On Sun, 06 Dec 1998 18:48:04 GMT, royc1@ix.netcom.com (Roy) wrote:

[....most deleted....]
>Not meaning to sound combative and with all respect, Robert, to say
>that "all drives have performance dips in them," does not answer the
>question. Are you saying you've tried it, and UDMA drives don't live
>up to hype that surrounds them?
>
>I wouldn't be surprised either way, again, I just haven't had the need
>to know yet. Just curious.

Well, I have not been using UDMA drives for capture and playback
regularly, but I would not hesitate to build a computer using them.
The 3.5-3.6 MB/sec constant mini-DV data rate is *well below* the
*minimum* sustained data rate of many good UDMA drives (which also
do not "recalibrate", so far as I know...). The test that I did
to check their capability was to fill my UDMA *program* drive
(un-defragmented...) with mini-DV captures. I had space for
two AVI files of about 2 gigs each. The first had a couple of
dropped frames in the first AVI captured (with the DPS Spark card,
using ver.2 Spark software) - but it didn't "stop". The second,
which very nearly filled the drive, had no dropped frames.
Playback of both files to the camcorder was perfect (except
for the frames missing in capture...). I think it is certainly
reasonable to expect perfect capture/play with single, dedicated,
unfragmented UDMA drives used for mini-DV (no raid, SCSI, etc.
required...) BTW, my program drive is an IBM Deskstar 8 UDMA...