What's the fastest hard drive for a HP Pavilion (Ultra IDE, non-SATA)? Scsi?

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:24:12 -0700, dean
<deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On Oct 11, 11:06 am, "GT" <ContactGT_remo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> "dean" <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>
>> news:1192065825.858887.58040@d55g2000hsg.googlegro ups.com...
>>
>> > Can anyone recommend fastest drive for my HP pavilion? It only has IDE
>> > right now, and I was thinking about buying a Ultra320 SCSI controller
>> > card (PCI) and a 15K rpm SCSI drive to match. Cost as around $400 for
>> > the pair.
>>
>> > Is this an ok plan?
>>
>> > (Use case is: I want to be able to scroll through a series of JPGs on
>> > hard drive from a security camera as fast as possible. )
>>
>> Are you bothered about noise from the PC. That drive is probably quite loud.
>> Check western digital website and see if the latest Raptor drives are
>> available in EIDE - they are the fasted WD drive around right now.
>
>Yeah I checked its sustained spead - its 84MB/s, whereas the Seagate
>cheetahs are 73-125 depending on how far out the heads are from the
>spindle. Then the seek times is much less for the scsi too, and that
>may also be important as the disk gets fragmented over time.
>
>But certainly the WD would be a simpler solution if it were in EIDA.

If you're considering a (relatively) expensive SCSI PCI
card, you might as well consider an SATA card if you felt
the WD (Or a RAID0 of two of them) might be an option.

kony <spam@spam.com> wrote:

<snip>
> Being slow might be a performance limitation of the computer
> (processor, memory), and also that computer may have similar
> performance limitations decoding the individual JPEGs.
>
> Which JPEG-to-AVI codec did you use? I would suspect
> converting to MJPEG AVI is the best route, should take less
> processing than other formats and (though I could be wrong)
> wouldn't expect a dramatic increase in total size.

I mostly do MPEG (now start converting AVI to MPEG quality) to know much
about others, but it seems like the new "WMV" is probably the best choice as
it's smaller and better quality comparing to MPEG and AVI

> However, you are talking about buying a new hard drive, does
> the size really matter today when there are 1TB drives
> available?

I don't own any TegaByte hard drive but I read few people mention it's
isn't true 1TB single drive *but* (2) 500GB in single enclosure. Also,
these folks were talking about the external 1TG hard drives.

It's possible that I read from newegg.com (?)

Joel wrote:

>
> I don't own any TegaByte hard drive but I read few people mention it's
> isn't true 1TB single drive *but* (2) 500GB in single enclosure. Also,
> these folks were talking about the external 1TG hard drives.
>
> It's possible that I read from newegg.com (?)

There are bare disk drives which are 1TB in capacity. So you can
buy a single drive that holds a terabyte.

Paul

On Oct 11, 5:37 pm, kony <s...@spam.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:24:12 -0700, dean
>
>
>
>
>
> <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >On Oct 11, 11:06 am, "GT" <ContactGT_remo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> "dean" <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> >>news:1192065825.858887.58040@d55g2000hsg.googleg roups.com...
>
> >> > Can anyone recommend fastest drive for my HP pavilion? It only has IDE
> >> > right now, and I was thinking about buying a Ultra320 SCSI controller
> >> > card (PCI) and a 15K rpm SCSI drive to match. Cost as around $400 for
> >> > the pair.
>
> >> > Is this an ok plan?
>
> >> > (Use case is: I want to be able to scroll through a series of JPGs on
> >> > hard drive from a security camera as fast as possible. )
>
> >> Are you bothered about noise from the PC. That drive is probably quite loud.
> >> Check western digital website and see if the latest Raptor drives are
> >> available in EIDE - they are the fasted WD drive around right now.
>
> >Yeah I checked its sustained spead - its 84MB/s, whereas the Seagate
> >cheetahs are 73-125 depending on how far out the heads are from the
> >spindle. Then the seek times is much less for the scsi too, and that
> >may also be important as the disk gets fragmented over time.
>
> >But certainly the WD would be a simpler solution if it were in EIDA.
>
> If you're considering a (relatively) expensive SCSI PCI
> card, you might as well consider an SATA card if you felt
> the WD (Or a RAID0 of two of them) might be an option.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

The specs are are 2.54GHz P4 and the pics are on a WD 7500AAK external
USB 750GB drive. I've compared it to the 76GB internal drive (sorry
not sure what brand) and there's no difference in speed.

If I reverse the images and load them all from memory cache instead,
its just less than twice as fast (not quite 2x faster), so it seems I
am indeed (as mentioned) slowed by my system - I bet that is all I can
possibly get given my processor. Maybe a new PC is in order.

