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

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. )

dean <deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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. )

I don't own one but I read 10,000RPM is the fastest IDE drive (by WD I
think). All my desktop IDE drives are 7200-RPM, and poor Toshiba laptop has
250GB 5400-RPM

dean wrote:
> 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. )
>

Sure, if you're happy with the price.

On storagereview.com and it's performance database, the fastest drive is
a Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 300GB at 135MB/sec sustained transfer rate. At the
end of the disk, the transfer rate is 82MB/sec.

If the PCI slot on the HP computer, is an ordinary 33MHz, 32 bit slot,
the bandwidth available on the bus, will reduce the peak transfer rate
a bit. You may see 120MB/sec due to the limitations of the 133MB/sec
PCI bus. If the computer has a higher performance bus available, then
you'd get to see the full 135MB/sec.

The main advantage of a 15K disk, is the reduction in seek time. The
transfer rate is secondary. The files you seek to review, are tiny
when compared to the transfer rate promised. That means, a lot of the
time each second, is spent repositioning the heads of the disk. If
you could promise the JPEG files were contiguously located (i.e. a
movie), then the seek time would be a much smaller component of the
puzzle.

Another thing you might investigate, is a piece of software that
can take the individual JPEG images, stitch them together, and make
them into a movie. Then store that on the disk. The advantage of this,
is there is no need to consult directory information, when fetching the
individual images. That could remove some of the more objectionable seek
time from the equation, and get you back to using your existing disk. An
even bigger improvement, could come from the improvement in directory
structure. It is possible, right now, that the sheer size of the
directory holding thousands of images, is making operations on the
files difficult to do in a timely manner.

You could run a program on the target disk, unattended, and transfer
a disk full of individual JPEGs, to a second disk which would contain
the "movie" to be reviewed. The tools to do this, could control the
dwell time per image (i.e. same JPEG is repeated for X frames in
succession - where X = 1 if you want to review the images at the max
possible rate). The value of X would help control the maximum scroll rate,
if the movie was flying by so fast, that you were not able to pick
up the necessary details. By placing a title on each image (as if this
was a slide show), where the title equals the filename of the source
JPEG, you can then track back to the source image.

The topic of making a movie from images, might be discussed occasionally
on rec.video.desktop:

http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.vi...e6b0afdb7eb5a7

I'd sooner spend a little time experimenting like that, than spending
the money on the hardware. If the disk is formatted NTFS, that might
avoid maximum movie size limitations (assuming the tool itself doesn't
have limits).

If you are buying the SCSI disk from Newegg, or can find it there, check
their customer reviews, for comments about the noise level of the
drive. Some drives in the past have had a self-test, that is noisy,
and may irritate desktop users of the disk. If you are buying second
hand SCSI disks, reviewing the noise characteristics of the product before
you buy, may help. I retired a few old SCSI drives, because of their noise
level - but modern drives have fluid bearings, so that level of noise
should be a thing of the past.

(Example review - drive rated as "quiet for 10K")
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148048

