help

[gonwk]

Hi Chewey,

I have come across some 300Gig Maxtor with 16Meg Cache ... for $87 including tax ... I went crazy and bought me 5 ... I plan to use them as external drives ... I don't really need that many for moving files around ...

Q: Do you know if they are dumping them because newer drives will become SATA? If so may be I should keep only couple and return the rest ... I have only 15 days from the date of purchase for a full refund!

Thanks!
G!

[Chewy]

that's a little extreme, I would just keep 2, I am reccomending e-serial for everyone with a new computer and extra serial ports. They are even sticking e-sata on mobos now.

[gonwk]

THANKS Chewy.
G!

[Chewy]

choose the external cases carefully

[NightTran]

5

[locoeng]

That is over a terrabyte of storage, nice.

[katzdvd]

gonwk,
<center>

Bill Gates, Circa 1981: "640K ought to be enough for anybody"

</center>


katz

[locoeng]

[Mike89]

Chewy. You gave me suggestions about Shrink outputting to a different hard drive.

Is there also a benefit if two hard drives (non SATA) are hooked up together on one IDE 80 pin cable?

[Chewy]

Even if drives share cables, things are faster because one drive is only being used for reads, the other only for writes, worst case scenario is a drive trying
to access data from one part for reads and write to another part at the same time. A 16 meg cache may burst at 133MB/s or 150MB/s(sata1), but we are talking gigabytes and newer drives do well to put out 40MB/s sustained transfers when reading or writting, not both.

windows does all this reading and writting when it boots up, a properly configured computer only loads
a few hundred megabytes to ram and page file.

[Mike89]

Cool. Both my drives are on SATA so I already have separate cables. A friend of mine has two IDE Hard Drives on one 80 pin (master and slave) so I was wondering if he should do the separate drive thing too (Shrink outputting to different HDD from the one with the DVDD ripped files for those who didn't know what I was referring to). Thanks for the info.

[Chewy]

Mike,
I always rip to my system drive, actually a data partition, but in this case we will assume no partition. I let shrink output to another drive(hopefully on a seperate cable). After checking out the transcode I then delete the rip.
My object is to leave my system drive as clean as possible, windows and your programs love a clean well organized drive. Every few weeks I clean out the oldest movie files, but by then I have verified that the burns play fine.
Once in a blue moon I delete all video and defrag my data drive.

[katzdvd]

a properly configured computer only loads
a few hundred megabytes to ram and page file.

what do you consider a "properly configured computer" - details please?

[Chewy]

a power user setup running/booting lean and mean

back when I first got into this video stuff, I read a guy's website about setting up a dedicated video machine, remember we were lucky to have 1 gigahertz cpu's, 256 megs of ram and small slow hard drives. He proposed
loading your computer, finding what programs and drivers/codecs worked best. Then reformatting and only loading what was absolutely necessary for video work, nothing else. These machines were standalone, no internet.
Today we take much more powerful machines and load them with so much crap they end up being no faster.

a good case in point is my current machine, my bench times have increased as I loaded ati catalyst drivers, microsoft net, and nero vision stuff and lord knows what else, I am getting ready for a clean install and takeing it back off the internet.

[katzdvd]

a good case in point is my current machine, my bench times have increased as I loaded ati catalyst drivers, microsoft net, and nero vision stuff and lord knows what else, I am getting ready for a clean install and takeing it back off the internet.

All good points; I understand where you are going with this. I too want to load & run a lean, mean, burnin' machine (don't we all)! My only problem is that it seems almost impossible to run a pc "standalone" off the net anymore, because of the continual upgrades needed for all the programs/ driver updates/ firmware/bios updates & so much more...

Tho, I guess you can always burn most of the updates to cd & transfer them over, or use a cable/wireless/other connection