Fast forward loses frames on a specific Hard drive.

3 replies [Last post]
rurouni
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Joined: Aug 5 2001

Hi, i bought a DVnow lite capture card and i use Windows 2000 as OS.
There is something i don t understand.
In my PC i got an old crapy Western Digital HDD 5400rpm and an IBM 7200rpm HDD.
The first time i tried to capture with Fast Forward, i could pilot my cam really easily but as soon as i started recording on my IBM HDD the video became jerky and i lost almost all my frames.
I tried on my old drive and that worked fine.
I defragmented my drives and the result is that still don't work on my fastest drive.
I knew that the problem comes from my HDD because when i exported(in premiere) a Divx video on this drive the video was jerky when i read it, and when i moved this same video on the other drive, everything was fine.
so please HEEEEEEEELP!!!!

Rurouni

FAST
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Joined: Dec 4 2000

Dear rurouni,

Insufficient speed of the hard drive. You should be capturing to a DMA-compatible hard drive, with a spin-speed of 7200rpm or more and a minimum data transfer rate of 4 MB/s, eg. ATA-66 or ATA-100 drives.
DMA (Direct Memory Access) hard drives need to have DMA activated by doing one of the following:
a) Install DMA drivers (the manufacturer will be able to tell you if this is necessary) OR
b) Activate the DMA setting in Windows. Go into Control Panel/System/Device Manager/Disk Drives, then go into the Properties of the drive you want to capture video to. Click on Settings and see if there is a check-box which says DMA. If there is such a check-box and it is unchecked, then it probably needs to be checked, because most modern hard drives are DMA-compatible. Do not check the box without first consulting the hard drive manufacturer, because if you activate DMA on a non-DMA hard drive it can cause serious problems. However, on most systems, checking the box will cause the drive to operate without any problems.

Romeo
Technical Support

rurouni
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Joined: Aug 5 2001

As I said, I use Win2K so DMA is activated by default(I verified).
So the problem can t come from the DMA activation.
The other fact is that the capture works fine with a Hard drive(Western Digital 5400rpm) which shouldn't be as performant as the other(IBM 7200rpm).
The DMA is activated for both drives.
Thanks.

Rurouni

A. V. S. productions
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Joined: Jan 15 2001

Hello
I have an IBM 14GXP (7200rpm) that will not perform on my system with other driver, it losses frames and keeps reporting ‘disk full errors’ when there is tonnes of space left (tonnes = over 8Gb).

Years ago (a couple anyway) CV did a report on IBM drives that found problems when mixing them with other drives, so I swapped my IBM for my daughters small Quantum and now everyone is happy. My daughter has a big fast drive that she will never use & I don’t have drive errors, I boot from Quantum & edit on Maxtor’s

Steve