Performance difference with extra hard drive?

[chetnet]

Hi All!

Finally got a new pc and hoping to ease my frustration in the video department. I haven't tried doing anything yet, but was curious if one of the given scenarios below would make a difference in performance, mainly capturing performance. See new pc specs below. Oh, I do capture with firewire in case that matters here.

Scenario 1 - existing hard drive
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Capture using existing 160GB SATA drive. Note that when I capture, I will not be doing anything else on pc, and space shouldn't be a problem.

Scenario 2 - add older hard drive
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I can add my 'old' additional hard drive, 140GB ATA. This would then be my 'video' hard drive. I will, however, need to use the adapters, etc, in order to get it to work in the new Dell. Will I see any improvement in capturing using this setup, with adapters and all?

Thanks, and I'm welcome to listen to any other areas of improvement, but let me say that I've always managed good burns, etc on my piece of crap Compaq, even though it took forever.

[Mihai]

second hard drive is the way to go.
make the faster, larger drive your "video drive". and yes, the improvement is fantastic. also, you must care a lot for your video drive. keep it as unoccupied as possible, defrag it several times a week etc.

[chetnet]

second hard drive is the way to go.
make the faster, larger drive your "video drive". and yes, the improvement is fantastic. also, you must care a lot for your video drive. keep it as unoccupied as possible, defrag it several times a week etc.

I think I will end up buying a 2nd, new SATA drive, since I don't want to reinstall the OS, which is what I'd have to do in order to make the added drive the main drive, correct ?

Or, should I not waste my older 140GB ATA hard drive, and just use that for video? I assume performance would still be better than sharing the SATA drive?

And I just found that my damn Sony DRU-510A won't fit in the 9100 correctly so that's going to go to waste it appears. Oh well, I got good use out of it.

Thx,
Chet

[chetnet]

Let me follow-up with this basic question......

1. What kind of improvement would I see comparing:
New SATA vs Older ATA hd going thru controller card

2. Would I notice a difference in capturing performance:
SATA 16MB Cache vs SATA 8MB Cache

Drives mentioned above would be the 'video' hd.

Thanks!
Chet

[Mihai]

well if you can afford the bigger, faster hd for editing go get it, but the other s-ata would do just fine (better than p-ata anyway). by no means trash the 140 gb ide drive, use it as a system drive (say 40gb as drive c and 100 gb a partition for data). but 2 separate drives is absolutely necessary.
there must be a tutorial here on the forums about that, see if you can find it, it's more technical than i can be, if you're interested.