On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Hans Witvliet
On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 06:11 -0400, Matt Archer wrote:
Ethernet is pitifully slow compared to the disk I/O of any modern computer.
This is why, despite the claims of Dell and others, file-servers can EASILY be bottom-of-the-barrel machines, and buying a top-end motherboard and CPU for that purpose is just plain wasteful and stupid.
Most sata's i come across are 60MB/s some 80MB/s, With raid-5 i've seen 100MB/s Still not enough to saturate a single GB eth-channel, let alone a number of bonded interface. Real fast scsi-drives are just some gigs..
(Or do you still use thinwire, 10B2, without proper line-terminators ;-)
I know a bit about this. For small files (1 MB or less) and a heavy i/o load your limiting factor is the drives and their slow seek times. (i.e. not the CPU, nor PCI-bus, nor Ethernet,) So spend your money on Raid setups and more drives if you want to run faster. ie. basically the more spindles you have, the more i/o you can do. If you have bigger files (1GB +) that you are working with, then 3 or 4 drives in a raid array may saturate what the MB / ethernet can handle. With older machines the PCI bus becomes the throttle. Just too slow. I have not tested with modern machines and all the i/o running on PCIexpress cards. I'm not sure where the bottleneck is there for a fileserver serving large files Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org