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Subject Author Date
Hard disc upgrade Carla Schneider 08-29-2004
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Posted by Carla Schneider on August 29, 2004, 5:31 pm
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 Is it a good Idea to buy an old laptop (e.g. Pentium II 333Mhz) and replace the
4-6 Gb Harddisc with an 80Gb one ?
Will there be problems with the bios about a disc larger than 8 or 32Gb ?
I want to run linux to capture 4 hour nonstop video with a firewire
cardbus card from a dv camera without using tapes.
Processing of the video will be done later on a different system, so no
need for a fast cpu.



--
http://www.geocities.com/carla_sch/index.html


Posted by Quaoar on August 29, 2004, 11:36 am
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> Is it a good Idea to buy an old laptop (e.g. Pentium II 333Mhz) and
> replace the
> 4-6 Gb Harddisc with an 80Gb one ?
> Will there be problems with the bios about a disc larger than 8 or
> 32Gb ?
> I want to run linux to capture 4 hour nonstop video with a firewire
> cardbus card from a dv camera without using tapes.
> Processing of the video will be done later on a different system, so
> no
> need for a fast cpu.
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.geocities.com/carla_sch/index.html

When you say "video capture", you should be aware that machines of this
age have very limited video processing capability. On a state of the
art (for the time) 266P2MMX laptop with a Trident video card with 8M
video RAM, the best capture rate at 240x180 pixels was about 15 frames
per second at 16bit color, limited by the video/cpu combination. There
was never any question of reaching 30fps and never any question of a
larger capture window. I seriously doubt that even with comsumer grade
external hardware that your machine is much more capable. Certainly a
very large HD would be required if the computer were capable, but HD
transfer rates are also limited by the DMA available and with a large
video data stream the sustained transfer to disk might well be too low
for your use.

Q




Posted by Good Man on August 29, 2004, 1:13 pm
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> Is it a good Idea to buy an old laptop (e.g. Pentium II 333Mhz) and
> replace the 4-6 Gb Harddisc with an 80Gb one ?
> Will there be problems with the bios about a disc larger than 8 or
> 32Gb ? I want to run linux to capture 4 hour nonstop video with a
> firewire cardbus card from a dv camera without using tapes.
> Processing of the video will be done later on a different system, so
> no need for a fast cpu.

get a USB 2.0 card for the laptop, and use an external USB 2.0 hard-drive
of whatever size you wish.


Posted by Barry Watzman on August 29, 2004, 5:10 pm
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There's no guarantee that a laptop that old, that came with such a small
drive, will support a very large hard drive. In fact I'd say that it
probably won't, but the only way to know for sure is to try it or to get
some documentation on the particular laptop.

Also, that might be a marginal CPU for that application, I'd be more
inclined to want to use a CPU over 500MHz for any video application, and
even 500MHz might not be fast enough, but it's the "bottom end"
guideline for MPEG playback (using software decode) and video applications.


Carla Schneider wrote:

> Is it a good Idea to buy an old laptop (e.g. Pentium II 333Mhz) and replace the
> 4-6 Gb Harddisc with an 80Gb one ?
> Will there be problems with the bios about a disc larger than 8 or 32Gb ?
> I want to run linux to capture 4 hour nonstop video with a firewire
> cardbus card from a dv camera without using tapes.
> Processing of the video will be done later on a different system, so no
> need for a fast cpu.
>
>
>


Posted by Howard Chu on August 29, 2004, 5:07 pm
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Barry Watzman wrote:
> There's no guarantee that a laptop that old, that came with such a small
> drive, will support a very large hard drive. In fact I'd say that it
> probably won't, but the only way to know for sure is to try it or to get
> some documentation on the particular laptop.
>
> Also, that might be a marginal CPU for that application, I'd be more
> inclined to want to use a CPU over 500MHz for any video application, and
> even 500MHz might not be fast enough, but it's the "bottom end"
> guideline for MPEG playback (using software decode) and video applications.

Playback and capture have completely different requirements. My 5 year
old Sony VAIO PCG-F190 has a PII-366 in it and a Firewire port. It
captures DV video just fine, no dropped frames. This works easily
because the video compression is performed in the video camera, and all
the computer has to do is write the 3.5MB/sec DV datastream to the hard
drive. Since the original poster is also talking about using a DV
camera, I think there's no problem here.

I think the main question is whether that cardbus card can run at full
speed in such an old laptop. If it doesn't have 32 bit cardbus support,
then that card will be running much slower; I only got 1MB/sec
throughput on a PCMCIA SCSI adapter (16 bit PCMCIA vs 32 bit cardbus).
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support


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