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advice for File Server - does ram speed matter?
On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 18:45:13 GMT, "FN"
wrote: I'm looking at using one of these Gigabyte motherboards in a custom built file server, for a small business... http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-166 http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-185 I'll be using Windows 2000 Server. IDE hard drives will be attached via a separate Promise IDE Raid 5 Card. About 1-2 gb of RAM (feel free to suggest). Does RAM speed matter for this type of file server usage? I gather ECC ram support is good for a server, but I have no idea if I should go with dual channel DDR 400 or 266? Would the difference be noticeable? The difference in the motherboard and the ram easily adds a couple hundred dollars minimum, and I'm wondering if its a waste. A file server? Multiply the number of network hoses times their best-case bandwidth and I bet you still won't touch the *disk* bandwidth available, never mind the memory bandwidth available with the lesser of your choices... ie: it's likely a waste to spend $$ on premium memory... /daytripper |
#2
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"daytripper" wrote in message ... On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 18:45:13 GMT, "FN" wrote: I'm looking at using one of these Gigabyte motherboards in a custom built file server, for a small business... http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-166 http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-185 I'll be using Windows 2000 Server. IDE hard drives will be attached via a separate Promise IDE Raid 5 Card. About 1-2 gb of RAM (feel free to suggest). Does RAM speed matter for this type of file server usage? I gather ECC ram support is good for a server, but I have no idea if I should go with dual channel DDR 400 or 266? Would the difference be noticeable? The difference in the motherboard and the ram easily adds a couple hundred dollars minimum, and I'm wondering if its a waste. A file server? Multiply the number of network hoses times their best-case bandwidth and I bet you still won't touch the *disk* bandwidth available, never mind the memory bandwidth available with the lesser of your choices... ie: it's likely a waste to spend $$ on premium memory... /daytripper As for the hard drives, just having a single IDE 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm drive makes a noticeable difference on a server. But thanks for the thoughts. |
#3
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On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 23:27:03 GMT, "FN"
wrote: "daytripper" wrote in message .. . On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 18:45:13 GMT, "FN" wrote: I'm looking at using one of these Gigabyte motherboards in a custom built file server, for a small business... http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-166 http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-185 I'll be using Windows 2000 Server. IDE hard drives will be attached via a separate Promise IDE Raid 5 Card. About 1-2 gb of RAM (feel free to suggest). Does RAM speed matter for this type of file server usage? I gather ECC ram support is good for a server, but I have no idea if I should go with dual channel DDR 400 or 266? Would the difference be noticeable? The difference in the motherboard and the ram easily adds a couple hundred dollars minimum, and I'm wondering if its a waste. A file server? Multiply the number of network hoses times their best-case bandwidth and I bet you still won't touch the *disk* bandwidth available, never mind the memory bandwidth available with the lesser of your choices... ie: it's likely a waste to spend $$ on premium memory... /daytripper As for the hard drives, just having a single IDE 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm drive makes a noticeable difference on a server. But thanks for the thoughts. Building a file server around a single anything is probably a bad idea, but building one around a single IDE drive would be down right stupid if performance is a criteria. At least a scsi solution would allow seek reordering where an IDE drive won't... |
#4
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western digital 200 GB with the 8MB cache
"George Macdonald" wrote in message ... On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 18:45:13 GMT, "FN" wrote: I'm looking at using one of these Gigabyte motherboards in a custom built file server, for a small business... http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-166 http://secure.newegg.com/app/specifi...tem=13-128-185 I'll be using Windows 2000 Server. IDE hard drives will be attached via a separate Promise IDE Raid 5 Card. About 1-2 gb of RAM (feel free to suggest). Does RAM speed matter for this type of file server usage? I gather ECC ram support is good for a server, but I have no idea if I should go with dual channel DDR 400 or 266? Would the difference be noticeable? The difference in the motherboard and the ram easily adds a couple hundred dollars minimum, and I'm wondering if its a waste. Is this a file/print server only?... no database serving? 512MB RAM will be sufficient - 1GB will give some breathing space for future bloat if you wish. For hard disks I'd suggest considering a Promise SuperSwap kit which will give you failure redundancy plus a near-passive short-term backup by disk swapping - the hot swapping works well but you have to be ultra careful about grounding yourself, no matter the weather, before touching the drive with the key... not sure if swapping goes with RAID-5. I still have a PII/450 in our W2K file/print server and the only time it really hurts for memory and CPU speed is on Defrags - yes, it *will* be upgraded one of those days.:-) If there's a few spare $$ spend on the case - I have a Antec SX-1240 (6x5.25" bays) which, AFAIK, has been superseded now but I don't regret spending on it and it has worked out very well. What drives are you considering? I recently switched from IBM 75GXPs to Seagate Barracudas (upgrade from 20GBs to 80GBs) and am seeing no more little disk related glitches and Active Directory recoveries in the system logs... and the Seagates, with FDB, are very quiet. Rgds, George Macdonald "Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me?? |
#5
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On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 22:01:40 GMT, daytripper
wrote: A file server? Multiply the number of network hoses times their best-case bandwidth and I bet you still won't touch the *disk* bandwidth available, never mind the memory bandwidth available with the lesser of your choices... Think we've been down this road before, but I'll risk it, anyway. I don't know the ratio of bytes read from disk to bytes actually used, but I'll bet it's significantly greater than one. Wasting bandwidth by reading more data than necessary is one way of hiding latency. That doesn't make your argument or your conclusion necessarily wrong, but it isn't the slam dunk you make it out to be. As to memory speed, same argument applies. How many memory references per byte read or written to disk via a network connection? More than one, that's for sure. Lots going on at once: many users, many transactions. Nobody ever sees a delay due to memory bandwidth bottleneck? I'm skeptical. RM |
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