How can I determine the RPM speed of my hard drive? Is there a free utility somewhere to do this? Video capture recommends 7200rpm. I have no idea what my disk is since it came pre-installed.

-- Brad Grant (bradandsteph@home.com), November 14, 2001

Answers

I don't know of a utlity that can do this, but I do have 2 suggestions. One is that you can call the manufacturer of your PC and give them the model number and ask them about your disk drive. The other option is that you could always open up the case and look for the model number on the drive. All major disk drive manufacturers have web pages where you can search on the model number and get all kinds of information back on the drive, including its speed. I have heard of people recording video with 5400 rpm drives, but since I have a 7200 rpm drive myself, I can't give any personal advice on any problems you might face with 5400 rpm drives. 7200 is probably better.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), November 15, 2001.

...or you can totally disregard the 7200rpm/5400rpm. You can just focus in determining if your harddisk can cope up with capture requirements.

You can go to Canopus' website (justedit.com), and scan around the downloads. You should be able to find a utility, the simplest being EZDVTEST. This utility will give you the read/write speed for your hd. If you see 'green', your HD should be more than adequate for capturing.

Just an FYI, I'm using a 5400rpm drive (maxtor) and EZDVTEST showed I can do a sustained write of 25MB/sec on this drive...and that's more than enough for capture, especially since I'm doing DV.

-- the_bum (no_email@usa.net), November 15, 2001.

download VirtualDub from www.virtualdub.com . Its free and under GNU. Once you install the program and run it (or look in the directory where you installed the program you will see 2 exes - one is AuxSetup.exe) click on benchmark, select your harddrive and click the first test button. That will tell you the write and read speed of your hd.

-- ..Dimitrius.. (dgofman@yahoo.co.uk), November 20, 2001.

Great. Thanks. VirtualDub worked. It didn't tell me the RPM but it did verify the drive is fast enough to sustain DVD at 30fps without dropping frames.

-- Brad Grant (bradandsteph@home.com), November 21, 2001.