2GB or other high bandwidth network

Captain Fizz · 15 Dec 2010 at 12:54

Hello folks,

I have a PERC 5/i in my main PC and it has around 200-250MB/s transfer speeds. (read & write)

Gigabit network only really does about 111MB/s in real terms. (125MB/s theoretical?)

So if I wanted to shove the 5/i into a wee chassis and use it as a NAS, to get decent speeds I'd need something a bit beefier than a standard GB network.

Looking at 2GB fibre, it's 'enough' speed but £70 or more per NIC, but PCI-e cards are £150 odds 2nd hand.
10GB is redicilously expensive
A switch that supports teaming for GB would be as expensive and I'm sure teaming only works for outgoing data, incoming still only uses 1 NIC.

Is there a cheap solution to this? Is it possible to get double the bandwidth of GB Ethernet at a reasonable price or will I just keep the PERC in the main PC?

Cheers.

Is going for 2GB fibre the cheapest option available?

rpstewart · 15 Dec 2010 at 13:07

Are the machines that you'd be transferring to capable of dealing with the data at more than gigabit speeds? For example if the receiving PC can only write to its disk at 80Mb/s the transfer will be limited to that speed.

Are you planning on moving sufficiently large files to make use of the speed? Anything under ~50Mb per file and you won't see much difference from normal gigabit.

RimBlock · 15 Dec 2010 at 14:59

if you are looking at using Linux and have the right chipset that supports it you can take a look at balance-alb which will bond two or more network interfaces and switch a bonded MAC address between them. The switch does not need to be special to support it.

More info here to start you off in a list of chipsets that support it and ones that don't.

Someone else here has also said they have it working to good effect.

RB

Captain Fizz · 17 Dec 2010 at 16:33

Currently I can FRAPS 1600 x 1200 @ 25FPS directly to the RAID Array without any drop in framerate / choppyness.
When I tried this to a single disk it struggled quite a lot. (Recording at that size seems to be just beyond a normal HDD write speeds)

DVD Conversion is quicker using the RAID array for reading & writing at the same time even compared to disk to disk!

So whilst the full speed would not be used on a daily basis - It seems a shame to cut the bandwidth in half by running it on a GB network.
Editing movies etc is much snappier with the huge cache / SSD type speed for sustained reads/writes.

This would also get used occasionally as a file server for small LAN's when we go to shoot each other in the face, face to face

(With beer)

It may be that to keep the speeds I'd be as well keeping it in the PCI-e slot, just for some reason memory address 860.6MB is faulty with the PERC in, fine when it's not :/
So stability affected. (All sorts of speeds, underclocked/overclocked/more & less voltage/stupidly slack timings & speeds etc)

Why off-loading it to an AMD machine would resolve all of my issues.

Will have a looksie at balance-alb, I assume I can get FreeNAS functionality with a *nix box with some playing

Cheers!

EDIT:

Is what I'd like to shove in the remote box - But maintain most of the speed.
Write speeds are about the same as read.

jaybee · 17 Dec 2010 at 16:37

I'm not sure I understand why you think you need more than Gigabit?

Captain Fizz · 17 Dec 2010 at 16:48

Gigabit maxes out at around 111MB/s...
I use the array currently at over this speed for writing FRAPS files + movie editing.

With the price of Velociraptors coming down / New Gen of SSD tech I'm planning an SSD for OS / WoW, 600GB RAID0 array with the Velociraptors and ideally the RAID5 array on another box.

So read/write speeds/transfers on both boxes would exceed gigabit.
I don't like watching progress bars, do too much of that at work!

Zarf · 17 Dec 2010 at 22:14

You can get Dual port Gigabit nics and use 802.3ad teaming, should be significantly less than £150 each on a certain auction site. Just run Crossover cables between the two PC's.
You can also usually team multiple single port nics if they are a server model, like the Intel Pro/1000 PT's, which might be cheaper but will use more pci-e slots.

I'm not sure if the 2Gb Fibre would work, they seem to be Fibre Channel HBA's rather than nics, so I don't know that you'd be able to set up TCP over IP on them.