HOW DO I? "Dedicated 7200 RPM drive for video" an

[OnTheWay]

at the moment I have 2 x 200gb hard drives.

what improvement would

# Dedicated 7200 RPM drive for video
# Additional 7200 RPM drive for realtime export to disk

make?

and how do you dedicate a drive to video?

thank you, if any one has a link explaining why and how, or could explain fully, it will be a great help!
thank you....

[Ian in Northampton]

OTW: if I understand correctly, the principle involved here is only in the capture process. In order to avoid dropped frames, choppiness etc., the incoming video needs to be streamed as smoothly and consistently as possible to the hard drive. This has two implications. The first is that, as the application runs and e.g. virtual memory is occasionally invoked, some disk access is required. Thus if your application and virtual memory space are on the same drive as you are capturing your video to, capture will occasionally be interrupted by other processes while the heads move to a different part of the disk and then back again - giving rise to the possibility of less-than-smooth capture. The second implication is that, ideally, you will be laying your incoming video down to a single, continuous space on your hard drive. If the incoming video needs to halt temporarily while the heads move to a new part of the disk, again, there wil be an interruption to the flow. That's why the strong recommendation is a) to decicate a drive to video capture, and b) to defrag your video capture drive regularly - to maximise the amount of contiguous space on it. How do you 'dedicate' a drive to video? Simply, you just designate that as the drive to which you will do all your capturing. In my set up, all the applications are on 40GB physical drive C: and all video is captured to a separate 80GB physical drive D:. It works for me. Hope that helps. (By the way, I'm deeply jealous of your 2 x 200GB drives - every couple of projects, I have to delete pretty much all the contents of the D drive before I can start another..)

[OnTheWay]

So if I have 2, then all i do is capture to the second one, and therefore thats it, its a dedicated hd for capturing?

cause thats what i do already, but read on some sites about editing pc's saying they have a dedicated video hd.

You may be jelouse of 2 x 200gb but the video one is full already had loads of tapes that needed capturing to pc, just need to find time to edit them to finally put onto dvdr.

[Ian in Northampton]

Yup, that's my understanding - dedicate a disk to capturing, and ipso facto, that's your video disk. I don't think there's any more to it. And re jealousy: yup, I'm still jealous of your capacity - but not so jealous of the amount of time it must take to defrag those puppies...