Astrophotography Hard Drive Shootout

[@I_Spaced_Out]

Do you capture data to an external drive? If you do, what are you using? Do you run into limitations with capture speeds for planetary astrophotography? Let everyone know what you're doing, and any tips or hacks you've found here!

[@GarnettLeary]

I need this kind of info. Thank you.

[@DarkArtsAstrophotography]

Those old SSDs don't really hold up these days. The lack of any significant amount of cache made large sequential read / write cycles fairly slow compared to modern SSDs. The only real speed advantage they have over a 5400 RPM drive is that you get near instantaneous seek times, which made file access times faster. And small data would load much faster. Glad to see you're having better luck with that new SSD. You probably have a couple of things affecting the write speed on the Compute Stick. The USB 3.0is likely part of that bottleneck. Also, the Compute Stick will have less processing power and throughput than your laptop. So it's likely a bit of a double whammy. That said, it's a huge improvement over what you were getting before, so I would say it's quite useable now.

[@I_Spaced_Out]

This experiment with the older SSD was inspired by what you and I were talking about on Facebook re: no cache on the old SSD. The Intel Compute Stick does have an m3 processor. That should be more than enough to stream the frames off of the chip, however, there is quite a bit of USB traffic. I found out after this video that not only is my USB hub only USB 3.0, but the intel compute stick only has USB 3.0 support as well. So no matter what I do, the Intel Compute Stick will only be able to push out roughly 5gb/s of data from its USB 3.0 ports (only one USB host controller)... When trying to stream team viewer through the same USB port on the intel compute stick, I'm competing for bandwidth. I think it is possible to boost this to maybe 60 fps if I were to start the capture with SharpCap, and then disconnect from the compute stick while the capture is going on.

[@jbobservatory3989]

Mitchell, this is a good solution. How Many seconds is it taking to download using your zwo camera and SGP to the ssd drive for for long exposure imaging. I am currently seeig 8 sec downloads with stick pc and asi1600 directly to the stick pcs HD

[@I_Spaced_Out]

The HD resolution frames write to the drive at 50 per second - so I guess that long exposures would transfer from camera to SSD in 1/50th of a second - practically instantaneously!

[@mtnphot]

I use a fairly new ssd for data capture using byn and raw files. The download speed is more or less instantaneous for a 35mb raw and 16mb jpeg file. much much faster than writing to the normal hard drive in a laptop.

[@Grogz40]

Hey Mitchell, any explanation for the large number of dropped frames?

[@I_Spaced_Out]

The HDD can only write the frames at about 6 to 10 frames per second. The memory on the intel compute stick fills up with frames waiting to be written to the drive, but the camera keeps trying to take images as quickly as it can. With no memory to write the frames to, they drop.

[@Grogz40]

Gotcha! Reasonable explanation. Which Compute stick are you using? I was looking into getting one, but if its going to be dropping frames like that, I would like a bit better one. :)

[@I_Spaced_Out]

I have the Intel Core M3 version. Remember, I'm trying to capture almost the full frame of the ZWO ASI174MM sensor in 16 bit. If I were going after Jupiter, I'd reduce that region of interest down to an appropriate size. I just tested the following resolutions: 1600 x 1200 = 81 FPS 1448 x 1216 = 89 FPS 1280 x 1024 = 118 FPS 1024 x 768 = 198 FPS So you can see, there are still huge frame rates available to you as long as you don't need to record in Full 1080 HD quality.

[@GarnettLeary]

Bummer on the weather. New gear curse.

[@I_Spaced_Out]

When I have down time like this, I can do hardware reviews and such... Trouble is, I am running out of hardware to review. I have an astrophotography channel that only has tech videos on it! Like I said before, I haven't done much in the way of imaging in the past two years, and I'm looking to 2018 to be the year I jump in with both feet, kick ass and taking names :)

[@GarnettLeary]

Awesome. Look forward to it.

[@PeterClarke55]

Allen, do you have voice over synched to the vid?

[@I_Spaced_Out]

What voice over? I'm talking directly to the camera in every shot...