[Gllug] Fileserver hardware advice

[Thomi Richards]

Hi List,

I'm about to build a new fileserver to replace the one I had to leave behind 
in my worldly adventures, and I was hoping to get some advice from the list 
(I am by no means a hardware guru).

First, here's the outline:

I plan to have roughly 400GB of free space to start with, but add disks as I 
need them. I was thinking of using EVMS for that. I want to 'export' this 
space using both NFS and SMB network protocols to an internal network (only).

I have a few specific questions:

1) I have a few old 200GB PATA disks lieing around that I want to use. What 
kind of performance can I expect from a PATA disk compared to a SATA one? 
Assuming both disks have similar cache sizes, does it hold true that SATA 
disks are always faster / better than PATA ones?

1a) Will using a mix of PATA and SATA in an EVMS 'cluster' (or whatever the 
right EVMS terminology is) degrade performance?

2) Assuming I use NFS to access the files on the share, how much difference 
will using a 1Gbps network between client and server make, compared to a 
100Mbps network? I'm trying to work out if I'll need to buy a 1Gbps network 
card for my laptop (sounds expensive). I assume that accessing large files 
over NFS will max out any connection.. is that correct?

3) As I understand it, neither NFS nor SMB do any kind of computationally 
heavy encryption, so I guess the machine specs realy don't need to be that 
beefy - can anyone recommend values int he right ballpark for CPU / RAM 
allocations?

4) Finally, how much difference will having a 64 bit CPU make when it comes to 
performance?


Can anyone offer me some advice on this topic? It's been a while since I've 
had cause to build a PC from parts, and I'd like to do it correctly the first 
time...


Thanks in advance!
-- 
Thomi Richards
thomir at gmail.com
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