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Chapter 1: Basic Concepts And Tips
10. What criteria should be considered when purchasing a hard drive?
1) Average Access and Seek Times (ms)
- time in milliseconds to find and retrieve data on the disk
- a digital video drive with numbers below 15 ms (under 10 ms is best)
2) Average Latency (ms)
- delay for the drive platter to spin to the correct position
- a digital video drive should have numbers below 6 ms and
drive spin rates of at least 7,200 rpm
3) Average Throughput (MB/sec)
- the consistent data rate throughput to the drive
- a digital video drive should perform at 5 MB/sec or higher
4) MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
- average number of usage hours before failure
- a digital video drive has a hard life because you are constantly reading and
writing large amounts of data with a high data throughput rate
- average MTBF should be about 300,000 hours, longer is better
For digital video a minimum 1 GB hard drive with <15 ms access time is
recommended. A SCSI-2 or Fast/Wide SCSI-2 PCI controller is required to transfer
these amounts of data. Of course, as you increase the quality of the video
compression and audio digitizing you also increase the needs of your system
components.
A list of Authorized Value Added Resellers and certified TARGA 3000 system
configurations can be found at the Customer Support section of the Pinnacle Systems
web site at: http://www.pinnaclesys.com
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