New Computer Money just came in

Santilli · Sep 1, 2005

Yawn... Yes, scsi sucks. I'm using a pos adaptec 21010S or some such POS< that maxes out at 80 mb/sec. Dual 15.3's in raid zero, are giving me 50-70 mb/sec range. I was so pissed, I bought the LSI single channel raid card, and it's sitting on my desk. It was 350 bucks. Then, I thought about it, and, it's so fast right now, it's absurd. Stuff loads pretty much instantly, on most of the stuff I do. I guess down the road, I'll put it in, and pull the adaptec card.

For some reason, I think it's the cache on the Seagate 15.3's, and maybe the algorithims they use for servers, the two together, even though the card isn't really giving great through put, gives fantastic seeks, and reads. It just feels VERY fast, even though the benchmarks say it's not. I am using it next to a 3000+ Athlon booting off one of the drives, both with 2 gigs of ram, and this system just feels much faster, at any disk type task.

Sometimes benchmarks make no sense...

GS

Pradeep · Sep 1, 2005

Santilli said:
I guess down the road, I'll put it in, and pull the adaptec card.

Which LSI card do you have? I would swap out that POS Adaptec immediately. The benchmarks don't lie in this case, the card is shite and should be ebayed immediately.

Yesterday we hooked up an LTO-2 half-height drive, and tried doing a daily backup on some of those shite RAID 5 arrays. Windows backup estimated 18 GB, and a time of over 3 days! The drive is capable of around 20MB/sec, and the servers churn out a max of 2-3MB/sec.

Our IT Manager has a day job in IT sales (for IBM actually), this is just a part time job for him. So he doesn't have much idea about day to day technical advancements (unless told by IBM technical staff). Plus he's better at running cables thru ceiling space than me. I prefer to advise on purchases.

Fushigi · Sep 1, 2005

Pradeep said:
Yesterday we hooked up an LTO-2 half-height drive, and tried doing a daily backup on some of those shite RAID 5 arrays. Windows backup estimated 18 GB, and a time of over 3 days! The drive is capable of around 20MB/sec, and the servers churn out a max of 2-3MB/sec.

We can get 270GB/hour or 75MB/s out of our IBM 3580 LTO2s. LTO3 should boost that to over 350GB/hour; I should know in a couple of months.

Pradeep · Sep 1, 2005

Yeah, the half height version we have (from Certance) is actually slower in thruput compared to a full bore LTO2 drive. But at around $2000 for an external drive, it was sufficient for our needs. The full speed drives are around $3500. We don't use compression (all JPEGs and TIFFs).

Pradeep · Sep 2, 2005

One last question for the gurus of RAID. The Areca supports >2TB arrays, but mentions 64 bit addressing. Does that mean we can only realise that with a 64 bit OS?

Mercutio · Sep 2, 2005

According to the product manual, you have to have a 64bit OS to surpass 2TB on a single array.

time · Sep 2, 2005

Mercutio said:
According to the product manual, you have to have a 64bit OS to surpass 2TB on a single array.

Why is this a problem? Unless ... don't tell me Pradeep is stuck with a P4 Dell POS? :hurl:

Pradeep · Sep 2, 2005

No, whilst we are stuck with Dell's for external client machines, we can do home brew for internal work which we support ourselves. So I've specced a nice Supermicro dual AMD mobo, with an Opteron 2.something. That'll prob be turned into a Celeron 1.5GHz by the beancounters :evil:

Pradeep · Sep 8, 2005

It's a miracle. The order slipped thru the beancounter cracks.

Dual Opteron 250 (2.4GHz)
Supermicro HD8something "OEM" board
2GB of RAM
Areca 1230 12 port PCI-E controller
6* 500GB Hibachis (to start)
Supermicro case with 15 hot swap SATA carriers on the front

$50 dolla PCI-Express video card

Handruin · Sep 8, 2005

Not all beancounters are bad. :bleh:

Sounds like a nice system!

Santilli · Sep 9, 2005

Pradeep said:
It's a miracle. The order slipped thru the beancounter cracks.

