On Sun, 24 Jan 1999 04:14:31 GMT, "Public Works - Environmental" wrote:

>Eric Cheng wrote:
>> As you might already know, most add in 1394
>> boards require high end SCSI HDs such as Seagate Cheetah, Quantum Altas II.....

>Not necessarily. The Electronic Mailbox folks have
>confirmed Ultra DMA system drives in PCs can
>provide flawless capture and playback IF:
>
>1) the DV board is either
> --a Canopus DV Raptor
> --a Truevision Bravado DV2000
> --a Radius MotoDV
>
>(Not the MiroDV300, the DPS Spark+, or the Adaptec 8945)
>
>2) the PC has:
> --a 350Mhz Pentium II processor
> --a motherboard using the Intel BX chipset (100Mhz bus)
> --preferably an NVidia TNT graphics adapter with 16MB
> --128MB of SDRAM
>
>Now this is my guess:
>
>The Sony VAIOs would probably drop a frame on rare occasions
>particularly if you are using the lower end model with only 64MB
>of SDRAM. I'm betting the higher end models would work okay.

Hmmm - while I do not (and did not, above...) recommend
using the program drive for video capture/play, I disagree
with some of the above E. M. quote... With an AMD K6-233
and a 5400rpm IBM Deskstar 8 UDMA drive as the program
drive (without defragmenting it first, as an experiment...),
using the Spark card (not "+"), I was able to almost fill
the program drive with captured video, and play it back
from the same drive. Of the two large files captured, the
second was perfect, and the first dropped a couple of frames
in one location only. I'm convinced that good UDMA drives
can be used reliably for NTSC mini-DV capture/play (without
RAID...) if the drives are dedicated to video files, and if
they are kept defragmented - regardless of the conditions
given by the E. M. folks (so long as the resources are not
TOO limited...;-)