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View Full Version : Computer people: A hard drive question



Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 08:39 AM
OK, I'm a bad computer nerd. I used to read anandtech, thresh's firingsquad and <cough> Tom's Hardware guide every day and I knew my computer hardware. Now? Not so much. I'm way behind. So here is my question:

I'm looking at a hard drive and it says "SATA 3.0Gb/s". Now I know what SATA is and I know for a fact my good old ASUS motherboard (a7nx something) has a SATA controller. What I don't know is do all SATA hard drives work with all SATA controllers? Specifically, will my older board work with this newer hard drive? Will I get the maximum speed out of the HD? Also, these perpendicular drives seem to be driving the price down a bit. Should I wait a few months for the prices to level? Right now you can get a 320 gig drive for $94 on new egg. That seems awesome to me, but my last drive was 200gigs for a little over $100 and that was over a year ago.

Widescreen
9/14/2006, 08:57 AM
Yes it will work but you won't get full performance from it because of the old SATA controller. You could buy a PCI SATA controller at the same time and get full performance. Oh, and Newegg is awesome.

Edit: Here's a link that further clarifies.
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7591-0.html?forumID=26&threadID=204773&messageID=2189858

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 09:15 AM
Ah - thanks. I figured that was the answer. Still, it's going at 150MB/s while my parallel drives are going 133 MB/s. So in theory, I could possibly see a speed increase.

jkm, the stolen pifwafwi
9/14/2006, 09:20 AM
Ah - thanks. I figured that was the answer. Still, it's going at 150MB/s while my parallel drives are going 133 MB/s. So in theory, I could possibly see a speed increase.

make sure you buy 2 because SATA supports raid 0 and 1. came in handy when one of my raptors crashed. didn't have to hear the spouse scream about all her missing data because it was mirrored...

MiccoMacey
9/14/2006, 10:28 AM
OK, now I KNOW you guys are just making stuff up...:D

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 10:37 AM
make sure you buy 2 because SATA supports raid 0 and 1. came in handy when one of my raptors crashed. didn't have to hear the spouse scream about all her missing data because it was mirrored...
Crap, I feel lucky that I can even buy ONE with it being football season and everything. The only things I have on my computer that's worth anything are the family pictures, which I back up to my ipod and DVD every so often. I would sort of hate to lose my recorded games though.

Let's see if NewEgg works their magic and gets it to me by tomorrow. I didn't pay for next day but for some reason I sometimes get my stuff by the next day. If it's in Dallas by tonight I'm golden.

RacerX
9/14/2006, 10:39 AM
BTW - I'm done with UAB. I'm getting ready to chapter UW.

RacerX
9/14/2006, 10:39 AM
Slacker

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 10:56 AM
I converted UAB to DIVX last night. It took me like 4 nights to do. The first try took 30 hours just to convert, but come to find out I needed to resize the video since AVIs don't have anything in them telling you the aspect ratio. The second try (after re-editing the entire game again since VirtualDub doesn't seem to be able to save your cuts so you can load them up later) come to find out I had to install the LAME mp3 encoder on my machine for the audio. So i did. But in order for VirtualDub to see it, I had to restart the program thus losing all of my editing. So I was done for that night. The 3rd time I ran tests and got everything I needed installed BEFORE editing the game for a 3rd time. It appears that it worked this time. I re-encoded it differently by only deinterlacing and resizing the video so I only needed one pass. It only took 8 hours instead of 30. It looked great when I checked it this morning.

Now I need to start working on doing that for the 2004 season.

BlondeSoonerGirl
9/14/2006, 10:57 AM
...The only things I have on my computer that's worth anything are the family pictures, which I back up to my ipod...

You put pictures on your iPod?

*snicker*

NormanPride
9/14/2006, 10:58 AM
What are your game-recording setups? That's the next thing I want to do, and then get into video-editing. I love all that stuff.

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 10:59 AM
You put pictures on your iPod?

*snicker*
Yup, that ipod is pretty handy to use for backing up stuff like that. I only use about 15 gigs for music so I use the rest for backing up pictures. if I ever get my CDs converted I'll, probably have to rethink that strategy.