Dual Opteron 250 (2.4GHz)
Supermicro HD8something "OEM" board
2GB of RAM
Areca 1230 12 port PCI-E controller
6* 500GB Hibachis (to start)
Supermicro case with 15 hot swap SATA carriers on the front
$50 dolla PCI-Express video card

YOU ARE ROCKING :excl: :excl: :mrgrn:

lucky guy :excl: :excl: :excl:

But, will it play Quake 3? :wink:

GS

Pradeep · Sep 12, 2005

This is a file server for work, so unlikely to see any Quake 3 duties

No offense Doug :bglaugh:

Will Rickards · Sep 15, 2005

Well finally bought the 2001FP for about $530.
It was 749 - 25% - $60 with almost free shipping leading to 500 before tax and 530 after tax. I did so because of news that the dell coupons will be pulled tomorrow and not renewed. Receiving conflicting reports whether this is just for systems or for systems and electronics and accessories.
I was freaking out earlier today as it was 749 with no 25% discount.
Then I checked tonight and the 25% was back so I bought it.

As soon as I buy I know they'll drop the price to 450 or below.
I hope to have a nice monitor in 3-5 business days.
With it my new computer will be complete.

Santilli · Sep 19, 2005

Pradeep said:
Santilli said:

I guess down the road, I'll put it in, and pull the adaptec card.

Click to expand...

Which LSI card do you have? I would swap out that POS Adaptec immediately. The benchmarks don't lie in this case, the card is shite and should be ebayed immediately.

Yesterday we hooked up an LTO-2 half-height drive, and tried doing a daily backup on some of those shite RAID 5 arrays. Windows backup estimated 18 GB, and a time of over 3 days! The drive is capable of around 20MB/sec, and the servers churn out a max of 2-3MB/sec.

Our IT Manager has a day job in IT sales (for IBM actually), this is just a part time job for him. So he doesn't have much idea about day to day technical advancements (unless told by IBM technical staff). Plus he's better at running cables thru ceiling space than me. I prefer to advise on purchases.

I have the LSI Megaraid1 320-1. It runs the same drives between 90-120mb a sec, and, is noticeably faster then the adaptec card.

I may have to resurect this thread, since I'm going to try and figure out
what is feasible, with the Gigabyte GAK8NSC-939. Hmmmm.

gs

CougTek · Sep 19, 2005

Did I tell you that I bought a Dell 2005FPW last week and that I've just installed it five minutes ago?

Not disappointed, I am.

Mercutio · Sep 19, 2005

One of my customers wants to upgrade 3 PCs to 3200s. Doesn't care what KIND of 3200, just wants to satisfy the "recommended requirements" for some analysis package he just bought (which, if I'm reading correctly, is really just a complicated excel spreadsheet).

As it happens I have three XP3200s, sitting right here.

I upgraded another of his systems about six months ago, at a total cost of $350 (he'd had an original Athlon machine, so it was CPU + mainboard + RAM), and that's what he budgeted for.

For the life of me I can't decide whether to just take the extra $200 per machine...

Pradeep · Sep 19, 2005

Well got everything hooked up and turned it on. Screaming banshee for sure. Definitely not an HTPC

On a plus note the Supermicro case and mobo get along well together, nice to have one big connector for all the front panel crap.

Will Rickards · Sep 20, 2005

Will Rickards said:
With the 2001FP my new computer will be complete.

My system is complete (for now). And not to sound like an AOLer but OMG this thing is sweet.
I bumped the resolution to 1600x1200 over the dvi connection. Not a dead or stuck pixel noticed so far. And bright! Either my old CRT had dimmed or I had the brightness turned down. Tried cleartype but then the fonts on this board looked weird (as in not what I'm used to) in FF. So I turned it off. The biggest thing I'll have to get used to is that everything isn't in my immediate view anymore. Lots more head moving or eye moving involved because the large viewable area.

Handruin · Sep 20, 2005

Glad you like it. I didn't notice any weirdness with the fonts when cleartype was enabled. Sounds like you and Buck notice the brightness more than I did. The only times it hurts me is when my room is dark, and a bright white image is displayed.

timwhit · Sep 20, 2005

I notice the same thing when upgrading to a larger monitor. You will get used to it very quickly. And then you won't know how you lived without the extra screen realestate.

Handruin · Sep 20, 2005

When you have time to play, try rotating the monitor. Makes reading large threads easy. If you do any coding or Excel work, also makes things easier IMHO.

Will Rickards · Sep 23, 2005

My new SCSI drive has 16K of bad sectors

Code:

Event Type:	Information
Event Source:	Winlogon
Event Category:	None
Event ID:	1001
Date:		9/22/2005
Time:		11:30:28 PM
User:		N/A
Computer:	CONTINUUM-X2
Description:
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.


