How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 4: Ubuntu Server

[nasfan]

thanks to the ubuntu diy article posted on here, I've setup a p4 2.8ghz, 512 MBs of ram and sil-magic sata controller nas box. Nasbox has 2 2tb hitachi hdd's. I'm getting 55 M/Bytes write to the nas and 33 M/Bytes reading from the nas using onboard marvell gigbit NIC. Is this normal or can it be faster?

I've tried tweaking HD parm with cache on but it actually made it slower.

Seeing 100 MB+ speeds on some of the setups posted here have me thinking old P4 is too slow for the job. Yet my cpu never goes above 40% usage and disk tests itself fine, comparable to others with 100MB+ throughput, odd...

I can slap together an Intel c2d E5300 box in less than 30 mins if it's the hardware.

 

[00Roush]

First up... what OS are you using to connect to the NAS?

In some of my previous testing I have seen speeds as high as 70-90 MB/sec on a P4 setup. So it is possible to see higher speeds but it mostly has to do with how the network card is connected to the system. The machine I tested on had a Intel PRO/1000 CT network card connected on the CSA bus which allowed for full gigabit throughput. But most network cards from that timeframe were connected via the PCI bus and ended up being limited to 60-70 MB/sec. Also the machine I tested had 2 SATA ports on the motherboard so I did not use a separate PCI controller card.

My guess is that your onboard network card is connected to the PCI bus. So with that and your SATA controller card being on the PCI bus you are probably being held back by the PCI bus. Realistically though I think that you should be able to see higher read speeds though.

Your Intel c2d E5300 setup would probably show some good improvements in transfer speeds.

00Roush

 

[Unregistered]

I built a VERY fast NAS as an experiment. It was so fast that the bottleneck was the gigabit LAN port!

I used a Solaris installation running a RAID-Z pool across four 1.5Tb disks and a AMD Phenom x4 processor.

 

[Unregistered]

What type of installation did you use?

 

[bnborg]

I built a VERY fast NAS as an experiment. It was so fast that the bottleneck was the gigabit LAN port!

I used a Solaris installation running a RAID-Z pool across four 1.5Tb disks and a AMD Phenom x4 processor.

Solaris is available from Oracle now that they bought Sun.