Hi, I am a newbie and need some advice.
I have a laptop: acer aspire 5536.
When I record with two kinects it stops and mentions the HD is not fast enough, sorry forgot the actual wording it states.

I would prefer the HD because it is much cheaper and the HD is much bigger in storage size, but read and write not as fast as the SSD.

Has anyone had really good results with the hd speeds or similar to the one below? What is your read/write speed of HD with two kinects?

Would the HD be fast enough for the two kinects? or do I need the SSD.

Toshiba 500GB 7200rpm SATA 2.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive: read[MB/s] 124.1 write [MB/s] 119.7

OR

Crucial 128GB M4 SSD: read[MB/s] 315.8 write [MB/s] 190.6

Opps, Just read a previous comment which asked the same question, and the answer was here: recording: http://wiki.ipisoft.com/IPi_Recorder_Sy ... ect_System

It states at least write 55[MB/s] for two kinects.

Is this true, because if it is I could get the HD.

Many thanks

Have you tried recording with depth only, not the video as well?

AC

yes. It still does not work properly

Would this be internal or external? If internal, would this be a primary or secondary drive? The speed of the drive is only one potential bottleneck--how the drive is connected and what else uses the drive could make a difference in performance. For example, even if you got an SSD, if the interface isn't fast enough, it might not be sufficient. Not trying to discourage, just want to be sure you get what works for you.

As for 7200rpm vs SSD, I use an SSD and really like it. But in my case, the SSD is a secondary drive in a desktop computer that I have dedicated for motion capture only. When I got the SSD, I never had another dropped frame even when recording from six PS3 Eye cameras.

Also, consider the size of the drive. My SSD is smaller (120GB) than a typical HD, so after capture I move the data to a project directory on a regular hard drive. I do this just to make sure I always have space for recording. A typical session for me is about 20 to 30GB. All of the Happy Box sessions took about 80GB, which was for three characters and 17 shots, but it should be noted that Happy Box was shot twice with multiple takes (first with single Kinect, later with twin Kinect,) and a lot of the recorded data was never tracked or used. So besides speed, sufficient space is another thing you need to consider.

When I was trying to use my laptop for twin Kinect I didn't have much luck, but this mostly had to do with insufficient number of USB controllers. Recording with single Kinect was just fine even when recording to the main system drive (a regular HD.) But this laptop is a small Tablet PC, so trying to make capable for motion capture is a bit of a stretch. I think a laptop with an extra drive bay and more USB controllers should work fine for twin Kinect though. Hopefully, somebody who uses twin Kinect with a laptop will respond soon with more useful information.

BTW, drive space/speed efficiency should be greatly improved with iPi DMC 2.0 because of the new file format and its superior data compression. We'll know later this month I guess. :)

G.

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Thanks for giving us a description of your setup. It is an internal HDD or SSD that I want to fit in my laptop as the primary drive. I think the laptop is going to be dedicated to ipi soft capturing. At the moment the laptop runs for some time with one kinect, but with two the laptop manages about a minute or so. I wonder if there is anyone out there who has fitted an internal HDD or SSD as a primary drive in their laptop? If so could you let us have the details.

I decided that the best thing was to fit a ssd as my primary drive. The ssd is 128G. It took all day to transfer my HD to the ssd, this was due to the software provided not working properly (always the case :0). After much cursing, coffees, and searching the net, I found a free software that could clone and copy. This worked.

So, what do I think of the ssd? Fantastic, no problems as previous, works like a dream, I would recommend to all at this stage.

Also another problem I encounter was the Pysceldelic kinect screen (very fustrating), again searching the net and this forum I discovered that the microsoft kinect SDK (which is a free download) is available, and microsoft state that the drivers work fine on the Xbox kinect hardware, also there states there are to be no changes till 2016. So I tried the new drivers. I uninstalled the ipi recorder and then loaded in the microsoft sdk, then loaded the ipisoft recorder without the primesense drivers. The process took minutes (sometimes happens that things work just fine) Oh my gosh, total perfection.... The pyschedlic screen is a thing of the past. The ipisoft is working 100% fine.

Nice to hear that you've managed to succeed with iPi software.


By the way, last time I've replaced HDD in my laptop, I used Easeus Todo Backup Free to transfer data. It just works :) Can be downloaded at http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Todo-Backup-Free/3000-2242_4-10964460.html?tag=api.