What's the Fastest I can get out of this Equipment

[Okami]

Hello All, I've read a thousand different threads / reviews / showdowns and I think i've gotten more and more confused along the way. The only thing I really know is my current hard ware

Amd Sempron 3000+
2 GB of Ram
2 500 GB Harddrives
2 160 GB hard drives
1 250 USB hard drive
1 160 USB Hard Drive

I've read about.. FreeNas, ClarkConnect, Openfiler, unRaid,
I have copies of xp, vista ultima, server 2008

What I can't decide are these things
1) Which operating system would I be able to get the fastest speeds?
2) Which gigabit ethernet cards would max out my system?
3) Which gigabit switch is priced well but not too much for a simple home server system (stream some media + backup pictures / media + torrent if possible)

I was looking at this switch
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pwcnt_2708?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

And this NIC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106121

I understand the mix of harddrives is going to be a major bottleneck as well as the PCI bus but this is what I have to work with for now.

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[thiggins]

Choose your gigabit switch based on price, warranty and brand preference. There is no significant performance difference.

You need a PCIe gigabit NIC to approach gigabit Ethernet speeds. A PCI NIC will only get you to 600 - 700 Mbps.

For best performance, use internal SATA drives, 7200 RPM or better. Capacity doesn't really matter.

If you are running Vista SP1 clients, use Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008, so that clients can use the file copy optimizations built into Vista. See
How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

 

[Okami]

Thanks for the info thiggins.

The network is going to be made of a few xp and a few vista machines. Also I'm still with the PCI bus right now as the specs i put up are of a computer we already have.

I'm not being stubborn about it. It's just i recently upgraded my own system for work purposes and dont have enough for a bit to invest on a totally new pc for a nas.

 

[00Roush]

I think the best performance would be Vista to Vista but I have not tested this. Since I had a machine here that is kinda similar to what you have I went ahead and did some testing of a couple of OSes.

Here is the setup I used for testing.

Client:
Athlon 64 X2 5400 (2.8 Ghz)
4 GB RAM
Vista SP1
Marvell PCIe gigabit network card
WD 320 GB SE16 test drive ( drive E: )

Server:
Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 ghz socket 939)
512 MB RAM
Win XP PRO SP2 and FreeNAS 0.68
Intel Pro/1000 MT PCI gigabit network card (desktop version)
WD 320 GB SE16 test drive

Reads from the Win XP server came in at about 65 MB/sec. Writes were about 85 MB/sec.

Reads from the FreeNAS server came in at about 65 MB/sec. Writes were also about 65 MB/sec.

The Win XP server was set to use LargeSystemCache.
The FreeNAS server had the CIFS send buffer size and receive buffer size changed to 65536.

Speeds are what Vista was reporting just before the file copy was done. I also used a program called DiskBench (http://www.nodesoft.com/DiskBench/) to verify speeds. I used a few different files that ranged from 1 GB to 2 GB in size. For reference the hard drives I used to test with benchmark at about 100 MB/sec max for reading and writing sequentially.

I was actually quiet surprised by the results as I have not seen file copy speeds that high for PCI based network cards. Also was surprised to see that FreeNAS had similar speed to XP. Past experiments on older hardware always had FreeNAS a bit slower. One thing to remember is that I was using Vista on the client.

I would say that FreeNAS, Ubuntu Server, Win XP, Vista, or Win Server 2003/2008 would give good performance as a server OS. I tried out Openfiler previously but found that it would not allow changes to Samba settings and therefore had lower performance than Ubuntu Server. It was also harder to configure hard drives and file shares. I have not tried ClarkConnect or unRaid.

The card you linked to should provide similar performance to the card I used in my test server.

Not sure if you really need a managed switch. I personally use the D-Link 2208 which is a 8 port unmanaged switch. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833127082

You could always benchmark your drives to see what a best case speed would be. My old IDE 160 GB WD drives are capable of a max of 65 MB/sec at the beginning of the drives. Speeds of file copies across my network with these drives is around 50-60 MB/sec on average. While they are not in the same league as most newer drives I believe they still can offer good performance in a NAS/media server.

Based on your CPU I would say your server could do 50-60 MB/sec provided the disks can keep up. Also you need to consider the computers you will be using to connect to the server. Basically your speed will be determined by the slowest computer.

Hope that helps.

00Roush

 

[bliko]

The PCI bus will present an overall bottleneck to the network, the USB drives will max at 30MB/sec.

As mentioned before I think you can expect ~50MB/sec from those internal drives. Since you're expecting a low number of connections and relatively low io which os shouldn't make too much difference. Win2k8 or vista may well give u a slightly better speed because they use newer samba as tim mentioned in his review.

I feel freenas and openfiller can be a bit hit and miss with some hardware, so I'd recomend windows as you already have the licences. Managing windows will also be slightly easier

Do you plan to use raid? Or just separate disks?

 

[Okami]

Well only 2 of the disk are exact matches so I'm not totally sure if I want to raid them.

Thanks so much for the information guys. I'm going to order the switch NIC and go from there.

Who knew there was this much information to go into Nas development! You guys should get together and make your own line of them

 

[thiggins]

I think the best performance would be Vista to Vista but I have not tested this. Since I had a machine here that is kinda similar to what you have I went ahead and did some testing of a couple of OSes.

Best performance will be with Vista SP1 to Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008. Both OSes include the file copy optimizations described in How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference and SMB2 support.

 

[MoralDelima]

If you've got room and space inside your PC, removing the drives from their USB enslosure and plugging them in directly to the MB might gain you a little bit extra (at least for SATA drives), assuming none of your enclosures are 2 drives in RAID0 or anything funky like that (some of the early 1TB and most of the 2TB are).

 

[Okami]

Ordering my stuff today but I have a question.

Been reading some switches will default every connection to 100mbit if one of the computers on there is 100mbit

If first I were to connect all my computers together through this switch and then this switch to my router (10/100) would that knock my whole network down to 100mbit?

 

[thiggins]

Been reading some switches will default every connection to 100mbit if one of the computers on there is 100mbit

Please give me the link where it says that.

It is not true. A switch treats each pair of connections independently.

 

[Okami]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833127082

In the reviews he's mentioning it

 

[thiggins]

If a switch is really doing that, it is broken.