Paul

On Oct 11, 1:36 am, Paul <nos...@needed.com> wrote:
> dean wrote:
> > 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. )
>
> Sure, if you're happy with the price.
>
> On storagereview.com and it's performance database, the fastest drive is
> a Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 300GB at 135MB/sec sustained transfer rate. At the
> end of the disk, the transfer rate is 82MB/sec.
>
> If the PCI slot on the HP computer, is an ordinary 33MHz, 32 bit slot,
> the bandwidth available on the bus, will reduce the peak transfer rate
> a bit. You may see 120MB/sec due to the limitations of the 133MB/sec
> PCI bus. If the computer has a higher performance bus available, then
> you'd get to see the full 135MB/sec.
>
> The main advantage of a 15K disk, is the reduction in seek time. The
> transfer rate is secondary. The files you seek to review, are tiny
> when compared to the transfer rate promised. That means, a lot of the
> time each second, is spent repositioning the heads of the disk. If
> you could promise the JPEG files were contiguously located (i.e. a
> movie), then the seek time would be a much smaller component of the
> puzzle.
>
> Another thing you might investigate, is a piece of software that
> can take the individual JPEG images, stitch them together, and make
> them into a movie. Then store that on the disk. The advantage of this,
> is there is no need to consult directory information, when fetching the
> individual images. That could remove some of the more objectionable seek
> time from the equation, and get you back to using your existing disk. An
> even bigger improvement, could come from the improvement in directory
> structure. It is possible, right now, that the sheer size of the
> directory holding thousands of images, is making operations on the
> files difficult to do in a timely manner.
>
> You could run a program on the target disk, unattended, and transfer
> a disk full of individual JPEGs, to a second disk which would contain
> the "movie" to be reviewed. The tools to do this, could control the
> dwell time per image (i.e. same JPEG is repeated for X frames in
> succession - where X = 1 if you want to review the images at the max
> possible rate). The value of X would help control the maximum scroll rate,
> if the movie was flying by so fast, that you were not able to pick
> up the necessary details. By placing a title on each image (as if this
> was a slide show), where the title equals the filename of the source
> JPEG, you can then track back to the source image.
>
> The topic of making a movie from images, might be discussed occasionally
> on rec.video.desktop:
>
> http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.vi...frm/thread/639...
>
> I'd sooner spend a little time experimenting like that, than spending
> the money on the hardware. If the disk is formatted NTFS, that might
> avoid maximum movie size limitations (assuming the tool itself doesn't
> have limits).
>
> If you are buying the SCSI disk from Newegg, or can find it there, check
> their customer reviews, for comments about the noise level of the
> drive. Some drives in the past have had a self-test, that is noisy,
> and may irritate desktop users of the disk. If you are buying second
> hand SCSI disks, reviewing the noise characteristics of the product before
> you buy, may help. I retired a few old SCSI drives, because of their noise
> level - but modern drives have fluid bearings, so that level of noise
> should be a thing of the past.
>
> (Example review - drive rated as "quiet for 10K")http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148048
>
> Paul

Hey Paul - thanks for that huge reply! What I've done is write a
couple of programs to allow me to scan at different speads, stop and
start and reverse easily, from a directory full of jpegs. It works
really well, since I can view every 3rd picture or every 10th to make
things faster. I can also scale (== Borland compiler function) the
jpegs at runtime to make things even faster, though the images are
smaller of course.

I have another scheduled batch program that renames the server
directory where the camera shoots the pics to, so that I don't get
overwhelmed with too many files in one folder. Still, 1 pic per second
is 86000 photos, which prevents me from doing many of XP's GUI file
handling procedures, but I got around that easily enough.

I tried virtualdub and other jpeg_to_avi and similar programs, but
they are all either too slow or increase the filesize dramatically.
No, I'd rather scan the jpegs to be honest.

If I reverse the jpeg 'movie' and load up cached-jpegs from memory,
the processor is fast enough to view 1 frame at a time and not skip
images (if that makes sense?), so I hope that a really fast drive will
make a difference. The files should be fairly contiguous, since they
are written out once per second all day, but who knows?

Thanks again for the help.

Dean

On Oct 10, 11:34 pm, Joel <J...@NoSpam.com> wrote:
> dean <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > 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. )
>
> I don't own one but I read 10,000RPM is the fastest IDE drive (by WD I
> think). All my desktop IDE drives are 7200-RPM, and poor Toshiba laptop has
> 250GB 5400-RPM

Joel - I don't care per se about rotational spead, only a sustained
data transfer rate. Its hard to get this info from drive manufactures,
who only state the cache transfer rate (3Gb/s, for example, for
seagates new SATAs). At least the scsis state the proper specs. (ps I
saw that WD yesterday in Best Buy, though it does not state on the box
the sustained rate).

dean <deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Oct 10, 11:34 pm, Joel <J...@NoSpam.com> wrote:
> > dean <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > 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. )
> >
> > I don't own one but I read 10,000RPM is the fastest IDE drive (by WD I
> > think). All my desktop IDE drives are 7200-RPM, and poor Toshiba laptop has
> > 250GB 5400-RPM
>
> Joel - I don't care per se about rotational spead, only a sustained
> data transfer rate. Its hard to get this info from drive manufactures,
> who only state the cache transfer rate (3Gb/s, for example, for
> seagates new SATAs). At least the scsis state the proper specs. (ps I
> saw that WD yesterday in Best Buy, though it does not state on the box
> the sustained rate).

