sda capture blog

first one was a worst-case scenario, the c: drive in the capture/encode/burn machine. luckily i had a notion it was going when i opened the case trying to troubleshoot this crap (thought maybe if i pulled one of the sticks of 512 meg and it stopped, the troubleshooting would be over). with the case open i could hear that a drive was "thunking" (louder than clicking) and that this coincided with a complete freeze of the software on the machine. definitely a drive dying, but i had to disconnect each one one at a time to determine that it was indeed the c: drive.

it took several tries to boot successfully after this, and i knew the end was near, so i stopped everything and tried to get everything off of the c: drive. unfortunately, this couldn't have happened at a worse time - i was right in the middle of importing dvd master files to the mac to prepare them for burning, so the mac had little room to spare. luckily i was able to get everything off in time, even given the extra burden of holding on to all those dvd master files at the same time. it was pretty scary, though, as i was forced to use the raid to hold important data, and the last time i played with disconnecting drives, the raid controller forgot about the raid and i lost all the data on it (that was what happened to my ecco speed run, if anyone was wondering about that).

i was pretty peeved when i found out that this drive was in fact over a year old (they sold 250 gig drives two years ago!?) and as such i would not be getting a free replacement from maxtor. thus, i was forced to slim down even more and take everything off of the old g: drive (also a maxtor 250, but much newer than c:) and format it to make it the new c:. this process took several days, and in the end i was forced to simply format over the dvd master for the adventures of lolo 3 run (i decided to recapture it from the vhs later for dvd).

my parents took pity on me and notified me of a deal at compusa last weekend where i could get another maxtor 250 for $80 after instant rebate, and said that they would pay for it. that got me back up to the 750 gig in the machine i need to comfortably store all of the versions of more than one run at the same time (e.g. huffyuv original, rgb16 field dominance corrected dvd master and divx hq/mq/lq).

then, yesterday, i was absolutely thrilled to hear the same thunking sound coming from the machine again. this time it was one of the two sata drives that together make up the ~250 gig raid0 i use to capture to. indeed, the seventh segment of the pal legend of mana run was shown to have several seconds of nearly 100% dropped frames - a sign that the raid had been going out earlier than yesterday. useless as a capture drive and even more useless as a place to put important data (e.g. hq/mq/lq divx files), i disconnected the raid this morning so that the machine could successfully boot.

so, i'm down to 500 gig after all, and probably for some time. submissions are coming in much less quickly now, and so i think if i'm really diligent about getting dvd versions burned immediately after i capture something (i.e. the same day), it shouldn't impede my ability to quickly make runs ready for the verification stage. but submissions can't reach the level they did last summer. radix is already quite favorable to the idea of making the submission guidelines more stringent, and i think this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in that area.