Using my ASI120mc-s with a new SSD drive.

[SkyBound]

Hi all,

wonder if someone could shed some light....

i have the above camera for planetary imaging, and bought a laptop a while back with USB 3, until then I used on USB 2 and got around 30fps in preview and 18fps when capturing, not very good I know.

now I have USB 3 I also upgraded to a 240gb crucial SSD drive, now I get the full 60fps (the maximum) with the highest resolution in RAW8 preview mode, but only 40 fps when capturing, as I have had to drop the USB traffic setting down to stop dropped frames....

i would have thought with an SSD drive I should get 60fps in both preview and capture mode..shouldn't I ??? Or am I missing something..?

can anyone tell me what sort of speeds they get 

my laptop is an Intel quad core Lenovo with 8gb RAM, and the hard drive only has 30gb of used space, so around 200gb free.

[SkyBound]

Hmmmm, maybe nobody still using this camera, I guess it's a bit old hat now...

[ChrisLX200]

Just no idea really - I would also have expected you to be seeing max fps with your kit. Not sure why you have to drop the USB traffic though because there should be no dropped frames? Are there other CPU hungry progs running at the same time?

ChrisH

[Gina]

I don't think the age of the camera would be an issue.  I agree with Chris that is is most likely a USB issue.

[SkyBound]

From what I have read, if it will preview at 60fps then it means there is no issue with USB, and if it captures at a lesser frame rate, the problem is normally because of a slow hard drive, which does make sense as the hard drive is not really being used during preview mode... and I have a fast SSD anyway...

and no I have no other programmes running at all...

[ChrisLX200]

47 minutes ago, SkyBound said:

From what I have read, if it will preview at 60fps then it means there is no issue with USB, and if it captures at a lesser frame rate, the problem is normally because of a slow hard drive, which does make sense as the hard drive is not really being used during preview mode... and I have a fast SSD anyway...

and no I have no other programmes running at all...

I have no doubt the SSD is capable of writing fast enough but what about the disk interface? I would try running a HDD benchmark and see what the system is really capable of before searching for other issues.

ChrisH

[Gina]

I see what you mean about the USB speed.  Yes, it does seem to be a question of write speed - somewhere along the line.

[Alien 13]

1 hour ago, ChrisLX200 said:

I have no doubt the SSD is capable of writing fast enough but what about the disk interface? I would try running a HDD benchmark and see what the system is really capable of before searching for other issues.

ChrisH

I agree, just found a nice simple benchmark called Novabench seems to give the right numbers for RAM/Processor/Graphics/SSD or hard drive although my SSD seems a bit slow at 180Mbs.

Alan 

[Xplode]

32 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

I agree, just found a nice simple benchmark called Novabench seems to give the right numbers for RAM/Processor/Graphics/SSD or hard drive although my SSD seems a bit slow at 180Mbs.

Alan 

Not sure why you would recommend a software you feel don't give the correct numbers so i just benchamerked my own computer with Novabench and got 183 MB/s, in AS SSD Benchmark i get numbers that seem more correct. 

Sequential write is what is important for planetary imaging

[SkyBound]

Well, I only need around 150mbs to capture 60fps, and my hard drive is more than capable of that on paper...so still don't understand it...

 

[Xplode]

Run a benchmark so you're sure that your system can actually save to your SSD with that speed.

[SkyBound]

2 hours ago, Xplode said:

Run a benchmark so you're sure that your system can actually save to your SSD with that speed.

So am I right in saying that even though I have a fast SSD and 8gb RAM, and a good processor, if the rest of the electronics are not up to it, then I will not get maximum GPS during capture, I guess that would make sense, as if it was just down to SSD then even an old pentium 4 would probably be good enough, and we know that would probablynot be the case.  

[ChrisLX200]

Just now, SkyBound said:

So am I right in saying that even though I have a fast SSD and 8gb RAM, and a good processor, if the rest of the electronics are not up to it, then I will not get maximum GPS during capture, I guess that would make sense, as if it was just down to SSD then even an old pentium 4 would probably be good enough, and we know that would probablynot be the case.  

Yep. The system is only as fast as it's slowest components   You need to check this out before adding more dents in the wall using your head...