I don't know and care what you care, I can only give what I know and in
general the faster the RPM the faster the data transfer rate. There are
many WD and I don't know what your local Best Buy carries, but you have
GOOGLE that you can use for information then go from there.

"dean" <deanbrown3d@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.

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.

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:31:14 -0000, dean
<deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On Oct 10, 11:34 pm, Joel <J...@NoSpam.com> wrote:
>> dean <deanbrow...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > 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. )
>>
>> I don't own one but I read 10,000RPM is the fastest IDE drive (by WD I
>> think). All my desktop IDE drives are 7200-RPM, and poor Toshiba laptop has
>> 250GB 5400-RPM
>
>Joel - I don't care per se about rotational spead, only a sustained
>data transfer rate. Its hard to get this info from drive manufactures,
>who only state the cache transfer rate (3Gb/s, for example, for
>seagates new SATAs). At least the scsis state the proper specs. (ps I
>saw that WD yesterday in Best Buy, though it does not state on the box
>the sustained rate).

A security camera doesn't tend to have extremely high
resolution, so these JPG are probably fairly small
filesizes, yes? In that case, the sustained transfer speed
won't matter as much as reduced latency from high RPM, and
having enough system memory to cache the files (if the
viewing app doesn't countermine this).

Perhaps a better question is how much $ a minor difference
in speed is worth, and what the total capacity of the drive
needs be? SSD (solid state, flash based drives) now
entering the market have far lower latency and finally
reasonable performance levels, but can easily run $400 and
well beyond that.

Going the opposite direction, an SATA controller card plus a
WD Raptor may give nearly SCSI performance for a fraction of
the cost in this single linear access scenario.

Going further in the opposite direction, today's large PATA
drives have quite a bit more performance than those of a few
years ago, but you haven't told us if you had tried this
task on the system as presently configued with the existing
drive (and found it too slow?) and if so, what drive it's
currently using.

Just writing "HP Pavilion" doesn't tell us much, for all we
know the system might be several years old and the
performance is as much downgraded by the general performance
limits of all the parts in conjunction, and if that is the
case, fitting a very fast hard drive may not make much
difference over the next step down in modern drives. It
would be good to have specifics of the system hardware and
about the file size/quantity/etc.

If budget is no limitation and capacity isn't either, yes
the SCSI card plus 15K RPM drive combo will tend to be the
fastest alternative, if/when there would be a significant
difference in use. That is, until we start talking about
multiple drives, a RAID0 of two, or especially a RAID0 of
two solid state drives... but this latter option could
easily cost closer to $1500 than $400, so it's really about
where the money is best spent as beyond a certain point a
system old enough to only have PATA drive ports could use
upgrade/replacement motherboard, CPU, maybe memory too.

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:28:11 -0000, dean
<deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> wrote:


>Hey Paul - thanks for that huge reply! What I've done is write a
>couple of programs to allow me to scan at different speads, stop and
>start and reverse easily, from a directory full of jpegs. It works
>really well, since I can view every 3rd picture or every 10th to make
>things faster. I can also scale (== Borland compiler function) the
>jpegs at runtime to make things even faster, though the images are
>smaller of course.
>
>I have another scheduled batch program that renames the server
>directory where the camera shoots the pics to, so that I don't get
>overwhelmed with too many files in one folder. Still, 1 pic per second
>is 86000 photos, which prevents me from doing many of XP's GUI file
>handling procedures, but I got around that easily enough.
>
>I tried virtualdub and other jpeg_to_avi and similar programs, but
>they are all either too slow or increase the filesize dramatically.
>No, I'd rather scan the jpegs to be honest.

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.

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



>
>If I reverse the jpeg 'movie' and load up cached-jpegs from memory,
>the processor is fast enough to view 1 frame at a time and not skip
>images (if that makes sense?), so I hope that a really fast drive will
>make a difference. The files should be fairly contiguous, since they
>are written out once per second all day, but who knows?


It'll make a difference, but there are too many variables to
predict if it will make enough of a difference.