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

[dean]

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. )

 

[Joel]

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

 

[Paul]

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.video.desktop/browse_frm/thread/639ec2ee11843074/49e6b0afdb7eb5a7

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/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822148048

Paul

 

[dean]

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.video.desktop/browse_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/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822148048

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

 

[dean]

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).

 

[Joel]

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.

 

[GT]

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.

 

[dean]

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.

 

[kony]

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.

 

[kony]

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.

 

[kony]

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.

 

[Joel]

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 (?)

 

[Paul]

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

 

[dean]

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?

 

[Paul]

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-2120S-U320-LVD-SCSI-RAID-Controller?sc=2&category=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/products/ADP-2120S-BN-FW/ADP-2120S-BN-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-bin/adaptec_tic.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?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

 

[dean]

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.

 

[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

 

[kony]

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/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/regentry/29933.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.

 

[GT]

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!

 

[GT]

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?