How much would a dedicated scsi drive improve video capture? I currently capture to an ATA drive, but this contains my system / applications, and capturing is a little jerky. Is a clean scsi drive the answer? Thanks.

[Kozmik]

An ATA drive is fine for capture. A SCSI drive is better, though. Capturing will nearly always look jerky, but as long as you don't get dropped frames it's fine.

[memento]

ATA should be fine. Optimize it so that you have one huge continuous chunk of free space. Jerkiness couls easily be a result of your capture device rather than your HD. I use a sony DVMC over firewire and it captures full resolution DV (720x480) to the same hard drive that all my apps and dosc are on and it is full 30fps. When I was using my turboTV card it would only capture 320x240 at 30fps. Anything larger would be choppy, regardless of the HD.

Agreed. Ultra-ATA is fine. I have two IBM Desktar 75 gxp's (one of them, of course, came stock with my G4), and I've never experienced a single dropped frame.

(for what it's worth, onvia.com has these drives cheap. that's where I got mine)

John