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Will IDE drive with XP OS slow down the performance of my NAS using SATAII and gbLAN?
I have four 250gb SATAII WD drives and will use RAID 5 to store various data. Should I put the OS on the RAID volume or what? The other option I have is to put the OS on a 40gb WD IDE. Will putting the OS on the IDE drive slow down data transfer to the RAID volumes? Don't forget this is network storage.
Thanks for your help - Jered S
Thanks for your help - Jered S
No, it shouldn't affect the performance of your RAID data storage, they will also run on different controllers.
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Will SATAII help performance?? Or is it bottlednecked by the RAID controller?
SATA 150 MB/s or 300 MB/s won't matter; remember, your Gb ethernet connection will, in the best of all possible worlds, give you only about 100 MB/s! Probably a little less. Granted, if all your ethernet equipment is thoroughly modern, that's 100 MB/s upstream AND 100 MB/s downstream at the same time, but it's still not much compared to hard drive interface bandwidth. Also, remember that the very fastest SATA hard drive on Earth right now, the WD Raptor, can only sustain about 88-89 MB/s. And that's only over the very beginning of the drive's capacity. Each of those 250 GB WD's you've got pobably has a sustained transfer rate (STR) of about 65 MB/s down to about 40MB/s over their full capacity.
Your bottleneck will be either a) a really slow RAID card having trouble keeping up with the ethernet connection during writes, or b) the hard drives themselves slowing down significantly when they perform multiple reads / writes at the same time. The drives would then be doing a lot of seeking, rather than just working on one contiguous patch of data. Their speed would then plummet to a fraction of their maximum sustained transfer rate (STR).
Your bottleneck will be either a) a really slow RAID card having trouble keeping up with the ethernet connection during writes, or b) the hard drives themselves slowing down significantly when they perform multiple reads / writes at the same time. The drives would then be doing a lot of seeking, rather than just working on one contiguous patch of data. Their speed would then plummet to a fraction of their maximum sustained transfer rate (STR).