Widescreen
9/14/2006, 11:52 AM
I converted UAB to DIVX last night. It took me like 4 nights to do. The first try took 30 hours just to convert, but come to find out I needed to resize the video since AVIs don't have anything in them telling you the aspect ratio. The second try (after re-editing the entire game again since VirtualDub doesn't seem to be able to save your cuts so you can load them up later) come to find out I had to install the LAME mp3 encoder on my machine for the audio. So i did. But in order for VirtualDub to see it, I had to restart the program thus losing all of my editing. So I was done for that night. The 3rd time I ran tests and got everything I needed installed BEFORE editing the game for a 3rd time. It appears that it worked this time. I re-encoded it differently by only deinterlacing and resizing the video so I only needed one pass. It only took 8 hours instead of 30. It looked great when I checked it this morning.

Now I need to start working on doing that for the 2004 season.
You need a hardware-based encoder. I converted the entire UW game to MPEG2 real-time. It also converts directly to DIVX. Looks awesome and was very painless.

RacerX
9/14/2006, 12:03 PM
Norm, so you're converting all the MPEGs to some other format with compression? What will that do to the quality of the game recordings? Will the difference be negligible?

GrapevineSooner
9/14/2006, 12:11 PM
I've converted some small stuff from MPEG to DIVX before. Hadn't really noticed much of a difference. But any video with lots of motion (especially sports) is going to magnify whatever difference there is.

That's another reason why if you can, get a hardware based encoder on your capture card or TV tuner. Encoding is done on the fly with minimal loss of video quality due to only compressing the video once.

Sooner_Bob
9/14/2006, 12:13 PM
I downloaded the UAB game via that torrent file from demonoid the other day and the quality seems just fine to me. I'm going to burn it to DVD and see how it looks on my Magnavox DivX player . . .

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 12:37 PM
Norm, so you're converting all the MPEGs to some other format with compression? What will that do to the quality of the game recordings? Will the difference be negligible?
It really looks quite good. Now keep in mind that my mpeg2 recording is from an analog connection from my dish receiver. So the signal comes from somewhere at dish and gets encoded as mpeg2 then gets decoded by my receiver then gets encoded back to mpeg2 by my TV card. You can't expect perfection with all this compressing and uncompressing.

The cool thing about it is I can get a whole game onto one single sided DVD. There are no chapters or menus though (unless there is some standard I don't know about). I'm thinking about getting a DVD player that will play mpeg4 files so I can watch the games in my bedroom when I'm bored.

I'm deinterlacing the original because the deinterlacer on XBMC (the software I'm using on my hacked X-BOX) really isn't very good, probably because of the hardware limitations of the X-Box. The deinterlacer I'm using is pretty dern good too. So now when I watch the game I won't have all of the interlaced artifacts to bug me. Or at least that's what my theory is - I haven't viewed it on my xbox yet.

RacerX
9/14/2006, 12:39 PM
....so I can watch the games in my bedroom when I'm bored.....

I would've never typed that.

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 12:40 PM
I've converted some small stuff from MPEG to DIVX before. Hadn't really noticed much of a difference. But any video with lots of motion (especially sports) is going to magnify whatever difference there is.

That's another reason why if you can, get a hardware based encoder on your capture card or TV tuner. Encoding is done on the fly with minimal loss of video quality due to only compressing the video once.
I've got a pvr-250 which has an mpeg2 encoder built in. My computer barely knows when I'm recording something. It's nice. I wish it had the DIVX encoder on it though. Does your DIVX encoder deinterlace at the same time?

RacerX
9/14/2006, 12:40 PM
And all that stuff sounds way complicated.

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 12:40 PM
I would've never typed that.
Yeah, another case of going ahead and pressing the submit button anyway.

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 12:42 PM
And all that stuff sounds way complicated.
It really wasn't that bad. Here is the tutorial I used:

http://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=244151

RacerX
9/14/2006, 12:53 PM
It really wasn't that bad. Here is the tutorial I used:

http://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=244151

Yeah, that cleared it right up.:D

RacerX
9/14/2006, 12:54 PM
I think I'll stick to my caveman ways.

Norm In Norman
9/14/2006, 01:31 PM
Well, if you don't have something hooked up to your TV that can play mpeg4 files, it wouldn't be worth it. The cool thing about that tutorial is it uses all free software.

RacerX
9/14/2006, 04:16 PM
I just want to get some of the mpeg2s you have before you compress them and stuff.