Which HD to use as primary?

[dummy2001]

I have a standard 80gb Maxtor hd in my system now and just got a WD 80gb caviar w/ the 8mb buffer that should generally be a better drive. I got it to use for capturing video for editing and burning to dvd. I'm wondering if I should use to the new drive as secondary to capture the video to or use it as primary since that is where the OS and applications will run from?

Also, is it most efficient to format the capture drive as a full 80gb or chop it up into smaller partitions? Thanks.

 

[sniperruff]

the 8mb cache one will be faster for everything.

 

[dummy2001]

Correct. Back to my question, will I do better for video editing to capture to the faster drive or run the OS and applications from it?

 

[gsellis]

Unless you are doing HD, both are fine. DV needs Read/Write at 25Mb/s (little b). A 10MB write speed is more than enough. The best drive is the one with the least on it.

 

[Zucarita9000]

You should have this setup:

IDE0 (Primary): Your OS drive as master. All your apps installed here. Also, your 1st optical drive as slave.

IDE1 (Secondary): Capture HDD as master. No partitions. 2nd optical drive as slave.

It is always best to have one hard drive per channel. You'll get higher write speeds thi way.

I suppose you'll be using a consumer DV type camcorder. Those use the DV25 norm, wich records video at 25Mbps. That's about 3MB/s. Virtually any hard drive can capture DV. Keep in mind that a full tape takes up 13GB, so you might wanna get a large (~200GB drive).

 

[dummy2001]

Thanks for the replies. Actually I'm just using a cheap capture card to convert 8mm and vhs tapes over to dvd, but capturing it all to the same drive was a bit much I trink and I was getting brief gaps in the capture. Thanks again.