THIRD PURCHASE: The Hard Drive
All reviews by Jan Ozer PC Magazine
Veteran video producers gravitate toward the more expensive SCSI drives because of troubling memories of IDE's inadequacy. But two trends combine to make IDE drives a smart buy for many producers. First, there's the bigger/faster/better trend that has boosted the performance of all computer components. As IDE moved to EIDE and interfaces transitioned from ATA to Fast ATA and eventually all the way to UltraATA/100, transfer rates improved from mere kilobytes per second to rates in excess of 100MBps.
At the same time, transfer-rate requirements for video editing have actually dropped, courtesy of DV's compact nature. Back in the early days of video editing, professional systems such as those from Avid, Media 100, and TrueVision (which was susequently bought out by Pinnacle Systems) captured in motion-JPEG format. Producers often captured at 7MBps to 10MBps, because higher capture bandwidths translated to superior video quality. But to preview a transition in real time, a computer must simultaneously retrieve two data streams that might total 20MBps--a tremendous load.
By contrast, DV is derived from motion-JPEG, but it's a fixed-bandwidth format, requiring only 3.6MBps. To perform the same real-time preview, a DV system must retrieve only about 7.2MBps, a comparative breeze for most hard drives today.
The key benefit of EIDE, of course, is economics. The 60GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 costs AU$549, or AU$9.15 per gigabyte. By contrast, not only are SCSI drives more expensive, you also need a SCSI adaptor (or a system with an embedded adaptor), adding several hundred dollars to the sum. The SCSI drives we tested--the 36GB IBM Ultrastar 36LZX, the Quantum Atlas 10K II, and the 73GB Seagate Cheetah 73--ranged in price from about AU$1000 to over AU$2600. Combine a AU$2528 Atlas drive (73GB) with a AU$500 Adaptec 19160 and you get a cost of AU$41.48 per gigabyte--four times as much as EIDE. And neither benchmark nor real-world testing confirmed that SCSI is worth the extra cost.
On our High-End Disk WinMark 99 tests, though the DiamondMax trailed the Atlas, it still pumped 21.4MBps at the disk's inner edge, where performance is slowest--more than sufficient for DV editing. Our picture-in-picture, dual-stream testing confirmed this finding, as all drives successfully retrieved two DV streams for over eight minutes.
The DiamondMax had a slightly slower access time than the SCSI drives, but this proved insignificant when we compiled our 33-minute test video, since times for all the drives were within a 10-second range. More important, the DiamondMax rendered our test production to tape without dropping frames, successfully accessing and reading more than 200 source and temporary files in real time.
Of course, SCSI still provides a unique value in a range of ultra-high-bandwidth applications such as video servers, Web servers, and RAID drives. For dual-stream DV editing, however, 7200RPM EIDE drives like the DiamondMax offer more than sufficient performance at a much more attractive price point.
IBM Ultrastar 36LZX
Company: IBM Australia
Ph: 13 24 26
Price: AU$989
Rating:
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60
Company: Maxtor
Ph: 02 9369 3662
Price: AU$549
Rating:
Quantum Atlas 10K II
Company: Quantum
Ph: 02 9232 1999
Price: AU$2,528
Rating:
Seagate Cheetah 73
Company: Seagate
Ph: 02 9725 3366
Price: AU$2,649.
Rating:
4%
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