I'm planning on reformatting at some point, just to start over. I'm also thinking of doing a little upgrading and possibly adding some storage to my system.

I currently have, as an OS disk, the 80GB Western Digital PATA w/8MB buffer.

First question: how much difference would I see if I went with the 74GB Raptor drive? I do quite a bit of video editing/conversion, DVD authoring, and a lot with video in general. Would this help?

Second question: will I have any problems installing an OS on a drive on an SATA card? Will that decrease performance? Will it be able to live peacefully with other SATA drives on the card? I'm not interested in having a RAID at this point.

Third question: given the above activities, what other upgrades would you guys suggest? I'm really trying to speed up conversion speeds, as it takes the longest time. Would better RAM help a little? I currently have slightly better than generic PC2100 RAM. Would I benefit from some Crucial 3200?

Lastly: has anyone here done HD video capturing? I've asked Bruno some questions about ATI's card, which I don't think I'll be able to use because I don't really want to "upgrade" to XP. I'm also not at all a fan of ATI's windows software (not Bruno's fault ). I'm actually not looking for any software beyond "tune and capture." I'm mainly interested in getting widescreen, high-quality copies of my favorite shows this coming season, and watching them on my TV. I'm less interested in scheduling and PVR software for watching on my computer. I've got plenty of space for HD captures, and the know-how to convert them, but don't know what hardware is recommended. I'm hoping for somethign sub-$200.

Thanks for any help on so many questions As usual, I'll probably go straight from here and find the perfect solution to all my problems I'll let you all know if I do

*edit*
Well, this time I did find the solution that looked the most appealing to me, but sadly it only works with Linux. You Linux people out there should take a look at it, though. It seems nice.

So what are you starting with computer wise? Software wise?

Sorry about that. That would be helpful, wouldn't it?

AMD 2100+ w/Zalman HSF
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
1GB of some kind of RAM, chips say Samsung at least
OS drive: 80GB WD SE PATA
Files drive: 250GB WD SATA
Extraneous drive: 25GB WD
ATI Radeon 9700 AIW w/Zalman HSF
Sony DVDRW DRU500
Toshiba DVDROM
old sound blaster
old second video card for second monitor
Antec 550W PSU
Lian-Li PC75 case

I think that's about everything in there. Oh yeah, I have a floppy drive

As far as software goes, I'm running Windows 2000. For video conversion and such, there are a few programs I use. These include:
Premiere (sometimes)
TMPGEnc (lots of times)
VirtualDub
NanDub
BeSweet
MKVToolNix
Graphedit
and others.

I also create DVDs with DVDlab, which sometimes takes a bit of time to compile everything. I'd also love to get Lame to speed up.

That's about the extent of my CPU intensive tasks. The latest game I've played on my system is Silent Hill 3, and I don't need to worry about supporting the latest FPS, because I don't play them.

Thanks.

Which adaptors are which drives attached to?

When your machine is maxed out, how much memory is in use?

right now the PATA drives are on the normal motherboard IDE connectors, and the SATA drive is on the built-in SATA controller on the motherboard as well.

Good point about observing memory usage. I have a feeling I won't have to worry about that. The task manager, at least, doesn't show that much is in use when I'm converting using TMPGEnc. I certainly have a lot of headroom in that area.

Quick answers :
First question : yes, you will see a notable difference in speed with the Raptor drive, especially if your virtual memory also swaps on that drive (and I imagine it would). I would also do any converting and stuff like that on this drive before writing away the end result to the other HD.

Second suestion : you shouldn't have any problems with putting the OS on a SATA drive. If the SATA interface of your motherboard is directly implemented in your chipset the drive would appear in your BIOS like any other HD. However, if your motherboard uses a third party chipset to implement SATA, you will need to install a third party driver when installing XP (by pressing F6 and poining towards the driver when the installation wizard asks you to)
In any wase, it shouldn't be any problem.
I've only got experience with Intel chipsets though, I have no idea how well this is implemented in an AMD chipset. But I can't imagine it would be a whole lot different.

Faster RAM is always a good thing, but you'll have to check what the maximum speed of RAM that your motherboard supports is. Obviously, if your motherboard only supports PC2100 RAm, you won't see any benefit from using faster RAMs. The other thing you can do to speed up stuff is by running in a RAID0 configuration, but you already stated that you don't want to do that. The last thing I can think of is upgrading your CPU, but I don't think you want to do that because I'm sure you'd have mentioned it otherwise.

Can't help you with the HD capturing issue, but maybe the Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U is a solution for you. This little unit captures video and converts it on the fly in real time to mpeg1, 2, 4 and DivX. It costs about $140 so it's well within your price range.

