Want to hear others thoughts or suggestions on my setup

[Mopardude]

My buddy and I have a little gaming club basically and we host LAN parties about every 3 months or so. I have a Ubuntu box setup to host all the ISO's, patches, MODS, and what ever else is needed.

My current Ubuntu rig is:
Asus A8N32-SLI MB
AMD Athlon64 FX San Diego 4000+ 2.4ghz
2 gigs of ram
WD 320GB Black Drive As primary basically is the OS drive
2 -WD 500gb Black drives using the onboard Raid in stripping mode. It is software raid or fakeraid from what I understand about onboard raids.

I just upgraded my gaming rig so I now have the parts from my old rig at my disposal.

Old gaming rig parts are:
Asus M2-Crossfire AM2 MB
AMD Athlon 64 X2 AM2 2.6ghz
2 gig ram

I also have 2 80gig 10,000rpm raptor drives laying around and need a home.

Here are some of the options I am considering. Also the network we have setup is a gig network and the primary roll of the ubuntu box is to serve files.

My first thought is to migrate the Ubuntu box to my old gaming rig and buy an actual raid card. Using 1 of the 80 gig raptors for the OS Drive and buying another 500GB drive and setting up a raid 5 setup and using this as a backup solution at home as well.

My next thought was setting the old gaming rig back up for gaming with the 320GB drive and having it setup for an extra computer for other people to use in case someone wants to bring a friend that doesn't have a good enough pc to run some of the newer games. Than resetup the current Ubuntu box with the new drive configuration I just mentioned.

With that being said my buddy and myself have a sick facsination with trying get our gig network to serve up data as fast is possible.

Would upgrading the Ubuntu box to the faster rig give us any benefits in speed or performance network wise? I am thinking no, as HD speed seems to be the cap holding us back right now and since it will be the same HD's being used no matter what box is used. Unless there is something I am overlooking. Also would I see any benefits in speed or performance if I bought a hardware raid and strippped both my 80 gig raptors for the OS drive? If I am overlooking any other ideas through them out here cause I am kinda learning as I go here anyways.

 

[thiggins]

What are you getting for transfer rates now?

 

[Mopardude]

Well I talk to my buddy today he says 3-4 mbs but I didn't think it was that fast. I was thinking more like 2.5 mbs. His numbers might be with just him accessing the server where mine would have been access it during the lan party and other users would have been downloading also. Which we should consider because on average we have 14-21 people per lan. If the forces to be were ever to align, it would be possible for over 40 people to come. Highly unlikely as it is hard pick a day that works for everyone.

 

[thiggins]

Is that MBytes or Mbits per second? Either way, that's pretty slow. Even inexpensive NASes can do 20 MBytes/sec or so now.

The problem isn't your hardware. It's plenty fast. I'd start with running some file transfer tests to get reliable numbers.

 

[Mopardude]

Is that MBytes or Mbits per second? Either way, that's pretty slow. Even inexpensive NASes can do 20 MBytes/sec or so now.

The problem isn't your hardware. It's plenty fast. I'd start with running some file transfer tests to get reliable numbers.

MBytes, but I think I will need to run the server over there sometime and check again as I don't think either one of us are remembering correctly. Here at home on my 100MB network I get between 10-11 MB per sec. Also is there any software that is best for testing network speed?

 

[thiggins]

Here at home on my 100MB network I get between 10-11 MB per sec. Also is there any software that is best for testing network speed?

12.5 MB/s is the maximum you'll get from 100 Mbps Ethernet. You must have Gigabit on both server and client to get anything higher.

You don't have to use anything fancy. Just copy a folder with a Gigabyte
or so of files, time it and do the math. If you're running Vista, just use the info from the file copy pop-up.

 

[Mopardude]

12.5 MB/s is the maximum you'll get from 100 Mbps Ethernet. You must have Gigabit on both server and client to get anything higher.

Yea I know that is why I can't test the gig network here as I don't have switch that will support it. So would you say getting 10-11MB/s would be good than or not for a 100 Mb/s network or should I be maxing that baby out? Also taking a educated guess, what kind of numbers would you say we should be seeing on the gigabit network?

 

[thiggins]

10 to 11 on a 100 Mbps network is fine. You won't get 12.5 due to protocol overhead.

As I said, you should be able to get 50 - 60 MB/s without the client optimizations that I referred to.

 

[Mopardude]

10 to 11 on a 100 Mbps network is fine. You won't get 12.5 due to protocol overhead.

As I said, you should be able to get 50 - 60 MB/s without the client optimizations that I referred to.

Ok when I get back over to his house sometime to test it if I am in that ball park I won't worry about it than. I will save my old gaming rig parts to rebuild into a box for other people to use than.