Pentium III + 3ware 9500s + GP 1TB RE2 drives...?

[Sparkyy]

Well as the title suggest, I actually got this computer for free from someone, they said it wasn't working and they were going to toss it less I wanted it. I figured why not, so I took it and ripped it apart; found out that just the PSU in this tiny computer was shot. Hooked it up to my 450watt and it purred to life, turns out it is a Pentium III 800EB Mhz processor with 128mb of SDRAM and 2 PCI cards as its a MATX board.

My idea is this:
-Pentium III 800mhz board
-3ware 9500s 8 port PCI-X card
-5 1TB GP RE2 drives in RAID 5
-Server 2003 Standard Edition

I know the PCI will limit the transfer of data from the card itself but I would toss in a Gb NIC to the second PCI slot and just use that as a very low powered server. The board with a single cd-rw and 20gb WD used 60watts.
Should I proceed down this path or just toss the board and find something else? I will be the only one using this but I have a feeling that it just might not be worth it.

 

[alan2308]

Its not going to win you any speed records, but I'm serving up files with less than that and satisfied with the results. Fire it up and copy some files back and forth. The only one who can really say whether or not its fast enough is you. I would consider upping the memory though.

 

[Mathemabeat]

What chipset does the board use? Intel BX?

My own personal experience has shown that has as much, if not more, to do with the performance you will receive over gigabit. Over a 100 megabit connection, you would have no problem saturating the connection with that P3. Gigabit is a different story. If you check that thread and Post 15 to be specific, you can get an idea on what kind of results you might see.


My P3 800 box with a cheap-o Realtek gigE card and SATA 4 port card was good for about 25 megs in each direction. This was with Server 2003. Results with Linux would probably be similiar.


My suggestion, if you already have the hardware and it was free, would be buy to use a high quality NIC in it to offset the slower CPU. Something like and Intel Gigabit card would be ideal and probably the best choice regardless of the rest of the hardware. Even if the hardware turns out to not deliver the speed you are looking for, the NIC would be a good carry over to a new machine. Plus its well support in Windows, Linux and the different BSD's.

 

[imzjustplayin]

What chipset does the board use? Intel BX?

My own personal experience has shown that has as much, if not more, to do with the performance you will receive over gigabit. Over a 100 megabit connection, you would have no problem saturating the connection with that P3. Gigabit is a different story. If you check that thread and Post 15 to be specific, you can get an idea on what kind of results you might see.


My P3 800 box with a cheap-o Realtek gigE card and SATA 4 port card was good for about 25 megs in each direction. This was with Server 2003. Results with Linux would probably be similiar.


My suggestion, if you already have the hardware and it was free, would be buy to use a high quality NIC in it to offset the slower CPU. Something like and Intel Gigabit card would be ideal and probably the best choice regardless of the rest of the hardware. Even if the hardware turns out to not deliver the speed you are looking for, the NIC would be a good carry over to a new machine. Plus its well support in Windows, Linux and the different BSD's.

And you wonder why you get such bad performance? If you want good ethernet speeds, even 100megabit speeds, get an intel ethernet card. Pretty much all other ethernet cards suck, horribly, and so I can only recommend intel ethernet cards. For gigabit, it's extremely important you don't skimp on something such as this.

But you are right though, you'll never saturate a 1gigabit connection on a Penitum III, in fact you'd need about a 2.8ghz P4 in order to do that. Don't sweat it though, you wouldn't be able to saturate the gigabit under the best conditions anyhow because of multiple factors: Hard disk speeds, controller speed, Bus speed and processor speed. If you take out processor and bus speed (use a P4 3ghz, and PCI-X 133mhz) you'd still have to contend with slow HDDs and the controller's speed. It's a good controller but you can't expect everything from it.

Also don't forget, if you install a PCI gigabit card, that's about 125MB/s, theoretically complete saturation of the bus, there would be no bandwidth left for other things, such as that controller card you'd be installing, so both of them would be fighing each other for bandwidth, the HDD would saturate the bus and then the GIGe card would then saturate it with the data it obtained from the HDD to send over the network.