Am I wrong or are there no Ultra320 SCSI cards out there for PCI (not
PCI-X or PCI-E) slots?

dean wrote:

>
> The specs are are 2.54GHz P4 and the pics are on a WD 7500AAK external
> USB 750GB drive. I've compared it to the 76GB internal drive (sorry
> not sure what brand) and there's no difference in speed.
>
> If I reverse the images and load them all from memory cache instead,
> its just less than twice as fast (not quite 2x faster), so it seems I
> am indeed (as mentioned) slowed by my system - I bet that is all I can
> possibly get given my processor. Maybe a new PC is in order.
>
> Am I wrong or are there no Ultra320 SCSI cards out there for PCI (not
> PCI-X or PCI-E) slots?
>

Taking a look around, I cannot quickly find a PCI card, with 32 bit bus
connection, offering a U320 bus. There are plenty of cards offering
U160, which is closer to the 120MB/sec limitation that comes with a
PCI 32 bit, 33MHz bus. Chances are, the U320 drive you are buying, could
work at a number of different SCSI bus transfer rates, all the way down to
20MB/sec or maybe even lower. So the declared drive speed, does not mean
you need to buy a U320 card. The interface on the drive will probably be
LVDS (low voltage differential swing), and that level and type of interface
has existed for years. A U160 would still support the sustained media
transfer rate of the fastest disks. The main benefit of the U320
transfer rate, when using a single disk, would be the ability to
"burst to cache" on the SCSI disk's controller.

There are cards which use one of the faster PCI standards. For example,
you can have 32 bit PCI cards operating at 66MHz. But you are unlikely
to find support for that on any old desktop motherboard. Another option,
would be cards that are 64 bits wide. That means a longer connector on
the PCI card.

This is an example of a longer card.

http://discountechnology.com/Adaptec...gory=31#photos

Once you get into this league, there are some other things to consider.
The PCI-X higher speed cards, for example, operate at 3.3V only. Some
people get a rotten surprise, when they think they found a bargain
somewhere, and then they notice that the voltage slots cut in the card,
prevent it from fitting in their motherboard.

In this closeup picture, you can see three slots cut. The right most
one, separates the two 32 bit parts of the interface. If you plug a 64
bit card, into a 32 bit slot, it can still work, and 32 of the contacts
are left "hanging in the air". The rightmost slot is there to leave room
for the end of the connector. This is a U320 card, but if plugged into a
32 bit, 322MHz PCI desktop slot, the max transfer rate achieved will be
120MB/sec or a little less.

http://files.discountechnology.com/p...-FW-image1.jpg

Next to the 32 bit separator slot, is the 5V key. A lot of desktop
motherboards, would have that key in place. It means the VIO selected
for the motherboard is 5 volts. A motherboard designer has to make some choice
of either 5V or 3.3V when the motherboard is designed, and 5V is compatible
with a lot of older stuff.

The left-most slot cut in the sample card, is for 3.3V. Since that
card has both 3.3V and 5V VIO capability (i.e. universal), it can
work with motherboards that choose to supply 3.3V or 5V. So that
card should be able to plug into a desktop, and also into the faster
slots (like PCI-X or PCI 64) on a server motherboard.

You have to be careful with this stuff. At least Adaptec, provides information
for some of their products, so you know whether the card will work for sure
in a PCI 32 bit slot or not.

So if you buy a U160 card, with an ordinary PCI slot connector on it,
then there should be no problem plugging it into a desktop motherboard.
For some of the other types, you can either rely on the slots cut in
the board, as an indicator, or check the manufacturer's web site, for
confirmation of interoperability. Notice, our example ADP-2120S card
above, is listed as "64-bit or 32-bit *" and "66 or 33 MHz" in the following
web page. The 33MHz part is reassuring, since that is the speed of a
desktop PCI slot. The card has no voltage limitation shown, and we knew
that since it had both the 5V and 3.3V slots cut in it, for VIO choices.
The asterisk seems to suggest they are looking for a more recent PCI slot
standard (2.1 or 2.2) and PCI 2.1 has been around for some time.

http://adaptec-tic.adaptec.com/cgi-b...p?p_faqid=1903

So you can grab a card that has a 64 bit connector on it, but it would
pay to do some research first, to confirm it would work. There is the
odd case, where the plastic frame on the 32 bit connector, is too wide
to fit into the separator slot in the 64 bit card, but I don't seem to
see that mentioned any more.

