[troppo]

hi was justafter some advice
i have absoultly no idea about HDTV digital tuner cards and was wondering what to look for when buying 1 i live in australia and have about $100 to spend (thats about $75 US) what should i look for and what is a good mid range tuner card?

If i get the tuner i am definatly going to get a larger hard drive around 160Gb's im thinking of a segate 7,200 RPM, 8MB cache ATA-100 hard drive.

i have two 120 GB seagate 7,200 RPM hard drives that are ATA can you mix serial ATA and ATA-100 drives together? i only ask becasue i have heard that they are a little faster in the transfer rate is this correct?
would it be worth getting a Serial ATA drive?
and what is Serial ATA does it have to be in a RAID set-up or can it be a single drive?
is this drive any good for capturing HDTV and then burning it to dvd:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA NCQ 3Gb/s ST3160812AS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

thanks for all of your asistance

Edited by troppo, 05 February 2006 - 01:06 AM.

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sata and regular ata hard drives can be mixed in a system. sata does not need to be in a raid setup. sata is 150mb/s, ata is limited at various speeds depending on the drive. sata is well worth your money, seeing that those drives are just a few bucks more. the hard drive is really not what determines performance when capturing video, main thing to worry about is your processor, and the card itself. hdtv requires alot of power to encode, few computers can do it in real time. i would just recomend capturing at dvd quality seeing that you said you would be burning dvds, so no use capturing at hdtv quality.

[Thebinaryman]

sata and regular ata hard drives can be mixed in a system. sata does not need to be in a raid setup. sata is 150mb/s, ata is limited at various speeds depending on the drive. sata is well worth your money, seeing that those drives are just a few bucks more. the hard drive is really not what determines performance when capturing video, main thing to worry about is your processor, and the card itself. hdtv requires alot of power to encode, few computers can do it in real time. i would just recomend capturing at dvd quality seeing that you said you would be burning dvds, so no use capturing at hdtv quality.

[troppo]

thaks for the reply but i have seen and heard that SATA Drives can transfer 3.0gb/s or is this something compleatly different?

i think that my comp can handle it my specs are listed below do u think they could handle it even not being overclocked?

what tuner do you suggest? i was looking at these two cards, which is better?
http://www.pccasegear.com/prod3026.htm
http://pccasegear.com.au/prod2607.htm
they are about in my price range

i think if i was going to record it would be in DVD with a SATA drive like the one i listed below im not going to record a whole lot at once so thast why im keeping the cost down by not buying a large drive around 120-160 gig is enough for me

thanks for your advice

[Thebinaryman]

yes sataII drives are 3gb/s, regular sata is 150mb/s

i dont know too much about video capture devices, except as far as the one i have, they are a bit overrated, and too many of them rely on good software. i'm still looking for a good "hardware" encoding one. one that encodes using a processor on the card itself, rather than your cpu. so regardless your cpu specs or current usage, you can capture the video in real time, and flawless quality. until i find a affordable one like that, i wouldn't buy one.

but as for you, both cards look nice. the leadtek one has regular video input though that the other one doesnt have, so that might be a bonus. i dont want to push you one way or another due to my lack of understanding on these cards.

oh, and your cpu should be good enough to handle it... so they say.

[troppo]

well thakyou for your advice on the SATA drives anyway that has been helpfull.
if i do get the card i definatlt will think of getting a sata drive maybe a sataII but i will have to see how much and if my board can handle it thakyou very much