If you do a lot of video editing, then you're going to want a very large drive a lot more than a 74GB Raptor. Sure, it spins at 10K and has pretty fast head movement, but 74GB vanishes very fast when shuffling large video files around.

Also, the Raptor drives are more optimized for random seeks than for streaming large files. I have an assortment of 8 different brands/models here, and the two types of Raptors are the slowest streamers..

I'd go for a 250GB+ drive instead, still SATA of course, simply because the protocol is so efficient, the cabling is excellent, and at one-channel per drive it hauls a**.

Cheers

Thanks to both of you. I'll think about it a while longer, probably after I get the HD tuner card, which is my first priority. At the moment, I'm looking at the DVICO FusionHDTV 3. From what I've read on forums, it's one of the front-runners, and does software decoding and native MPEG2 encoding. They also have some nice downloadable demos, including the actual playback program and some sample files, mostly so you can see if your system will be able to keep up. They looked gorgeous!!

As for the rest, I think I'll probably go with another 250GB drive like Mark suggested. I hadn't thought about that aspect, and it makes sense, especially since that is the only type of large task that I'll be using my machine for. Will I at least notice an improvement with the 250GB SATA drive over my current OS drive?

Also, woudl it make more sense to move all my SATA drives to a controller card, to make room for more expansion, or make use of the motherboard ports? Does anyone know of a good, not-too-expensive SATA controller card?

Archeon, thanks for the replies. My mobo supports the high end stuff (PC3200 and Barton AMDs), but I haven't been sure of the price vs increased performance benefits. I recently asked about upgrading the processor, but was told I wouldn't see much of an improvement. At this point, I'm not so sure myself.

I guess I'll take this one component at a time. If I feel like upgrading and want to sell my old stuff, there's always ebay

Thanks, guys.

I've been thinking about disk upgrading, too, and I have a basic question...

My motherboard has, according to the specs on the ASUS website:

South Bridge:
2 x UltraDMA 100
2 x Serial ATA
Promise 20378 RAID controller (optional):
1 x UltraDMA 133 support two hard drives
2 x Serial ATA
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, Multiple RAID

My question is pretty simple... Which is the faster and/or more reliable interface? Serial ATA or Ultra DMA? When I get a new hard drive, should I consider going SATA with it? Right now I'm doing the UDMA with an 80-conductor ribbon cable. I think those tiny little SATA cables are pretty neat and I'm itching to use them.

Hehe, that's about what I was asking as well. I hope someone has an answer.

And yeah, I only have one SATA drive in my machine, but that one tiny red cable is so much more attractive than anything else in my box, even my silver rounded IDE cables.

I've used SATA drives for more than a year now. I haven't had any problems with them. I find them just as stable as IDE drives.
To me this is a no-brainer : go serial ATA. It's the future anyway, and it already works very good, at least as good as their little IDE brother.

Good to know the connection is reliable. What about speed? Is there a speed improvement over UDMA?

Dignan, one other thing. If you decide to go SATA, and go for a large drive instead of the Raptor drive, maybe you should consider going for one of those new Maxtor Maxline III hd's. They go up to 300Gb, but more importantly, they have 16 mb of cache and support native command queuing. I've read several reviews about NCQ, and the speed improvement that can be gained by using this is in some situations as big as when you make the jump from a 7200rpm drive to a 10.000rpm drive. Just read this review on Anandtech about it.

Maybe you can have your cake AND eat it too. Of course, this WOULD require you to change your motherboard to a chipset that supports NCQ, OR buy an expansion card that does. But in any case, it's something worth considering.

No speed improvements as of yet, mostly because almost all SATA hd's (except for the Seagates and those new Maxtors I've been talking about in the above post) are just IDE hd's with a parallel to serial bridge chip. So they can't be faster than their IDE brothers, it's exactly the same drive.
The only benefit right now is the thin cable. However, if you would decide to buy one of those new NCQ supported drives, AND you've got a motherboard chipset that supports it as well (i915 or i925x), it's a whole different story alltogether.

As for relieability. I would say they equally (un)relieable as IDE drives. They should be, as said above, they are the same drives. (for now still anyway)

I had taken a look at that drive. Very impressive, I must say. I'm normally a Western Digital buyer, but to be fair I haven't really given Maxtor a try.

But you're right, it looks to be the best of both worlds. I get a giant drive, and some reviews I've read rate it as almost as fast as Raptors. 16MB is pretty good too

I think that when I eventually go this direction, I'll get a good controller card (I'm going to research those now), and the 300GB Maxtor. That would put me in at about 650GB. I'm on my way to a TB! Woohoo!

