Toys arrived - technical help sought

[ciphergoth]

Toys that arrived today:

- Pocket DV cam and 512 Mb flash card (only a toy video camera but will still be fun)
- USB 4-port hub (I was running out of ports)
- DVD +- rewriter (good for backups and for making my own DVDs)
- 120 GB SATA hard drive

(This on top of toys that arrived the other day, viz two DDR mats and PS2 - USB adapter)

The hard drive does not have the connectors I'm used to. I thought that SATA was like any other upgrade to the IDE standard, where the connectors stay the same and the drive and controller talk the best protocol that they both know. Now I have no idea how to plug my new hard drive in, or even how to give it power. Anyone know the story?

Comments

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

SATA: Um, yeah. You need a whole new controller, (purchasable as a separate add-in PCI-card if there's not an integrated controller on your motherboard). You also need a power adapter cable. Have a look at this article (http://www.ata-atapi.com/sata.htm) and this (http://www.serialata.org/) website.

[skx.livejournal.com]

Sata is a new kind of drive interface serial based.

If you want to use it then ideally you'll have a motherboard with the correct sata port on it, or an PCI expansion card which will do the same thing. (Also you'll need the cabling to string the two together).

Sata card and cable costs around 15 quid; A quick google search landed this one from Dabs - you might be better off buying one local though...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Balls.

So is this the excuse I've been waiting for to buy myself more computer? And if so, should I just go mad and buy a case, video card etc rather than taking the old machine apart?

[lovingboth]

Depends on the spec of the one you've got at the moment, really, as well as what you want to do on it.

[synthclarion.livejournal.com]

SATA requires a supporting motherboard or card, I'm afraid. The data cable is a tiny little jobbie, looks nothing like IDE.

As for power, I haven't a clue.

Which PocketDV cam did you get? I'm in the market for a toy-quality, toy-priced one too...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Nisis Pocket DV2. I'm not under the impression it has a great many competitors but I could be wrong...

[lovingboth]

There are one or two now. They've also done a DV3 (slightly better screen, but I never bother with the screen as you can aim it fine without, comes with a small memory card) and they're going to do a DV4 (adds MP3 player!?!)

I love mine - particularly for toddler filming and theatre bootlegging - and I wish it'd been available a year earlier than it was. Oh, and its low light abilities are crap.

Where did you get it from?

What everyone else said about the hard drive. The price of 120G 7200rpm 8Mbyte cache ordinary UDMA EIDE drives is now low enough to get me to buy a couple recently. See if you can return this one or sell it quick. The speed advantage over UDMA EIDE is approximately nil, but having a larger cache does make a difference.

[lovingboth]

I see Amazon have just dropped the price to £75 quid.

My review was

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

It's a toy, but it's a fabulous one., 10 March, 2003

Reviewer: kraftwerkfan from London, United Kingdom

Compared to a 'real' camcorder, this is rubbish. The resolution of the video is only 320x240. And only 10 frames a second too. The pictures are dim unless you've got daylight. But in bright light, the LCD is difficult to see. Zoom? Forget it. Image stablisation to combat camera shake? What's that? The camera slowly drains batteries even when 'off' and if it runs out, anything stored in the internal memory is lost.

But but but... it's incredible fun at an unbelievable price.

We bought it to record the antics of a toddler. She absolutely loves watching the results, and the camera is cheap and light (the two AA batteries are probably half the weight) enough to take everywhere. With no moving parts, I can almost imagine not worrying about dropping it. Almost.

Mind you, I already had a compact flash card - if you don't, you absolutely need to buy one. Not only does it give you more recording time (up to two hours) but it also solves the battery running out problem. Fortunately, they're basically commodity items, so you can search around on price.

Oh, it works with USB Macs: the memory appears as a removeable disk, just as on a PC without using their program, so you can copy the videos/pictures.

Oh2, by the end of 2004, someone will have done one with more resolution for the same (or less!) money. But you'll have missed a lot of fun by not getting one of these now. I wish it'd been available a year ago.

[djm4]

I just got one for B for Christmas from >a href="http://www.firebox.com/">Firebox - they're selling them off for £50. Is it just the one I've got, or is the backlight on the viewfinder totally invisible? Even in pitch dark, you get a slight glow at the left hand edge of the screen when you turn it on, and that's all...

[lovingboth]

Ah yes, there are some very good example films on there, but when I got mine, they were about £20 more expensive than Amazon.

Although mine is not as bad as that (which does sound like a fault) IME it's not worth switching on the backlight - it just drains the batteries. It does make a difference in exactly the right lighting conditions, but those lighting conditions tend to be too dim for the camera to work well.

I've found it much easier to aim by looking along the angle formed by the closed 'flap' than use the screen on the flap or the viewfinder lens.

[lovingboth]

Hmm, a quick look at Firebox - at £50, I'm tempted to get another one - reveals that a) they're out of stock and b) the DV4 is better than I thought with twice the resolution and (at last!) controllable exposure and white balance. Pity they've ditched CF though, and it's cheaper at Amazon.

Hmmm.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

No indeed. SATA is Serial ATA; same API, different signalling protocol. No faster today but has more room for growth than parallel ATA, which is just about maxed out at UltraDMA/166 speeds.

You'll need a new disk controller card - or to exchange it for a parallel-ATA drive.

[purplefreakgirl.livejournal.com]

Hello! Remember me? I have no friends on this thing so you've been added to my list whether you like it or not :P
Unless you do really object that is, but im lovely really!!!

[hughe.livejournal.com]

basicaly USB-for-HardDisks.... wouldn't recomend, but it looks like everything is going that way. quite error-prone atm. and as usualy they will continue to push speed on the edge or reliability instead of just improving reliability and then thinking about speed.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

This was why for my server I went for 60Mbyte/s transfer rate LVD SCSI drives. More expensive but much more reliable.

The SCSI card came from Ebay to keep the cost down but was still £40 the drives were only cheap 7200rpm Fujitsu ones and were only a little more than the equivalent ATA133 drives when I brought them. Cheap SCSI drives are not common though.

The fact that I was using them in a linux soft raid format also meant that SCSI was a good choice as there is less contention. The net result is that when I want to backup data the transfer rate to and from the server is limited by the 100Mbit/s ethernet link.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

Or even 160Mb/s tranfer rate...