Hi, someone told me that I need an SCSI harddisk in order to convert VHS to VCD. How true is this? That same person mentioned that the frames per second on a non-scsi harddisk is only 19 fps, and should reach 29.

-- none (buwiset@hotmail.com), June 23, 2002

Answers

SCSI is best because you can have guaranteed sustained rates of 40MB/s or more, for example with UltraFastSCSI wide (80MB/s for UltraFastSCSI-3, and 160MB/s for the newer Ultra160 SCSI). But it is also expensive: a common UltraWideSCSI hard drive will cost at least twice its IDE counterpart for the same size, and u need to install SCSI adapter cards. Nowadays however there are IDE HDDs that are just comparably as fast using ATA100 interface with 100MB/s transfer rate peak, so it's not the problem it once was. You can get RAID-installed EIDE motherboards that support ATA133, with the correct drivers and at least 7200rpm HDDs transfer rates can be as fast as what SCSI can do. HDD transfer rate is only one of several factors that will affect frames-per-sec when capturing or playing; you have to look at others like whether you have the most current drivers, how your computer is configured, whether or not your HDD was recently defragmented, your FSB speed, your processor speed, etc.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), June 24, 2002.