Slow write speeds (2mbs) on old harddisk?
 

Hello all.

I'm configuring a capture system.

For now its equipped with a P3-1000 wil 512mb ram and 40gb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm.

I'm upgrading the system in the future with a ATI Radeon Vivo 9200, but for now I'm running some test in Win98 with a Pinnacle DC10+ card.

Running a read/write test gives me 2200kb/s write and 2900kb/s read. In my opinion this is much to slow. This machine should easily be able to achieve read/write of +10mb/s.

I enable DMA in the bios, but no difference. What else can couse these slow speeds?

I tested capturing on medium quality (fitting the speed range) and got hundreds of los frames, so something must change.

Two common causes of slow rates include:
- AV software running
- capturing to the system (typically C:) drive

Yeah, both were happening. There was nothing running in the background. I just did not expect that those things had such a big impact in the write speeds

Video capture is always best to a dedicated drive that has nothing else going on with it and that is generally less than around 75% full. Fragmentation can be an issue as well, especially as the drive fills.

Depending on how the OS is setup, it can take a lot of bandwidth with cashing to disk, etc.

And AV software may be checking everything you try write to the disk taking a lot of clock cycles as well.

Please let us know if these make a difference for you. While adding a separate capture drive will take a bit of time, you can probably just turn the AV off for a quick test.

BTW: which OS are you using?

You may also want to check that the hard drive is running with the fastest available ATA speed (not sure if it would be ATA66 or ATA100 for the setup.) It's usually displayed on one of the BIOS screens when starting up.

USE DMA in Device manager
 

I enabled DMA in the Device Manager, opening the properties of the selected IDE disk.

After this was done, I tried the speed test and the C drive did 48000kb/s write speed and an even faster extra harddrive did 60000kb/s. So it is solved. And these are the speeds I was counting on. Until now: 0 dropped frames

A Pentium III is too old and slow. Even a P4 with less than 2ghz is looking for trouble. I used a powerful P4 1.8ghz for years, but it had other high-end specs to make it workable for capture.

512mb RAM will never work. Anything under 2gb is pushing your luck.

Win98 will never work due to FAT and not NTFS. Win2K minimum, but blah. WinXP best. The write speeds can also be caused by the OS.

Seagate during the 40gb era was terrible. The only decent IDE Seagate I remember using was the 120gb, and I still have one. SATA is another story, where Seagate is probably the best drive maker (quiet, long-lasting). Hitachi good but noisy, WD mix of noise and failures.

All around, that's a bad build for video work.

The main reason I waited until 2001 to start capturing digital video because P3 just wasn't cutting it. I watched the world of digital video capture for years before it was viable (and for under $2k just for the computer with card). My best friend at the time pulled the trigger 6 months early and got a Mac G4 tower with a Matrox for like $5k. I think he still regrets that purchase decision.

Windows 98 will choke if 2GB of RAM is installed. :laugh:

Honestly those old Pinnacle DC series cards aren't worth the hassle. I used them when they were current and they never worked right back then. Many of them had that silly Zoran MJPEG hardware compression chip that never got proper DirectShow drivers for Windows 2000. the actual ADC on the card appears to be the very common Phillips SAA7110 series chip.

The best OS for them back in the day was Windows NT 4.0 (since that at least uses NTFS for storage), and even that was annoying because of how obsolete/limited that OS was in circa 2000 hardware.