One test I've used before, to eliminate disk speed from an experiment,
is to use RAM disk software. That makes storage space, from a section of
RAM. That is only feasible, if you have lots of RAM to play with. For
example, I wanted to see how fast a network connection I could make
between two computers. I had a Gigabit connection, and both computers
had Win2K. Each computer had 1GB of RAM, so I made a 100MB RAM disk on
each computer. I was only able to achieve 40MB/sec, only 1/3rd of the
available gigabit link speed (which is what that particular OS is known
to be able to achieve) with the setup. By using RAM disks, I was attempting
to eliminate the storage devices from messing with my experiment. The
RAM disks I've used, were not the cleanest things to install and remove,
so they tend to be "creaky" pieces of software. Microsoft has a sample
RAM disk implementation, and some of the available RAM disks are based
on the sample implementation. I'm not sure if anyone makes a "smooth"
and "flexible" RAM disk implementation, that is free from flaws.

If you are processor limited, then the solution to that should be
more straight forward.

Paul

On Oct 11, 7:27 pm, Paul <nos...@needed.com> wrote:
> Joel wrote:
>
> > I don't own any TegaByte hard drive but I read few people mention it's
> > isn't true 1TB single drive *but* (2) 500GB in single enclosure. Also,
> > these folks were talking about the external 1TG hard drives.
>
> > It's possible that I read from newegg.com (?)
>
> There are bare disk drives which are 1TB in capacity. So you can
> buy a single drive that holds a terabyte.
>
> Paul

Paul - thanks for that update, its very useful. Took me quite a while
to determine even what kind of PCI slots I have.

For the ram-disk you mentioned, can you not do the same thing by
loading files up twice - first time comes from the actual disk, second
time its in the system cache memory? If, as I mentioned above, I
'reverse' the jpegs and replay the ones that were just loaded viewed,
I see a nearly doubleing of frame rate, since the OS knows the jpegs
are in cache and have not changed on the hard drive.

dean wrote:
> On Oct 11, 7:27 pm, Paul <nos...@needed.com> wrote:
>> Joel wrote:
>>
>>> I don't own any TegaByte hard drive but I read few people mention it's
>>> isn't true 1TB single drive *but* (2) 500GB in single enclosure. Also,
>>> these folks were talking about the external 1TG hard drives.
>>> It's possible that I read from newegg.com (?)
>> There are bare disk drives which are 1TB in capacity. So you can
>> buy a single drive that holds a terabyte.
>>
>> Paul
>
> Paul - thanks for that update, its very useful. Took me quite a while
> to determine even what kind of PCI slots I have.
>
> For the ram-disk you mentioned, can you not do the same thing by
> loading files up twice - first time comes from the actual disk, second
> time its in the system cache memory? If, as I mentioned above, I
> 'reverse' the jpegs and replay the ones that were just loaded viewed,
> I see a nearly doubleing of frame rate, since the OS knows the jpegs
> are in cache and have not changed on the hard drive.
>

I'm just mentioning that for the sake of completeness. If a situation
cannot rely on caching to work at the full rate, it is another
option.

Paul

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:02:06 -0000, dean
<deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote:


>The specs are are 2.54GHz P4 and the pics are on a WD 7500AAK external
>USB 750GB drive. I've compared it to the 76GB internal drive (sorry
>not sure what brand) and there's no difference in speed.

This is quite a wildcard you've just thrown out!

What is this 76GB internal drive? Was there simultaneous
access from the OS or some other app while you were testing
it with the picture viewing?

To put it another way, if the internal were a standard 7K2
RPM ~80GB drive, and the external is a 750GB drive over USB,
then the external drive itself has significantly higher
performance, but is presently being castrated by being over
USB bus.

That you see no difference between these two means one of
two things:

1) It randomly happens that USB offsets that the 750GB
drive has higher performance, and then what you should do is
move the 750GB drive into the system instead of running
externally over USB.

2) The drive performance was not the bottleneck, that it
was the filesystem overhead (for so many JPEGs) or the
processing decompression overhead for JPEG.


>
>If I reverse the images and load them all from memory cache instead,
>its just less than twice as fast (not quite 2x faster), so it seems I
>am indeed (as mentioned) slowed by my system - I bet that is all I can
>possibly get given my processor. Maybe a new PC is in order.

Maybe, we don't know the total budget vs benefit you're
willing to accept.


>
>Am I wrong or are there no Ultra320 SCSI cards out there for PCI (not
>PCI-X or PCI-E) slots?

I think we should back up a bit. Look at Task Manager, CPU
usage. See how often and how long the usage spikes at 100%.
That will give you an idea what percentage of the time the
CPU is bottlenecking you. Also as you wrote about memory
caching... but we still lack a comprehensive overview of all
major details, for example what OS it runs, how much memory,
whether this is a multitasking environment or whether while
viewing these JPG, it's practically all the system is doing
(besides background idle things that can wait).

