On Monday 05 November 2001 13:26, you wrote:
> I would like to connect two computers directly at around 30MB/s.
>
> Computer A will be a fairly ordinary workstation.
> Computer B will contain a number of ATA100 disks.
>
> The idea is to create a few RAID 5 arrays within Computer B to be used
> exclusively by Computer A (there simply isn't enough room in A alone). I
> am thinking about the most cost effective and sensible way to do this - as
> I see it, the most cost effective solution would be to stick 3-4x100Mbit
> NICs in each box and bond the devices to create around 30MB/s+
> (theoretical) throughput between the boxen.
>
> Does this sound like a reasonable way of doing this or should I consider
> fibre solutions (this is for home so I want it to be cheap, but reliable).
> I am also after suggestions of a suitable network filesystem for the task.
It sounds reasonable to me, Dlink makes a Quad Fastethernet NIC which I used
from gnd.com. Although I have used 3 seperate PCI NICs in one host, I'd be
surprised if you have all the slots available, especially if you have RAID
cards.
I think when you've done this, you'll find your bottle neck is somewhere
else. Some of the Beowulf network drivers have special tricks to reduce
latency, which might be interesting for you, if you find your throughput
isn't limited by the disks.
Depending on your application, you might find it more cost effictive to
simply use lots of RAM in the client machine, for a large cache. This will
be especially good if you can mount large parts of your fs's read only.
As speed seems important to you, I'm wondering why you're using RAID5 rather
than RAID10 (0+1) which tends to come out top in benchmarks, and performs
much better for random writes.
Rob
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu 22 Nov 2001 - 13:19:08 GMT