Hard drive question « Videomaker Community Forums

harmonicamaster
Member

I just installed a Seagate (Ultra ATA 7200 RPM, 16MB Cache) 500GB drive for video work on my 4-year-old computer. While capturing and editing it's slow and pretty much unusable. Any ideas of what I did wrong? Thanks! David

Posted 4 years ago #
tonsofpcs
Member

Is this on a separate IDE channel than your windows hard drive (I assume that you are using windows)? [If it's on the same cable, it's not.]
Windows tends to like to poll its drive constantly, any antivirus software installed will multiply that access, slowing the channel down [if not the entire bus].

Posted 4 years ago #
harmonicamaster
Member

Thank you so much for your help. Yes, it's on the same cable and I have antivirus. Hmmm... I noticed a separate cable came with the drive, so I guess I need to open up the computer and see where I can plug it in. Thanks!

tonsofpcs Wrote:
Is this on a separate IDE channel than your windows hard drive (I assume that you are using windows)? [If it's on the same cable, it's not.]
Windows tends to like to poll its drive constantly, any antivirus software installed will multiply that access, slowing the channel down [if not the entire bus].

Posted 4 years ago #
kkmac
Member

If it is on the same cable, make sure the jumper on the hard drive is set to the correct position (master, slave, cable select). 2 hard drives sharing the same ide channel will also create problems. Cable select if your best bet if your unsure what to use.

Posted 4 years ago #
tonsofpcs
Member

It is best to not have your video drive on the same cable as your system hard drive. I would put your primary DVD/CD drive on the same chain as the system drive and ove your video drive to the other chain (as master, if able).

Posted 4 years ago #
brandon0409
Member

You typically have three IDE channels on your motherboard.
Floppy disk IDE (the small one)
IDE 1 - Typically you connect the System drive to this one.
IDE 2 - Typically you connect the CD-Rom here.

Here is how I used to have my computer set up.

On IDE 1:
I have my System drive and my CD/DVD-ROM connected on one cable.

On IDE 2:
I have both of my Storage drives connected.

WHY?
The simple way to explain it is... Lets say you had The system drive and your storage drive connected to the same cable in the same IDE port.
Now say you wanted to move a file from your system drive to your storage drive.
The information must travel down the cable to the motherboard, then to the processor, then back to the IDE port and back up to the Storage drive while at the same time the remainder of the file is still being transfered from the system drive to the motherboard. Basically, it is congestion. The cable is handling twoice the amount of information.

If you have the system and storage drives on separate IDE ports the file has a nice clean tunnel from the system drive down to the motherboard, to the processor and into the storage drive with no congestion.

EX
To transfer an 800MB video file from one drive to the other with the drives connected to the same cable, it took me 5 minutes.
To transfer the same file with the drive on different IDE ports it took 30 seconds.

I'm sure my explaination was clear as mud so I hope it helps.

Posted 4 years ago #
harmonicamaster
Member

Thank you so much. You are all great!

brandon0409 Wrote:
You typically have three IDE channels on your motherboard.
Floppy disk IDE (the small one)
IDE 1 - Typically you connect the System drive to this one.
IDE 2 - Typically you connect the CD-Rom here.

Here is how I used to have my computer set up.

On IDE 1:
I have my System drive and my CD/DVD-ROM connected on one cable.

On IDE 2:
I have both of my Storage drives connected.

WHY?
The simple way to explain it is... Lets say you had The system drive and your storage drive connected to the same cable in the same IDE port.
Now say you wanted to move a file from your system drive to your storage drive.
The information must travel down the cable to the motherboard, then to the processor, then back to the IDE port and back up to the Storage drive while at the same time the remainder of the file is still being transfered from the system drive to the motherboard. Basically, it is congestion. The cable is handling twoice the amount of information.

If you have the system and storage drives on separate IDE ports the file has a nice clean tunnel from the system drive down to the motherboard, to the processor and into the storage drive with no congestion.

EX
To transfer an 800MB video file from one drive to the other with the drives connected to the same cable, it took me 5 minutes.
To transfer the same file with the drive on different IDE ports it took 30 seconds.

I'm sure my explaination was clear as mud so I hope it helps.

Posted 4 years ago #