It may be that caching improvements will be substantial. A
large increase in amount of memory combined with increasing
(WinXP? I wish I wasn't wasting my time guessing on details
not provided?) OS LargeSystemCache value (=1),
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro....mspx?mfr=true
could help a lot.

If your system is old enough it just can't accept very much
memory, a system upgrade and potentially moving to 64bit OS
might be in order.

The first thing I would do is change the LargeSystemCache
value to 1, put that external 750GB drive inside the system
direct connected (if it's an SATA drive, buy (really any
kind of) an SATA card for that) instead of over USB, and if
you have less than 2GB of memory, consider whether now is
the time to buy more memory or the time to move to a newer
DDR2 based platform upon which it is cheaper to buy memory
and can also yield potential processor improvements.

Since the registry change and moving the drive internally
are both either free or low cost, they seem the first step.

You never did tell us how much retention is needed, what the
total capacity bare minimum requirement is to store all the
JPEGs or movies made from them before they're deleted. It
definitely effects the options vs budget.

"kony" <spam@spam.com> wrote in message
news:6r5tg39tu7anucjokk5ak00dnkfn39u1d9@4ax.com...
> On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:24:12 -0700, dean
> <deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>On Oct 11, 11:06 am, "GT" <ContactGT_remo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> "dean" <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>>
>>> news:1192065825.858887.58040@d55g2000hsg.googlegro ups.com...
>>>
>>> > Can anyone recommend fastest drive for my HP pavilion? It only has IDE
>>> > right now, and I was thinking about buying a Ultra320 SCSI controller
>>> > card (PCI) and a 15K rpm SCSI drive to match. Cost as around $400 for
>>> > the pair.
>>>
>>> > Is this an ok plan?
>>>
>>> > (Use case is: I want to be able to scroll through a series of JPGs on
>>> > hard drive from a security camera as fast as possible. )
>>>
>>> Are you bothered about noise from the PC. That drive is probably quite
>>> loud.
>>> Check western digital website and see if the latest Raptor drives are
>>> available in EIDE - they are the fasted WD drive around right now.
>>
>>Yeah I checked its sustained spead - its 84MB/s, whereas the Seagate
>>cheetahs are 73-125 depending on how far out the heads are from the
>>spindle. Then the seek times is much less for the scsi too, and that
>>may also be important as the disk gets fragmented over time.
>>
>>But certainly the WD would be a simpler solution if it were in EIDA.
>
> If you're considering a (relatively) expensive SCSI PCI
> card, you might as well consider an SATA card if you felt
> the WD (Or a RAID0 of two of them) might be an option.

But either will still be limited by the PCI bus!

"dean" <deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1192123452.585734.174820@y42g2000hsy.googlegr oups.com...
> On Oct 11, 11:06 am, "GT" <ContactGT_remo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> "dean" <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>
>> news:1192065825.858887.58040@d55g2000hsg.googlegro ups.com...
>>
>> > Can anyone recommend fastest drive for my HP pavilion? It only has IDE
>> > right now, and I was thinking about buying a Ultra320 SCSI controller
>> > card (PCI) and a 15K rpm SCSI drive to match. Cost as around $400 for
>> > the pair.
>>
>> > Is this an ok plan?
>>
>> > (Use case is: I want to be able to scroll through a series of JPGs on
>> > hard drive from a security camera as fast as possible. )
>>
>> Are you bothered about noise from the PC. That drive is probably quite
>> loud.
>> Check western digital website and see if the latest Raptor drives are
>> available in EIDE - they are the fasted WD drive around right now.
>
> Yeah I checked its sustained spead - its 84MB/s, whereas the Seagate
> cheetahs are 73-125 depending on how far out the heads are from the
> spindle. Then the seek times is much less for the scsi too, and that
> may also be important as the disk gets fragmented over time.

These numbers don't seem right to me - or at least they seem misleading. I
don't believe that any hard disk available would be 50% faster than a
Raptor. SCSI might be 10-20% faster at a push, but you would have to look at
a fast SCSI RAID setup to get a noticable improvement in speed. That means
you are probably talking a new power supply, new case to fit it all in, more
cooling and more noise etc.

Is it really worth it? Either I'm missing something or this is a strange
exercise - if you need to examine all the images in detail, then image load
times won't be the slow part of the process. Can't you just open paint shop
pro and let the browse function index the folder, or just use WinXP
thumbnail view to preview things?

Here's another thing to consider: If you are opening all these images at
once, or sequentially without closing them, then perhaps you are running out
of RAM and the computer is resorting to virtual memory paging on the same
drive as it is trying to load the images from?