in this way, but some can.  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 09-28-2003 01:57 PM                     Bobby, get an ATA controller card. It will handle 4 additional drives in addition to what you have. Maxtor and Promise Technologies have them. I have one of each and they work equally well. All you need is a spare PCI slot. Maxtor's Ultra ATA/133 PCI Adapter only costs about 60 bucks. The card will also allow the drive to come up to maximum capacity without partitioning. I have a 120 gig drive in my Pentium 75 (gasp) on a Promise Technology card. Full cpapcity - no partitions.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 09-28-2003 02:24 PM                     After closer inspection, it turns out my PC has a floppy that doesn't run on IDE. So I'm pretty sure I can just mount the new drive in an empty HDD bay above where the floppy sits and attach the boot drive and new slave drive on the same Ultra ATA cable. I would consider getting a PCI-based host adapter. However, I have only one PCI slot left and that would create a really cramped up cabling situation. I've already got Ultra ATA 133 speed on my main board-based controller. So it just seems like an easier solution. I'll probably install this new slave drive later on this evening after I get some other work done.  |  IP: Logged Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 09-28-2003 03:03 PM                        Your Dell's ATA133 interface will handle an 80GB drive partitioned and formated as a single NTFS volume. By the way, for anyone considering a Promise controller... most of their ATA controllers (especially the TX-2000) don't work reliably in systems that have nVidia chipset based video controllers.  |  IP: Logged Jon Bartow Master Film Handler Posts: 287 From: Massachusetts Registered: Nov 1999 posted 09-28-2003 03:37 PM                     The standard configuration for PC motherboards includes the following : 1 floppy connector that can handle two floppy drives (A: and B:), a Primary IDE connector and a Secondary IDE connector. Both IDE connectors can have two IDE devices connected to them (one Slave and one Master). So without an add on controller card you could have two floppy drives and up to four IDE drives  |  IP: Logged Ken McFall Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 615 From: Haringey, London. Registered: Apr 2001 posted 09-28-2003 04:55 PM                     Hi Bobby, you should consider very carefully how you mount your new drive. Any two drives on an single IDE channel will default to the 'SLOWEST SPEED' of the two. So your new '133' drive may in fact run at '100' or even '66'. NEVER put a hard drive and a CD drive on the same channel for the same reason. Your easiest option may be to buy a new IDE controller card, Promise make good reasonable priced 133 cards for up to four drives. Put it in and it will configure itself. Attach any new hard drives you have on to it and they will run at their fastest speed, leaving your existing drives as they are. Where possible you should set your windows 'Virtual memory' to a seperate physical drive so it can be accessed at the same time and therefore faster that using the same drive or partition that windows is installed on. IDE drives can cope well with video capture provided every link in the chain is at it's optimum setting. Some software allows you to specify which drive the memory cache for capture should be placed. Again make this a physically different drive to windows for faster reading & writing. Finally make sure you have as few processes running in the background, XP has a huge number. Turn off everything you don't actually need and the difference will be very noticable. Using external interfaces will, in general, give lower performance than internal drives provided everything is set correctly.  |  IP: Logged Matt Hale Expert Film Handler Posts: 123 From: Vancouver, Canada Registered: Dec 2002 posted 09-28-2003 05:51 PM                        The critical component in any firewire drive that determines the speed is the bridge chip that converts the firewire bus interface into the ata drive interface. Most ata harddrives these days can sustain 45MB/sec +/- and firewire 400 can sustain 50MB/sec but most bridge chips can only do about 5-6MB/sec. The only bridge chip that can handle 50MB/sec is the Oxford 911, or in the case of firewire 800, the Oxford 922. It can be very difficult sometimes to find out what bridge chip comes in a case, but it sure pays to ask. My favorite type of firewire case is actually a no-name tiwanese import that is resold by several companies in north america, including OWC and Unibrain and various others. Its easily recognizable. The only harddrive I trust at the moment is the Seagate. Every Western Digital I have ever owned has died. Maxtors can be good, but its really hit-and-miss. Hitachi (formerly IBM) DeskStars are known as DeathStars for a reason too. Processor speed can also have a major effect on performace of internal and external drives. For example, the same firewire drive that manages 14-15MB/sec on my old 233Mhz G3 sustains 47MB/sec on my new 2x1.25GHz G4. Same drive and, for the sake of the test, same firewire card (an old Unibrain)  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 09-28-2003 06:53 PM                     I installed the new drive and am still have some of the same glitches with gaps being dropped out of the video when capturing. It makes me wish there were some way to slowly take the video data off the tape in binary form, but apparently nothing works like that. There are a couple other possible variables at play causing some of this trouble. I updated my Zone Alarm and Norton Anti Virus software to their latest versions. I assume I should have that stuff disabled when capturing. Also, the AC adapter for my camera is defective, so I have been running it with only the battery. Does video capture typically pull more juice than a typical camcorder battery can provide? As many hangups as there are with this stuff, I can see why the pros are still spending tens of thousands of dollars on rack mount hardware.  