hard drive concern

IIMvideo wrote on 3/26/2003, 6:46 PM
Hi everyone, i have an issue with a new hard drive i just bought. It's a Maxtor 120gig with 8meg cache. I've captured and printed footage with no problem over the last week or so. I just recently captured a couple of big files which brought it almost to max. When I play these files(2) - 90min lengths)in media player they crash it. When I load them into VV4 they sometime crash or the video loads up on the timeline, but the audio building peaks idles at 0% for a while then moving extremely slow, not normal! I know how long it should take with this size file. I tried printing some of that footage to another drive in my system and no problem. Could it be a problem with the drive, or do I need to constantlydefrag the drive before and after captures/prints?? It almost seems like anything that sits on that part of the drive gets corrupted. I had a file I moved there when I got the drive, and when I went to play it yesterday it acted the same way. Any suggestions on what it could be? I'm currently defraging the drive. I have another 80gig(seagate) and never had this issue. Thanks in advance.

Comments

pconti wrote on 3/26/2003, 6:54 PM
Is it the same drive as the drive VV is using for the application? VV needs some temporary space to operate. If you max the drive it won't have that space.

What's the speed of the drive? Is it NTFS or FAT? What OS are you using?

These are some of the questions that will need answers before anyone will be able to take a stab at the problem.

Thanks and good luck.

IIMvideo wrote on 3/26/2003, 6:55 PM
Oh, i forgot to mention.. I can't copy anything from this drive to another! It sit idle again and tells me it will take 2 hundred and something minutes to copy, completely ridiculous, thanks.
pconti wrote on 3/26/2003, 7:02 PM
I'm guessing you have a 7200 rpm IDE drive. Am I correct?
IIMvideo wrote on 3/26/2003, 8:31 PM
I'm using xp, yes its 7200rpm/ata133IDE. It's not my boot drive. I have 4 drives operating in my machine. thanks.
RBartlett wrote on 3/27/2003, 1:43 AM
Could be the PSU isn't upto this newer drive.
Have you distributed the load as evenly as you can across the (usually 2) runs of 4pin Molex power conns?

I'd be using a 430 watt PSU minimum, irrespective of whether you have a 60W PIV or 80W Athlon.

Does it really take 200 minutes to copy. I find that Win2000 gets the ETA all wrong with file sizes over a couple of gig. Irrespective of whether the transfer is IDE to IDE, LAN, or FireNet etc.

Test whether it might be a high current problem by temporarily unplugging some of the other drives (assuming you don't RAID them in any way?).

Lastly, check that the drive is being recognised correctly by the controller you have it connected to. e.g. ATA133 UDMA6 (?) and see if you might benefit from running a Maxtor tool to health check the drive.

There are some DiskTest programs on the web to performance test a drive for the remaining empty area of the drive. I'd expect to get 40 to 35Mbyte/sec sustained data transfer rate from your 120GB drive (the cache helps random seeks/writes for bursts and sexier search algorithms compared with 2MB).
Grazie wrote on 3/27/2003, 2:01 AM
Just my 2 pennies worth. I've got 2 x 120 external Maxtors. When I wanted to transfer some >4gb files I was informed it would take something like >600,000 minutes!

I ignored it . . .

In reality it took about 15 minutes.

Grazie
foredogg wrote on 3/27/2003, 2:12 AM
I've had a similar problem copying data from a DVD drive that was not the master drive and when playing movies on it, it would stutter and get out of sync.

When I moved the SVCD over to the master DVD drive it copied over really fast and played smoothly. I have a second 200GB Western Digital and it has no problems playing 12GB video files in Windows Media Player or bringing it into VV3 on my 80GB boot drive. So maybe it has something to do with the IDE cables? just my guess.
Travis
Frenchy wrote on 3/27/2003, 9:57 AM
IIMVideo:

You said: "I just recently captured a couple of big files which brought it almost to max." Do you mean that the drive is almost full? If so, this could bring on some playback and other file management problems, especially if, as pconti pointed out, the system files and temporary files are also on this same drive.

Something to consider

Frenchy