workprinter drive setup

[Justin Lovell]

hey hey,

I have my workprinter being built as we speak, and I am trying to decide what drives I will need to buy to be able to get the workprinter XP running smoothly on my system.. I have heard mixed opinions about setups that work, and just want to be good to go for when the unit arrives. I am running an AMD Athlon 1800, 1 gig ram, a 20gig (system drive), and a 80gig (Maxtor 6L080J4 Maxtor 80 GB 7200 RPM ATA 133) hard drive.

My understanding is that I need:

1 RAID 0 drive controller
2 ATA hard drives (I'm thinking 80-100gig each?... i have 60+ rolls to bring in) w/ 8mb caches.

So I was looking here to purchase the equipment, could someone let me know if i'm on the right track or if they think this is a good price, or would be able to recommend somewhere else to buy from?

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... image1.y=0

they also sell RAID controllers, but i think these may be overkill for what i need, and may not be compatible with ATA drives (also heard i should be able to get them cheaper).

I've also heard that people can capture directly into their laptops.. but heck i don't think any laptops have RAID controllers....?!


thanks guys,

jusetan

[Lunar07]

Check the following link:
viewtopic.php?t=8268&highlight=raid

In summary:
Use a RAID card. Agreeement is that Promise cards are good. I have the Promise FastTrack TX2000 with two IDE channels. You can use up to four IDE drives on it. I found it on eBay.
For a RAID-0 system, you install two hard drives - one per each IDE channel, and both configured as Master. Get 130-160 gig drives. They are cheap. The Promise card above supprts ATA 133 drives.
If you want to, after capturing using the RAID system, you can move the whole thing into a FireWire or USB2 removable drive to edit etc....

TigerDirect is a good place to buy from. I personally like Western Digital and Seagate drives.
For a Promise card, eBay is a good source. Then you can dowload utilities and/or any BIOS upgrades from http://www.promise.com
So, yes you are on the right track :-D

hey hey,

I have my workprinter being built as we speak, and I am trying to decide what drives I will need to buy to be able to get the workprinter XP running smoothly on my system.. I have heard mixed opinions about setups that work, and just want to be good to go for when the unit arrives. I am running an AMD Athlon 1800, 1 gig ram, a 20gig (system drive), and a 80gig (Maxtor 6L080J4 Maxtor 80 GB 7200 RPM ATA 133) hard drive.

My understanding is that I need:

1 RAID 0 drive controller
2 ATA hard drives (I'm thinking 80-100gig each?... i have 60+ rolls to bring in) w/ 8mb caches.

So I was looking here to purchase the equipment, could someone let me know if i'm on the right track or if they think this is a good price, or would be able to recommend somewhere else to buy from?

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... image1.y=0

they also sell RAID controllers, but i think these may be overkill for what i need, and may not be compatible with ATA drives (also heard i should be able to get them cheaper).

I've also heard that people can capture directly into their laptops.. but heck i don't think any laptops have RAID controllers....?!


thanks guys,

jusetan

[MovieStuff]

I've also heard that people can capture directly into their laptops.. but heck i don't think any laptops have RAID controllers

Not sure about Raid arrays in a laptop but I know of several people using RAM disk programs in their laptop with great success. Such programs are about $50 and can be downloaded from the internet in minutes. You need a lot of RAM but, hey, you can never have too much RAM, you know? The RAM disk program takes a part of your RAM and makes your computer think it is a hard drive. It is blindingly fast -much faster than any RAID set up- and can be an efficient way to pack more capture speed into a computer too small to add a Raid array to. You capture to the RAM disk and then copy the file to a physical drive. Figure about half a gig of RAM per 50 feet plus your operating system RAM requirements.

Roger
http://www.moviestuff.tv

[Lunar07]

After trying out many Ramdisk packages - the most stable one is at:
http://www.superspeed.com

I've also heard that people can capture directly into their laptops.. but heck i don't think any laptops have RAID controllers

Not sure about Raid arrays in a laptop but I know of several people using RAM disk programs in their laptop with great success. Such programs are about $50 and can be downloaded from the internet in minutes. You need a lot of RAM but, hey, you can never have too much RAM, you know? The RAM disk program takes a part of your RAM and makes your computer think it is a hard drive. It is blindingly fast -much faster than any RAID set up- and can be an efficient way to pack more capture speed into a computer too small to add a Raid array to. You capture to the RAM disk and then copy the file to a physical drive. Figure about half a gig of RAM per 50 feet plus your operating system RAM requirements.

Roger
http://www.moviestuff.tv

[Justin Lovell]

so would you agree that I could use a ramdisk package with my 1 gig of ram, instead of purchasing a RAID controller? Would seem pointless to purchase a controller if Ram Disk effectively does the same thing.

All I would really need to buy is one 160gig/200gig HD to add to my current setup.

correct non?

jusetan

[christoph]

correct non?

well, your system prolly needs about 300-400MB to run decently so you could dedicate 600MB to a RAM disk and capture just about one roll of super8 in DV codec. after that you will have to copy it to a harddisk to free up space. you could of course write a script that copies and deletes the frames just after got captured if you have some experience with computers.

on the other hand, these days you can set up a 400GB raid0 for like 250 bucks
++ christoph ++

[MovieStuff]

so would you agree that I could use a ramdisk package with my 1 gig of ram, instead of purchasing a RAID controller?

I would suggest still keeping a gig for your system overhead, even if it states only needing 512 megs. The reason is that each time you open another window or activate some new process, you eat up RAM. Better to have more than you need. I would have two gigs. One gig for your system requirements and one gig for captures. That should leave a bit of "fudge" factor in the system.

Roger

[Justin Lovell]

any other recommendations on where to buy the components in canada, or in the US, with low shipping charges?

thanks for all the support,

justin

again, i was looking at http://www.tigerdirect.ca (I can drive "down the street" to their warehouse for direct pickup).. i don't think they sell the RAID controller i need though, their card is more expensive.