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 09-28-2003 07:53 PM                     Bobby, if you are running Windows 98 or ME, you'll never get it to run the way you want to. Something about how the memory resources are handled, I guess. For what it is worth, the person who wrote the DOS-based program we use for our on-air computers tried to write one that would work in a Windows 98 enviroment. He was not successful. Too many glitches. When Windows 2000 was released, he was able to make it work. From what I understand, XP, XP Pro, and 2000 handle memory allocations completely different than 98. I might be all wet on this, but people like Daryl is much more qualified to address your problem than I am. Hopefully what I said in the above paragraph will trigger a bell in Daryl's head.  |  IP: Logged Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 09-28-2003 07:57 PM                        Like Ken said above, try having your new drive setup as the only device on the IDE channel so you know wether or not the other device on that channel is causing your problem. So, for now... hook up your drive by itself on IDE2 as the master drive and see if you get better performance out of it.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 09-29-2003 12:17 AM                     So let me get this straight. I was under the impression you could have no more than 4 IDE devices installed in a computer system. Also, I have been assuming if you have a motherboard based IDE controller, then you would need to disable it in BIOS to install a new PCI IDE controller card. Ken, your comments suggest very much otherwise. If I can leave my existing IDE devices installed in my main board controller and then put the new ATA133 drive in a PCI controller then that might solve a big part of the problem. Seems worth a shot anyway since Ultra ATA 133 PCI controllers are not very expensive. I'll have to look a little harder at the Maxtor and Promise models. Of course another thing that has me suspicious is trying to capture video with the palmcorder only running off battery power. I really think there is something to this. While my AC adapter was still working, I did one video capture of about 20 seconds worth of footage. It did drop a single frame here and there, but not the big gaps of footage like it was doing running off battery power. I don't know. Maybe that might be a coincidence.  |  IP: Logged Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 09-29-2003 12:25 AM                        Newer ATA controllers (nearly all of the ATA133 controllers) can coincide with your onboard controller (you can use both at the same time). They do this by 'pretending' to be a SCSI interface card. Once again, if you've got an nVidia chipset based video card, avoid the Promise controllers.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 09-29-2003 04:28 AM                        Bobby, I ALWAYS use battery power when I capture and export. In fact, I haven't used my XL1's AC adaptor for a few years. All it does is sit there and charge batteries. I think the problem is that your wallet is too full. Try emptying it out (I'll take the contents) and all should work fine.  |  IP: Logged Ken McFall Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 615 From: Haringey, London. Registered: Apr 2001 posted 09-29-2003 05:03 PM                     You can insert another IDE controller card and it will be independant of the on board IDE controller. You have to remember that when they claim multi tsaking for a computer system they do in fact mean time sharing.... each 'system' is given so many clock cycles so you are never really running true multi-tasking. When it worlks it works very well.... Yes try and close as many background applications as possible as they all consume some clock cycles. Anti virus software when doing it job will be very intrusive, after all if its going to catch some illegal action then its got to be busy checking every write to disc! One of the beauties of windows is its ability to do so many things and interface with so much hardware.... but that's also its downfall. I have on my Athlon 2800 system.... Two 80 gig 8meg cache drives on IDE 0 & 1. IDE DVD writer as IDE 2 DVD Reader on IDE 3 On my pronise controller card I have, 80 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 0 80 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 1 60 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 2 80 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 3 They are paired for IDE performance so the 133 drives share a channel on the main IDE controller. The other drives on the Promise are mainly storage so are no so important. I have matched the drives for performance so the matching compliments their abilities and don't work against each other. The CD drives are on a channel on their own so don't affect the system performance. Hardware is just one side of the equation....you can chase your tail forever if you like.... but you'll never get a perfect system foir every situation.... belive me I've treid and spend a small fortune in the processs. I could have paid off our national debt if I'd not had a computer leeaching the cash from me! Time for a large G&T  |  IP: Logged

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