Build Advice File server build

Well.. I've already run them in RAID5 in the NAS box. The other three are running quite happily in RAID5 as well. So I foresee no problems.

The server is alive and well. It's installing Visat 64 Ultimate now.... slowly. Celery Cheesecake!!!


Talking of which.... cheesecake always helps a headache

 

good to hear pooky! benchmarks stat!

 

Well, that's good. Does RAID5 normally need identical drives, or not?

 

OK... been testing all morning (I feel asleep last night LOL).

Not done any specific benches on the RAID yet.. except a few quick ones to establish it was working. I did a fast bench in both RAID0 and RAID5... just to see.
RAID0 is around 450MB/sec read and 300MB/sec write. Which is cool.. but I need RAID5.

RAID5 is around 250MB/sec read and around 175MB/sec write. So oodles of bandwidth for gigabit traffic there.


I just copied a 80GB ghost image from my main rig to the new server's RAID over the network, and got this. (sorry about the weird screenie... I'm on teh server using MS Paint LOL)




So the limiting factor is now the i7 rig's hard drive READ speed!! cool Basically, it means I can now back up over the network as fast as I could to the main rig's local drives.

Mission accomplished.


I will have to rebuild the server though... physically I mean... as this cheap case I bought has cooling so bad that within 10 minutes of operation the drives are at 50C!!!! Caught it just in time. I shall bring old faithful PC-70 out of retirement


[ZOMG!!!111 EDIT]

Just read that having matching figs for Jumbo frame support on all NICs across the netwprk can massively improve performace.. so I did.

Same 80GB file from main rig to server over the gigabit...



I think I can safely say that's as fast as I'll ever transfer files over a gigabit home network

 

loving that!

 

Matching figs? What do you mean by that?

Oh and you do realise that you can crop the picture in MS Paint - no excuses for the massive white blank spaces!!

 

I can honestly say I've never used MS Paint before today LOL


By matching figs, I mean in the netwok adaptor's config setings, you can enable, or disable jumbo frame support... which is basiocally large packet support. If enabled, it works better if all network adaptors on the network use the same figure.

 

Oh right, never gead of jumbo frame support - sounds like a wind-up.

Where are the photos!?

 

Mission Accomplished?

 

Looks great, Pook. Glad to see its sorted.

Mind if I ask what your network switch is?

Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L is Realtek GigE and what's your i7? P6T? That'll probably be Marvell.

Just interested because my GigE switch is cheap and Im not sure if supports Jumbo Frames, or even if the Switch matters (iirc it does).. ill have a look later.

 

errr.. yeah Being able to write a back up to a server as fast as i can on the local disk

D-Link DIR-655 is the router/switch.

Photos soon... trying to configure a VNC now so I can run the server headless.

 

Did you trim down Vista especially then? Or as is?

 

ultraVNC, get it and love it

 

HippoRemote - control your server from your iphone or ipod touch

 

sounds like a headache as wireless VNC just fails.

 

Just as is.


I'm trying tightVNC.. seems to work OK

 

so you've got all this in your PC-70, lol overkill much?

 

It works great. Although thinking about it it's not applicable to this situation. Sorry

 

why not just use remote desktop if your already running vista? thats what i use

oh and for the screen shots type in 'snipping' into the vista run box

or alternatively use alt-prtscrn

 

also copuld you get a power meter on it to see what power you are drawing My sig server pulls about 95W or ~ 105W with a few VMs turned on