*edit*
I've been trying to research this controller card thing, and I think I need some more help. I'd like to stick to a good brand, but the only ones of these that I recognize as being decent companies are Adaptec and Promise. The Adaptec cards are too expensive, and I can't figure out if the Promise cards have NCQ, becuase their web site isn't working for me. Anyone else? Tony, could you reboot the internet for me? It would be a great help. Thanks

I don't think those new Maxtors fully exist in the retail channel yet, but they do look nice on (virtual) paper.

Native command queuing is a nice refinement over the Tagged-Queuing that the Raptors and Deskstars already have, but there's not a lot of O/S support out there for either form yet.

Under Linux, it makes very little difference since the O/S already sorts the queues rather effectively. Under another O/S your mileage will vary.

SATA interfaces are faster than PATA, usually because the host controller chip buffers the register accesses locally at PCI bus speed, and only transfers them to the drive when needed. Even the few that don't work this way are still faster, simply because SATA PIO speed (1.5Gb/s) can be faster than many controller's PIO rates for command writes (120-600ns).

There are many native SATA drives available NOW, and not all of them are PATA with a bridge chip soldered on. I've got a good selection here, and like what I see.

(for newbies, I work on PATA/SATA/RAID drivers for much of my living).

Cheers

EDIT: one more plus here is that most SATA controllers are now designed with 66Mhz/64-bit PCI interface logic, and sometimes are even wired up that way on motherboards. I have one here that's on a 64/66 expansion card, with TCQ/NCQ/HQ/HWRAID etc.. Quite fast. With my drivers, anyway.

how would one differentiate between a bridged PATA and a true SATA? ideally it would say on the box or webpage, is this the case?

With any luck, I'll have one by next week

Many of the Highpoint and other cheaper controllers don't do RAID onboard. That's why they're cheaper. They also suffer a performance hit because of this.

Well, I don't really want to do any RAID configs. I just want a lot of large drive

Welp, got the new hard disk. Got a SATA drive by Western Digital, 200 gigs. Since it was a trip to Fry's, I probably paid a few bucks more than I really needed to. But there's just something nice about having it in your hands the same day you decide you want to actually buy it. Instant gratification and all that.

Interesting things I noted:

- The SATA connector that comes with the drive seems to include a "power" section, which in theory means I don't have to deal with those terrible molex power connectors any more. But no dice, it seems my motherboard or the connector or something doesn't supply power through the SATA plug, so I still have to use those awful old style power connectors. Sigh.

- Bios detects 200 gig, operating system thinks the drive is only 128 gig. Solution here.

Anyhoo, now I want to make this drive boot and have it be the only disk drive in the system. I want to copy my current boot drive over to it. Anyone have a favorite method for this that doesn't involve Partition Magic? I've done it before, a bunch of different ways, I'm just wondering if there's any fancy new tools to get this job done that perhaps I haven't heard about yet.

Edit: Never mind, the CD that came with the disk drive had a utility to do precisely that. We'll see how that goes.

Interesting. The utility that came with the Western Digital drive merely did a file-copy.

Which is a problem. See, it only copied the long file names, and did not preserve the corresponding short file names.

The system works, except for little things like... All the entries in the system registry that point to "c:\progra~1\micros~2" are now swapped with the ones that point to "c:\progra~1\micros~4". (In that example, it was "Microsoft Visual Studio" and "Microsoft Office" that got swapped.)

So I have to decide whether to bin the whole thing and start over with a true sector copy, or if I should just continue to try to repair every instance of configuration entries messed up by mismatched short file names.

I think I've nailed most of them, but I'll always have that uncertainty I'd missed one somewhere...

Yeah, the SATA power and data connector were side by side. The cable that Western Digital included with the drive was a unified plug that covered both the power and data connectors together. So I guess I assumed that it was supposed to be getting power from the motherboard somehow, and that the "legacy" power connector wasn't intended to be used except as a backup if you didn't have the right cable or something.

Acronis' Migrate Easy is excellent. The guys who make Partition Magic also have a similar program, but I thought Acronis' was better.

Bruno

That's odd. It must be something they've done recently. My 250GB SATA drive is about 8 months old now, and it merely shipped with a short cable with a molex connector on one end and the SATA power connector on the other. So it's basically just an adapter. However, my manual even advised me not to use the molex power connector on the drive. I always wondered why they put it there if they didn't want people to use it.

In the future, does anyone know if we'll be able to daisy chain these SATA power connectors?