SMB NAS Roundup
by Ross Whitehead Jason Clark Dave Muysson on December 5, 2006 3:30 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Group DOSBench RAID 5 Results
In this DOSBench Write test the devices are more distributed in the graph vs. the IOMeter Write test where three devices were almost on top of one another. In this graph we see that Infrant is 20% faster than the QNAP, Thecus, and Intel. We wondered if the extreme performance difference between some of the devices was a result of the RAID 5 parity calculations. We will explore RAID 0 performance shortly in an attempt to gain some insight into where the bottleneck may be.
Here we see that Infrant is 25% faster in the 100 MB File Copy but with File Copies of 200 MB or greater the Infrant and Thecus are able to outperform all others by 44%.
In this DOSBench Write test the devices are more distributed in the graph vs. the IOMeter Write test where three devices were almost on top of one another. In this graph we see that Infrant is 20% faster than the QNAP, Thecus, and Intel. We wondered if the extreme performance difference between some of the devices was a result of the RAID 5 parity calculations. We will explore RAID 0 performance shortly in an attempt to gain some insight into where the bottleneck may be.
Here we see that Infrant is 25% faster in the 100 MB File Copy but with File Copies of 200 MB or greater the Infrant and Thecus are able to outperform all others by 44%.
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yyrkoon - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
My problem is this: I want redundancy, but I also do not want to be limited to GbE transfer rates. I've been in communication with many people, via different channels (email, IRC, forums, etc), and the best results I've seen anyone get on GbE is around 90MB/s using specific NIC cards (Intel pro series, PCI-E).The options here are rather limited. I like Linux, however, I refuse to use Ethernet channel bonding (thus forcing the use of Linux on all my machines), or possibly a combination of Ethernet channel bonding, with a very expensive 802.11 a/d switch. 10GbE is is an option, but is way out of my price range, and 4GB FC doesn't seem to be much better. From my limited understanding of their product, Intel pro cards I think come with software to be used in aggregate load balancing, but I'm not 100% sure of this, and unless I used cross over cables from one machine, to another, I would be forced into paying $300usd or possibly more for a 802.11 a/d switch again. I've looked into all these options, plus 1394b firewire teaming, and SATA port multipliers. Port multiplier technology looks promising, but is Dependant on motherboard RAID (unless you shell out for a HBA), but from what I do know about it, you couldn't just plug it in to a Areca card, and have it work at full performance (someone correct me if I'm wrong please, Id love top learn otherwise).
My goal, is to have a reliable storage solution, with minimal wait times when transferring files. At some point, having too much would be overkill, and this also needs to be realized.
peternelson - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
It sounds like your needs would be solved by using a fiber channel fabric.
You need a FC nic (or two) in each of your clients, then one or more FC switches eg from Brocade or oems of their switches. Finally you need drive arrays to connect FC or regular drives onto the FC fabric.
It isn't cheap but gives fantastic redundancy. FC speeds are 1/2/4 Gigabits per second.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 5, 2006 - link
I've been giving Areca a lot of thought lately. What I was considering, was to use a complete system for storage, loads of disk space, with an Areca RAID controller. The only problem I personally have with my idea here is: how do I get a fast link to the desktop PC ?I've been debating back and forth with a friend of mine about using firewire. From what he says, you can use multiple firewire links, teamed, along with some "hack" ? for raising to get 1394b to 1000MBit/s, to achieve what seems like outstanding performance. Assuming what my friend says is accurate, you could easily team 4x 1394b ports, and get 500MB/s.