Hi,

I was told by the people at Pinnacle that SCSI hard drives produce better results than UDMA hard drives. UDMA is faster than SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 but slower that SCSI-UW (Ultra-wide). The person I spoke with told me that video captured with a UDMA drive will look choppy and SCSI-captured video will look smooth. Is this true? Any comments on this?

-- Ed Lauzon (edward@pennygrader.com), November 21, 1999

Answers

Hi Ed, The real thing is that practically *ANY* SCSI is better than UDMA (even SCSI-1 and SCSI-2) and not only is it a matter of speed, but the fact that SCSI works with its own "brain", and UDMA needs the CPU a lot (although far less than the oldish PIO mode) makes SCSI a better option.

By now you'd be expecting me recommending you SCSI over UDMA. Well, that's not the case! With today superfast processors, you won't see any difference. The quality of the video depends on the capture-card, and the HDD can only influence whether you have or not dropped frames. It's more than normal nowadays to achieve drop free captures at the lesser compresion ratios with any K6/pII 233+ processor, a good UDMA disk like the Quantum, and a decent motherboard. Yes, SCSI is better, but the overprice is worth to be paid only if you're planning to capture video, navigate the internet and play a .MP3 song all simultaneously! Absolutely pointless!!

The last one: if buying an UDMA disk, always prefer one with a big buffer (avoid Seagate: it's a good brand, but has the smallest buffer which unqualifies it for videocapturing) Good luck!

Matias///

-- Matias (petrellm@telefonica.com.ar), November 23, 1999.