[joncurtiss]

My system is a Dell 4550 at 2.4GHz with 1GB RAM. The hard-drives are PATA (i.e. not serial ATA) so that could be a weak-point (as pointed out).

I'll try reformatting the disk I use for video storage (500GB) to 64KB clusters to see if that helps enough. I don't have much else on it so that size cluster shouldn't be a detriment to space, much.

The thing that bothers me (some) is that the WinTV software generates mpeg files when it records, and those seem to be ok. I'm thinking that maybe they get generated in software before the data is spooled to the disk, reducing the load on the storage subsystems. That's another reason for trying to speed-up the disk retrieval speed (with 64KB clusters).

I'll post my results. either way.

Thanks for the help so far. If anyone else has ideas feel free to throw them into the mix.