More money spending - thoughts

[Fish]

Right I've got a nice 3COM switch with a Gigabit uplink to the server which I have got a 3COM server NIC card for now.

However the server is essentially a desktop machine with an IDE 7200 ATA 133 hardrive. Motherboard is a ATA 133front bus? with a P111 1GHZ and 1Gig of RAM.

With that specc I can't imagine I'll get anything near full spead of the network and switchs as the hard drive will slow it down. Am I right in that IDE drives use the processor to distribute the data.

If I change to a SCSI drive with a PCI SCSI controller card will I see HUGE changes in the speed of file saving and opening over a 100mb(client) network.

I've seen SCSI 320 15000rpm Seagate drives and ADEPTEC cards.

I suppose what I mean is do SCSI ignore the processors and the controller card deals with the data directly?

Thoughts on another postcard to.....

[agent006]

Walk into a server room in any IT department worht its salt, then try and find an IDE drive.

SCSI drives are inherantly faster than IDE. More reliable and designed for longer running times.
For a server you'd be better off buying a RAID card rather than a basic SCSI controller. Raid lets you use more than one drive to get fault tolerance.

So for example:
2x 36gb SCSI320 drives
1 raid card

You mirror the drives to tehy both end up with the same data on, but appear as one volume. So if one goes "oh for 's sake" the other one can keep going until you replace the broken one.

[UpTheIron]

You'll get another performance hike over SCSI disks and RAID card if you go for a decent caching RAID card (e.g. HP/Compaq SMARTArray).

[plotloss]

To be honest, unless you are caning both the network and the discs I wouldnt bother with SCSI as the price hike and platter limit is unjustifiable for simple serving work.

If you are worried about DB transaction time or serving media then yes but for normal stuff IDE or even RAID IDE should be fine.

[Fish]

Thanks for the thoughts I'll probebly just see how it performs with the new switch.

It is a low traffic small office network with only 20 odd PCs but it will be growing!!!

The IDE has performed reasonably well and has been switched on for nearly two years now and the server has never had a glitch yet touch wood...

[ek993]

If it is an office environment with users dependent on data (ie they are going to be sitting their twiddling their thumbs in the event of downtime), then I would definitely get a RAID controller and 3 x SCSI disks. Go RAID 5 and you havent got the constant worry over your head of having to rebuild the box if the disk dies (which it will eventually). I would rather spend the cash and have peace of mind over data integrity (considering it is a work environment), how much would it cost your business if the data is unavailable for 24 hours whilst you are rebuilding? At least with RAID 5 and a decent RAID controller you can swap a disk out when it goes bad.

Disk is cheap these days!!

[_DJ_]

agent006 said:

Walk into a server room in any IT department worht its salt, then try and find an IDE drive.

1) You shouldn't be able to walk in to a server room (you'd need authenticating, change request document etc)

2) Once you'd done the above, you'd then find IDE drives in our datacentre.

IDE drives are cheap and cheerful and have their uses.
For example, we use them for disk backups (NAS Filers) and in IBM blade kit (which still use RAID for resilience).

Don't discount either technology - choose the one that fits your requirements and budget.

DJ

[apeebles]

If you are supporting 20 users + then I think that you will notice the difference between a SCSI and IDE system. Also if you are keeping data on this server (Which I suspect) then I agree that a RAID solution would be a good idea in order to add a saftey net to your data. Just curious but how do you backup your data or is that the next money spending question?

[Mrs Fish]

James here:

I back up onto tape each night in full and do an incremental at lunch time. We don't have much data as it is mostly word docs and excel with some Autocad so I don't need more than 30gig as my current full backup is only 12gbit.

SCSI does look tempting I'll probebly then be limited by motherboard speeds.

[JamieBeeston]

Mrs Fish said:

SCSI does look tempting I'll probebly then be limited by motherboard speeds.

haha, never. (so long as your on a decent server mobo)

64bit PCI will do 528 mB/sec

You will need ALOT of scsi hdds to get anywhere near that speed in reality.

Your bottleneck will always really be the speed of the hdd. u320 drives, wont see 320mB/sec nearer 80mB/sec in reality.

So long as ou get a 64bit PCI slot on your mobo.

if you only have a stock 32bit pci, then your limited to 133mb/sec (to share between not only the scsi controller, but also the Network cards, and disk controllers, and video (unless agp)

so you will then very quickly hit a mobo limit!