On 30 Dec 1998 23:29:01 GMT, dermich@aol.com (Dermich) wrote:

>I'm getting mighty tired of equipment "dealers" who can't answer basic
>questions about the stuff they sell...

Even the "mfgrs" sometimes don't seem to know...
(DPS gives bad drive advice for the Spark on their web
site...)

>Can anyone tell me if it is in fact possible to use a high-rpm IDE hard drive
>to capture video with the DPS Spark Plus?

Yes. Any of the high-quality recent UDMA drives should
work well - just keep them defragged. I prefer at least
two drives in addition to the program drive, so that big
files can be transferred to clean up drives (can be faster
than defragging, though avoiding deleting material on the
video-dedicated drives before more material is added can
keep the drives defragged...). Even "slower"-rpm drives,
like the IBM Deskstar 8 work well for NCTS mini-DV - no
RAID needed...

>Is it possible to avoid SCSI HDs
>entirely?

Yes!

>I've had 2 different answers from about 5 different dealers. Sigh.

That's why I bought two IBM 9-gig SCSI-II's and the Adaptec
2940UW when I first set up the Spark - and worried that even
those would not be fast enough...! Now they are for sale
(they were overkill...!).