Home Network Server

[Rson]

No, you have the Disc Overhead, Drive controller on the NAS box, switch and traffic, Network port and then board overhead. All those mixed with Network traffic slows the up and down of writing an image.

[Bob_S]

Originally Posted by Rson

No, you have the Disc Overhead, Drive controller on the NAS box, switch and traffic, Network port and then board overhead. All those mixed with Network traffic slows the up and down of writing an image.

Disk and controller over head should be same no matter where the disks is mounted, right?

I'm sure you're right and the NAS is a slower, I just wonder by how much. The only thing I can think of is a network layer to add overhead. Network traffic is pretty insignificant for a NAS on a Gb connection.

[Flores]

a properly built NAS will easily saturate a gig-e interface. a cheap **** one will have issues because of the OS it uses and the number of drives in it.

SATA is MUCH quicker than a gig-e interface. If your the only one using it, and your only opening a single file, your network will always always be the bottleneck.

if you are doing multiple reads (like browsing thumbnails), the more read/write heads you have (ie, the more drives) in the NAS, the better the performance will be. If you only have a box of disks (like a drobo) the harder you try and work that drive, the slower it will be, just as if it was directly connected to your PC (but at a piddly slow gig-e speed!)

having a system that E-Satas directly to your machine would be the best solution for speed on external drives. doubly so if it has a good raid controller on it.

[stephenpinn]

some of the earlier bios's will not support notherboard RAID with drives greater than around 750GB. If you use a 3rd party RAID controller (like promise, etc) you will be ok. Many motherboard manufacturers did/do not continue to upgrade BIOS's after a couple of generations.

[Bob_S]

Originally Posted by Flores

a properly built NAS will easily saturate a gig-e interface. a cheap **** one will have issues because of the OS it uses and the number of drives in it.

SATA is MUCH quicker than a gig-e interface. If your the only one using it, and your only opening a single file, your network will always always be the bottleneck.

SATA the interface is quicker but my drives aren't. 100MB/s burst transfer rates seem pretty typical from SATA drives with platters with averages around 90MB/s. Where are you finding drives that will fill up a Gb network? Are you only considering striped architectures?

Well after I wrote this I installed my new Hitachi drives and am getting 120MB/s average and 158MB/s peak. That's enough to fill up a Gb connection

[athompson]

RAID is going to be expensive and technologically complex. Drobo is getting expensive these days. I'm currently building an unRAID (Home) server for my onsite storage.
-ANDY