I hope this is the right thread for these questions...

My System: Athlon 3200 XP with 1 GB of RAM, a 40GB EIDE HDD for Windows XP Home Edition and an 80 GB EIDE HDD for video editing work. Video card is an nVidia 5900 w/ 128MB. I have a Pinnacle systems Dazzle 90 (NTSC), the software is Studio v9 SE. The Dazzle 90 connects to the PC via USB 2.0 connection. All video capturing right now is from an analog camcorder.

The problem: Capturing from the camcorder drops a great deal of frames as it tries to write to the HDD. I am assumng the dedicated 80GB HDD cannot write fast enough, its interface is EIDE. I need to resolve this so I'm not dropping frames in the transfer. Pinnacle didn't mention any particular HDD xfer rates in their marketing blurb on the product box, however the documentation suggests SCSI drives.

Questions:
- Can I get the performance I need to write to the disk with the EIDE interface?
- Would I get better performance from a non-USB Pinnacle capture board? That is, get a Pinnacle capture board installed instead of using the Dazzle 90 USB device.
- Is SCSI the only way to go? Would two Serial ATA (SATA) HDDs in a RAID-0 configuration give me the write performance I need? SCSI is really expensive.
- Pinnacle warned in the documentation about using HDDs that are too big. What maximum sizes should I be looking at? Its hard to find smaller drives, and if two drives are setup in a RAID-0 config, then thats a larger disk to work with - is that going to be too big?

I would appreciate anyones guidance on these issues. Thank You.

John