It's a big mess that you shouldn't be concerning yourself with. Just get a quality Intel Gigabit ethernet card, who cares how old it is, just long as it's Intel as the newer cards would only benefit those who could fully utilize it (those with 64bit PCI or 32bit @ 66mhz or even 64bit 133mhz. (Those configurations aren't available on consumer boards in MOST cases). For one HDD, in a non raid configuration, I'd imagine you'd be able to fully utilize its transfer speeds. So if it's a 50MB/s drive (actual tested speeds, not its rated controller speed i.e 133MB/s) then I can see you getting at least 30MB/s, that's Megabytes, not Megabits over the network. (Remember, 100Mb=about 12.5MB)

I have found that using gigabit ethernet to feel very similar to the performance of using a hard drive in an external USB 2.0 enclosure, the quirks and all. Though USB2.0 doesn't have to contend with TCP/IP and therefore has far less overhead which is why you generally need such a fast machine to to fully utilize the 125MB/s bandwidth that gigabit ethernet can provide while USB2.0 can be appreciated on just about any machine.

Also there is one more factor you have to think about, lol, you have to think about the quality of your ethernet equipment, cheap shitty switches (hubs are even worse!) and not having support/use of jumbo frames will impact speeds as well.

Regardless of whether or not you get a 10/100 or 10/100/1000 ethernet card, stick with Intel. I know this from EXPERIENCE, realtek and other, even 3COM suck terribly. Last decent 3com card was probably the 3C905 series of ethernet cards, however I have had a few die/act irregular (essentially failed yet works in certain circumstances) so I'm just going to suggest you go on ebay and pick up a few intel 10/100 cards as they can be cheaply obtained. Intel gigabit ethernet cards are a bit more expensive but definately worth it. If you already have a 10/100 card and don't care about anything, then don't spend any money on anything and just use what you have. BUT if you're going to spend your money, spend it on an Intel card.

Summary: Think about what you want to do with this file server. If all you're going to do is store files on there and would like to have reasonably fast access to them, then just stick some Intel 10/100 megabit cards in there and don't worry about it. It'll be the cheapest route and you wouldn't have to worry about a multitude of factors that will impact performance and therefore piss you off.

Otherwise, I'd readup on all the things I've discussed above.

 

[Bookmage]

I have 2 servers running on P3 733Mhz running on Abit VA20 mobos and 512MB SDR that have integrated intel 100Mb Nics. I have 4 x 500GB SATAs running off a $20 4port Sil3114 Sata card. Running in Linux SRAID5, I can stream music and DVDRips and it serves pretty well for just a few users. It only has 1 PCI slot, but if it had 2, I would add in another 4 port sata card. The whole thing runs under 70w and the thing only cost me the drives and the sata card 3 years ago.

Depending on how u want to use it, general file server, streaming music or wutever, it should be fine for ur own personal use. I would go uber cheap, surf the for sale forums/ebay and max out the memory and get a used Intel Nic... Yeah, I second the Intel Nics...

I think the 3Ware might be overkill, but it would work and give u 8 drives if u had acase for it... U might prob get better performance from a low end Athlon64/Sempron and DDR... but it would depend on ur intended usage...

I would throw up FreeNas or Linux SRAID 5 and call it a day...
Cheap, simple, and low energy usage. To be used as a simple file storage server and not expect too much from it...

 

[Sparkyy]

Well I am currently running the server I have in my sig below, that beast uses about 250watts just idle so I am interested in basically selling off my 3 of my 4 - 5 bay hotswaps and the 3ware 12 port card and just get 5 - 1 TB RE2 GP drives for the simplicity of being fewer drives and hopefully less power. I am not worried about it taking a couple seconds more for transferring things if I can cut way back on the power as that is my goal. I was thinking of getting 512mb RAM as that is maxing out the board.