ChrisH

[Xplode]

In my opinion your computer is more than fast enough for the FPS you want, but there's always the possibility a setting could be causing low performance so the first thing to check is the actual peformance you can get.

[Alien 13]

On 11/12/2016 at 16:14, Xplode said:

Not sure why you would recommend a software you feel don't give the correct numbers so i just benchamerked my own computer with Novabench and got 183 MB/s, in AS SSD Benchmark i get numbers that seem more correct. 

Sequential write is what is important for planetary imaging

I did a test with the AS SSD benchmark and results are a little strange but as previous experience has shown they are good for comparisons but not necessarily real world conditions. These are my results with Nova and AS SSD.

 

Alan

[Xplode]

Seems normal for a PM951, it doesn't have that great write speed and it's easy to confuse it with the SM951 which is much faster.

Again Novabench gives weird results so it's not a benchmark i would trust  as it gives almost the same results for SSD's with very different performance.

 

Your SSD should definitely be fast enough for what you're trying to do thou so it's weird you don't get the expected speeds.

I have the same camera myself so i will check what speeds i get

[CSM]

Maybe I am completely misunderstanding your problem, but I have this camera and as far as I am aware the fps will be down to a combination of the object that you are viewing, the frame size and the exposure, not the hard drive.  Thus using Sharpcap with the Moon and an exposure of around 3.5 ms in RAW8 mono I can get around 118 fps with a 640x480 frame size.  At other times if the viewing isn't as good  or with a larger frame it will drop to 80 or 60fps. With something like Mars where you need a much longer exposure you may come down to maybe 30fps or less.

[SkyBound]

42 minutes ago, CSM said:

Maybe I am completely misunderstanding your problem, but I have this camera and as far as I am aware the fps will be down to a combination of the object that you are viewing, the frame size and the exposure, not the hard drive.  Thus using Sharpcap with the Moon and an exposure of around 3.5 ms in RAW8 mono I can get around 118 fps with a 640x480 frame size.  At other times if the viewing isn't as good  or with a larger frame it will drop to 80 or 60fps. With something like Mars where you need a much longer exposure you may come down to maybe 30fps or less.

Yes I realise if I use ROI I will get faster speeds, I was just using maximum resolution and RAW8 for benchmark purposes....

[SkyBound]

Well here are my results using AS SSD Benchmark......

not sure what the pciide - bad means, but I have two hard drive slots one which is empty for a mini SSD board which I think is a PCI slot. I use the standard sata interface so I guess it's because the PCI is empty... or at least I hope so, or is there something wrong, but the figures don't look too good....

 

[Xplode]

I just did a test and i get 77fps both preview and when capturing.

I see the CPU usage go up while capturing and i think this might be your cause of the drop since your clockspeed is lower than mine.

2.6ghz vs 4ghz can make a lot of difference.

 

 

 

[Xplode]

On 14.11.2016 at 13:05, SkyBound said:

Well here are my results using AS SSD Benchmark......

not sure what the pciide - bad means, but I have two hard drive slots one which is empty for a mini SSD board which I think is a PCI slot. I use the standard sata interface so I guess it's because the PCI is empty... or at least I hope so, or is there something wrong, but the figures don't look too good....

 

pciide is your driver name, i guess you would get better speeds by changing from IDE to AHCI mode. I guess almost 3x the speed.

[SkyBound]

26 minutes ago, Xplode said:

I just did a test and i get 77fps both preview and when capturing.

I see the CPU usage go up while capturing and i think this might be your cause of the drop since your clockspeed is lower than mine.

2.6ghz vs 4ghz can make a lot of difference.

 

 

 

Can I just ask, when you did your test, what exposure were you using, as in my initial tests I was using the fastest possible 0.063, but I think that was a mistake, just changed it to 3.5 milliseconds and was getting it to capture 60fps at 100% USB traffic setting

so I am wondering if that was the problem...., what doyou think

i can also get 77fps if I use the overclock feature, but have left that on zero, also I use sharpcap....

[Xplode]

I used Sharpcap too. I tried 10ms for full resolution.

Sounds weird that higher lower exposure would make problems, but computers doesn't always do what we expect them to.

With very low resolution i got over 1000fps