Real World Computing
Is fast the new slow?
But the real killer comparison for the PC-to-NAS equation came from a pair of servers that I'm building at the moment: one is a Compaq ProLiant 310 with a triple SAS drive array and the cheapest-of-range SAS RAID add-on card; the other is a real fossil, an HP E800 that has twin 733MHz Pentium IIIs and a RAID made out of four 36GB SCSI disks on an Intel SRC RAID card. Shooting the same PC copy at these two machines, through the same switch, produced quite staggering performance increases. Using XYplorer as the copy utility (and thereby bypassing Windows Explorer), I was seeing transient speeds of more than 100MB/sec via a gigabit connection, and with just me on the network this vintage dual-processor machine with pre-historic U160 drives plus a smart caching controller wasquite indistinguishable in speed from the ultra-modern SAS machine, since both were capable of saturating the capacity of the wire. I'd expect the ProLiant 310 to achieve that, but the fossil E800 very pleasantly surprised me.
Any pleasure evaporated, though, when I recalled that the external FireWire drive cage and the drive to go in it had cost me more than the entire hardware contents of the E800...
I've built these little servers to run a 40-person network- and that isn't a role I'd consider for a momentfor any of the various new technology hot contendersin the 2008 New Year sales, which all suffer from pretty fundamental and permanent performance bottlenecks.
