slow striped video drive

Actually your processor and RAM may be part of the problem, even though you can compile video with slower processors the playback may lag if your CPU and RAM don't work well together, even though you have 384Mb of RAM you don't have that much available to you while your system is running, I would increase the RAM to 512Mb total and see if the problem resolved itself. Also if your M/B would allow it consider moving up to the 1.4Ghz TB or XP range, there is a big performance difference below the 1000Mhz range. You've got the hardrive capability but also your M/B may not be allowing the full capability of your hardrives. Ryan






Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

Well, UDMA 4 is ATA66. That is, the striped drives have a burst transfer rate of 66MB/s. If you have them plugged to the same IDE channel as master and slave, the drives will have to share that 66MB/s between them. So, if you really need 42MB/s sustained rate, 66MB/s burst rate is cutting it close. Try putting the striped drives to dedicated IDE channels.

BTW, I assume you got the speed requirement from the formula 768*576*4*24 / 1048576 = 40.5MB/s. (768*576 pixels, 4bytes per pixel, 24fps, divided by Mbyte). If that's the case, even the latest and greatest ATA100/ATA133 drives in RAID0 and separate IDE channels would have a hard time giving you a <i>guaranteed</i> 42MB/s minimum transfer rate. Check this THG <A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02q1/020305/wd1200..." target="_new">chart</A>. The minimum rate for two striped WD1200JB's would be 2*24400kB/s = 48800kB/s = 47.7MB/s. Again, that's cutting it close.

I'd recommend applying some (lossless?) video compression algorithm for those movies. That would reduce the size of the movie files, thus reducing the sustained transfer speed requirement.


<font color=red><b><i>You want WHAT on the #$#%## CEILING?!</i></b></font color=red> -Michelangelo

thanks for the reply!
i have my system drive as prim master and my 1st striped drive on prim slave and my 2nd striped drive on sec master.
when you talk about losles compresion, do you know of a good compressor? i use premier 6 and i need my files to be broadcast quality. also do you know a good harmles hard drive benchmark (freeware if possable)?
thanks

Well, don't know much about video formats nor Premiere. I suppose Microsoft AVI with RLE compression is lossless, but don't know about its colour depth, could be 8bit only. Just my guess, though.

For read transfer rate benchmarking, <A HREF="http://www.tcdlabs.com/hdtach.htm" target="_new">HD Tach 2.61</A> is probably the most common one. <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/vgrinenko/DiskSpeed32/" target="_new">DiskSpeed32</A> is similar, but IMO a bit more thorough read benchmark.


<font color=red><b><i>You want WHAT on the [-peep-] CEILING?!</i></b></font color=red> -Michelangelo

Working with video all day I would recommend using the HuffYUV codec which is freely available. It allows lossless compression and normally compresses by 2-3 times. This can be used for realtime capture at full PAL resolution on most processors above 400mhz. I use it on a non raid system with a IBM 60GXP 40gig hard drive and it doesn't drop frames (btw using a p4-2ghz).

Hope this helps