In message , Laurence Payne
writes
Snipped...

This point is often made regarding using slow laptop drives for video
capture. In fact, it's often made by our own Tony Morgan :-)

Ahah... But with my new Dell XPS M1710 notebook it's noticeably faster
rendering than my old desktop with the same CPU Clock Speed. Although I
do concede that I'm using an external USB2 HD for capturing and
rendering the video.

But your point is taken Laurence.

Two or three of my friends, who are the most vociferous about slow
rendering sit for five or ten minutes then get bored and start doing
something else on their computer. One even starts on-line gaming and
moans just as loudly that his game runs so slowly :-)

--
Tony Morgan

"Tony Morgan" wrote in message
...
snip

Two or three of my friends,

You mean you have some?!! :~)

who are the most vociferous about slow
rendering sit for five or ten minutes then get bored and start
doing
something else on their computer. One even starts on-line gaming
and
moans just as loudly that his game runs so slowly :-)

Indeed...
--
"The problem these days is, people are so used
to instant coffee they want instant everything..."

On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 14:38:09 +0100, "Jerry"
wrote:

But surely the HDD (or it's motherboard controller) is now the
limiting factor now that we have hyper-threading and duel core CPU's
etc. It is now quite possible to obtain a real-time, full frame
preview purely on CPU power alone (meaning the HDD is reading only) -
no one has ever suggested that one can obtain a real-time render,
especially to the same drive that one is reading off, this surely
means that reading *and* writing to the same disk whilst rendering
has to be slower than reading from one and writing to another IYSWIM?

In some circumstances you can achieve a considerably FASTER than
real-time render. But I still doubt that disk performance would be a
limiting factor.

On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 15:20:18 +0100, Tony Morgan
wrote:

Ahah... But with my new Dell XPS M1710 notebook it's noticeably faster
rendering than my old desktop with the same CPU Clock Speed. Although I
do concede that I'm using an external USB2 HD for capturing and
rendering the video.

And as the notebook has an Intel Core Duo processor, an unqualified
statement "same CPU clock speed" is thoroughly misleading, isn't it?
NAUGHTY Tony :-)

And I'd strongly suspect that there's less chance of a glitch
capturing to the internal drive than the external :-)


When you get a chance, can you render an few minutes of video using
different combinations of internal and external drives? Relative
times taken would be very interesting.

Jerry wrote:

Not a direct answer to your question but would the Canopus
'FireCoder' (circa £269.08) card be of any use, although you will
need a PCIe slot?

Second from last product on this URL
http://www.planetdv.net/Content/By%5...turer/Canopus/



Almost certainly yes. I'm sending them an enquiry!

Thanks

Andy

Ok, what about real numbers instead of just talking and arguing? I could
test that on my own machine having 2 Gigs RAM and a very powerful Terabyte
RAID made with 4 different 7200 hard drives and able to produce 100
MBytes/sec up and down. I know that when I use a separate hard drive then
the rendering goes a little bit faster even in this case because 100 is
actually a linear speed, when I read/write to the same disk then it doesn't
go smoothly, the noise is much louder, the difference is the very first
percents although, not higher. If I test same on my laptop with one built-in
OR from my built-in to external USB2 drive then the second combination works
much faster. The built-in HD is able to provide 36-41 MBytes/sec "only", but
the searching/positioning takes time and it's much better when I use another
physical device to store the target file which is smaller and USB2 is not
critical for that case. Sorry, have no time right now, but probably I could
start some test rendering of 10-20 GBytes piece to compare both machines in
both ways. Realistically on 3.2 HT laptop 1 G RAM, 2.8 Dual Core Laptop 2 G
RAM and 3.2 HT crazy RAID server 2 G RAM = in al cases the speed is high
enough, I see in Vegas that it's even higher than the real time, people walk
faster. The quality using for this rendering was set to the best, NTSC,
etc.

Just D.

"Laurence Payne" lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in message
...
On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 12:35:21 +0100, Tony Morgan
wrote:

And what will that tell us about disk performance as a limiting factor
when rendering video?

It does give relative performance metrics for C: and the second drive.
And if you'd care to run a comparison using the Control Panel's
Performance console while actually rendering [1] - you'll see that the
console reflects what Sandra told you.

[1] Obviously you're going to have to change your rendering engine's
input/output drive to do the comparison.

And what will that tell us about disk performance as a limiting factor
when rendering video?