On Thu, 30 Jul 1998 04:01:34 GMT, oucomputers@geocities.com (George C. Ou) wrote:

>DPS claims they require SCSI, this seems silly when you can get 80%
>performance in IDE compared to ULTRA2 SCSIs like the cheetah costing
>1/4 the price excluding controller. Don't tell me you have to have
>cheetah performance when DV only requires 3.5 MB/s.
>
>I want to know if anyone out there is using an IDE drive with a
>firewire card. If so, what card?

Fast IDE drives work fine with the Spark card - I can even capture
on my "C" drive with the IBM Deskstar 8 UDMA drive (rated minimum
sustained data transfer rate of just under 6mb/s - the mini-DV
transfer rate is about 3.6mb/s, making it a fairly easy job...).
I got scared by the DPS site when I started and bought a pair of
9-gig SCSI drives and $300 SCSI controller, but I have found them
to be overkill. I would get a Deskstar 8 for your "C" drive, and
2-3 Deskstar 8 or 14's for capture/play drives (it is useful to
capture on one drive, then edit to another for playback) - you
can even use spare space on the "C" drive for AVI files when
needed... Keep the drives "clean" (unfragmented), and you should
have no need for SCSI, raid, etc. with mini-DV (which can make
mini-DV editing cheaper than high-quality captured-analogue
computer editing...;-).