On Mon, 23 Nov 1998 00:33:30 +0000, Guy Morgan wrote:
>In article <365d694d.2759793@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu>, Neuman-Ruether
> writes
>>On 22 Nov 1998 16:19:41 GMT, johntel@aol.com (JohnTel) wrote:

>>>Any experience or advice about using the new 7200 Ultrawide IDE drives with
>>>digital cards, such as, Pinnacles DV300?

>>It will probably work fine...
>>(I would suggest using two drives, though - one for capture,
>>one for editing-to/playing-from.)

>I have just (last week) taken delivery of a DV300 system with IDE
>drives. I'm reserving judgement on some aspects of the system
>(particularly P4.2) but I can confirm that the drives capture via
>DVTools without dropping frames.

Interesting...;-) (I keep forgetting that the PAL mini-DV data
rate may be somewhat higher than it is for NTSC, making things
a bit more difficult for the drives...) BTW, unlike P-5/5.1,
I really like P-4.2 (maybe 'cuz I learned on it...) - I haven't
gotten used to P-5.1, and I suspect I won't bother with it,
even though it has some useful feature upgrades... (know anyone
who wants a copy of Premiere 5/5.1? ;-).

>The drives are IBM 16 Gig items and I have three in the system with one
>partitioned to give a 2Gig C:\ drive. I intend to use 2 as capture
>drives and keep project files on the other one (which has the C;\
>partition on it).

This is the arrangement (maybe with the 14-gig IBMs instead...) that
I was going to use on my next computer - though, since I don't need
the built-in SCSI adapter, I use the DPS Spark (same hardware minus
the SCSI adapter...).

>I've only captured manually up to now. I'm told that the method which
>goes back and looks for dropped frames is much slower even when no
>frames have been dropped.
>MIV also dumps back to the drives quite happily.

As an experiment once, I captured to my (un-defragmented...) and
un-partitioned program drive (IBM Deskstar 8 UDMA) with two large
AVI files (that nearly filled the drive), then played them back
from the program drive. This is a hard test, but only a few frames
were dropped from only one place in only the first AVI file (these
AVIs were both close to 2-gigs in size). I was then convinced that
UDMA drives could be OK for mini-DV work.
BTW, I did recently receive an e-mail from someone who pointed out a
possible frame-drop problem if the drive goes into "Cal mode" while
capturing, but I had assumed that UDMA drives did not do this - any
info on this?