CompuServe Messages

Dean, I bought the Seagate Baracuda specifically to avoid the TCALs! Thanks for the thought though. Bill Metzger ———————– Bill, part of your problem might stem from a Thermal Recalibration disruption on your hard disk. Digital video is very sensitive to hard drive TCAL's. I have had to replace several otherwise good hard disks with "AV" versions to rid myself of frame drop problems. Dean ————————————— I just saw your other remarks. I was told the drives TCAL about every 5 secs. I loose 20 frames about every 10 minutes – all at once, and another frame every 700-800 frames (25 secs). I'm using a QLogic Fast PCI IQ SCSI card, on an Intel Pentium 90 motherboard. That's fast SCSI! They claim the drive will sustain 8MB/sec rates. Because I was gonna do video capture, I set out to buy the fastest PC possible. The problem is in the DOS file system, and potentially in how the capture program does I/O. If it's doing I/O with 512 byte blocks, it'll be slow. It should be using LARGE block sizes and double buffering. Blocks of 64 KB to 1 MB come to mind. Double buffering allows you to write a block while filling the next. I don't know if DOS/Windows will permit this type of behavior. Bill