If it is external and you have another casing to enclose it in, put it in that and test it out to see if the same occurs after checking the cable if that doesn't fix it. Make sure you check that your drive is configured properly. If is set to PIO, change it to DMA.

j razz

If the drive is internal, then DMA is almost certainly the problem:

Improving Vegas Performance

If external, right click on the drive in Explorer and select "Properties." Click on the Hardware tab. Then find your drive in the list and select properties. Then select the Policies tab. Make sure "Optimize for performance" is checked. You can also check "enable write caching on the disk" although for a USB external, this may not "stick." I would recommend doing this for all your other drives as well.

I'll try that when I get home. The drive is in a carrier, which I then put into the computer, so it's a swappable drive (there's no cable).

Thanks for the tips.

It couldn't be that there is one 235 gig partition could it? Does the partition size matter?

Andy

Partition size should not matter.

You may want to search for a PC benchmarking tool and run it on your hard drives and see what the minimum throughput is.

DMA issues are very likely since it's a new drive

I discovered one bad carrier a couple of years ago. Bad cable or solder joint somewhere--I never bothered to tear it down, and just bought another one for $12.

if DISC SPACE is your issue (reason why you are using 250)

An option, if you have enough free space say on internal drive you know works....... is crapture tape to that drive.....

then, Cut n Past it over to your new 250 drive.... shouldn't have dropped fram issues so long as orgiinal caputre was flawless

John.

I tried these things, when I get to the Advanced settings, Device 0 has current transfer mode as Not Applicable.

Device 1 has Current transfer mode as PIO Mode, but it is greyed out, and I can't change it.

An ideas?

Andy

Any chance this is a Dell computer? I helped my brother troubleshoot a similar issue, though this was for an internal drive, not external. Anyway, in case this helps:

Hint from the Western Digital support site -- you really must check the BIOS setting before anything else.

Western Digital's FAQ (my remarks in [brackets]):
On some Dell PCs, when you install a second hard drive into the primary slave position, the drive will only run in PIO mode. It doesn't run in DMA mode.

Cause:
On some Dell PCs, a BIOS setting is not set properly to allow DMA transfer mode on the second drive. The hard drive will default to run in PIO mode causing degradation in performance.

Solution:
To fix problem you must change a bios setting.

[To get to Bios -- Turn on (or restart) your computer.
When the blue DELL logo appears, press <F2> immediately. ]
Select drive configuration.

Then select primary slave drive [primary drive 1?].

Change the setting to auto, it will be set to off.

Save the BIOS settings and boot the computer, the secondary slave drive should now be running in DMA, rather than PIO mode.

Hi Guys!

Went to the WD site and followed their FAQ and trouble shooting, and one suggestion was: Reboot.

Problem solved, apparently.

Frustrating

Thanks for the help again!

Andy

Just when you thought it was safe........

Finished a project, swapped in the new drive, and suddenlt Vegas wont play an AVI file!

It gets 7 frames in at normal speed, then slows to a crawl, at 1 frame per second.

I'm in PAL land btw.

Yes, the New disk drive is in PIO mode, this time rebooting won't change it back. Apparently I have to uninstall it, then reinstall it to get DMA mode back. I would format it, and will, when I have got all the info off it onto another drive.

I did uninstall VEGAS 6, then reinstall, and it all worked for a prief period, before the trouble restarted.

Any ideas why the drive would keep going into PIO mode?

A thought: Should this drive be a primary drive, secondary drive, slave or master? It's purely for storage, the OS is on another drive.

Any help appreciated. Andy

The

Most drives in PCs today run in cable select, however get that part of the interface mixed up and things can get mighty messy.

Is this drive on the same bus as the system disk, if it's sharing a port with an optical drive that too can cause a dramatic slowdown in speed.

Reasons why a drive that should be working in DMA mode changes to PIO mode can be found here.

Basically it boils down to too many errors being detected during data transfer, typically because of poor quality of cable, poor connections, wrong type of cable (40-conductor rather than 80-conductor) or occasionally a hard drive beginning to fail The event log should contain details of the errors that are provoking the downgrading from DMA to PIO and may help you decide what to do about it.

Mark

It sounds like something bigger, but you may also want to ensure that Indexing is turned off (that's what I suspected from the start). If it tries to index while saving video to disk you could drop frames.

Keep in mind that most drives still come formatted in fat32. I always reformat any drive I get as NTFS right away.

It's definately in NTFS.

I'll check the indexing factor.

I had another go last night, and ANOTHER drive, which has never had a problem before, also slowed Vegas to a crawl.

Thanks for the tips guys, I'll keep hunting.

A