One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You
may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended
that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.                         
Deleting orphan file record segment 12208.
Deleting orphan file record segment 12209.
Deleting orphan file record segment 12210.
Deleting orphan file record segment 12211.
Index entry KB888113.CAT of index $I30 in file 0x2fab points to unused file 0x2fb0.
Deleting index entry KB888113.CAT in index $I30 of file 12203.
Index entry update.exe of index $I30 in file 0x2fab points to unused file 0x2fb1.
Deleting index entry update.exe in index $I30 of file 12203.
Index entry update.ver of index $I30 in file 0x2fab points to unused file 0x2fb2.
Deleting index entry update.ver in index $I30 of file 12203.
Index entry updatebr.inf of index $I30 in file 0x2fab points to unused file 0x2fb3.
Deleting index entry updatebr.inf in index $I30 of file 12203.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 82 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 82 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 82 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

  30780508 KB total disk space.
  11158936 KB in 37849 files.
     10864 KB in 3382 indexes.
        16 KB in bad sectors.
    112440 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
  19498252 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
   7695127 total allocation units on disk.
   4874563 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
80 b1 00 00 1a a1 00 00 05 ce 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
f8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 a0 01 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
58 b2 3d 03 00 00 00 00 3e 7c 7d 09 00 00 00 00  X.=.....>|}.....
ec e7 b4 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 48 51 22 17 00 00 00 00  ........HQ".....
e0 f6 d3 77 00 00 00 00 d0 3c 07 00 d9 93 00 00  ...w.....<......
00 00 00 00 00 60 16 a9 02 00 00 00 36 0d 00 00  .....`......6...

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.


For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Santilli · Sep 24, 2005

Repeat after me:
"Seagate, Seagate, Seagate,etc."

:wink:

GS

Will Rickards · Sep 24, 2005

20K Bad Now.

Filled out online RMA form with advanced replacement requested. A diagnostic code was not required. Good thing too as their diagnostic program failed to even see my drive. Even after I installed the Adaptec ASPI drivers like it asked me too.

Backing up data as we speak.

Pradeep · Sep 27, 2005

So I did some performance benchmarking of the file server today. 10MB/sec over the network. Not good.

I changed the array over to RAID 10 (from 5). Still 10MB/sec. Bugger says me (thinking of the $$$ I will need to reimburse the company). And then I notice the network cabling from the jacks hanging down from the ceiling, to the patch panel. Fucking Cat5 (no E). I think it's time for a large drink.

CougTek · Sep 27, 2005

Pradeep said:
Our IT Manager has a day job in IT sales (for IBM actually), this is just a part time job for him. So he doesn't have much idea about day to day technical advancements (unless told by IBM technical staff). Plus he's better at running cables thru ceiling space than me. I prefer to advise on purchases.

At least you know who's fault it is.

Santilli · Sep 28, 2005

Pradeep:
For us non IT guys, what exactly happened to still give you 10 mb a sec, with a Cat 5 cable not connected :?: :?:
:wink:

gs

Mercutio · Sep 28, 2005

Santilli,

With the best possible equipment, a 100Mbit switched network should give you a hair about 12MB/sec. Note the big B vs. the little b there.

In this case, it looks like Pradeep expected Gigabit speeds (as in, the Cat5 cable was connected to a Gbit switch and a Gbit NIC), but Cat5 cannot support speeds over 100Mbit. Cat5e can, sorta, so in this case, all the performance problems Pradeep's been attributing to, oh, everything else were actually just caused by having the wrong cable.

mubs · Sep 28, 2005

Clarification for non-IT types: The connectors/jacks have to be rated for the desired speed; in fact everything in the entire path the data travels on. I learned that the hard way (a duh moment).

Splash · Sep 28, 2005

Pradeep said:
...And then I notice the network cabling from the jacks hanging down from the ceiling, to the patch panel. &%@#$Cat5 (no E). I think it's time for a large drink.

Is your Ethernet connection at the server not indicating 1Gb/s service? Is is running full-duplex?

If you strip out all the CAT5 premise wire, replace all the CAT5 drop cables and replace everything with CAT5e cabling, it won't make any difference, unless you just happened to replace a section of marginal cabling. I would stick with top quality Belden DataTwist or Madison Wire for premise wiring. CAT5e simply has better signal integrity over long cabling runs than CAT5. Belden DataTwist 5e+ is better than anyone else's CAT6.

Pradeep · Sep 28, 2005

Splash said:
Is your Ethernet connection at the server not indicating 1Gb/s service? Is is running full-duplex?

Windows XP indicated that the connection is Gigabit. It just didn't give me anything over 10MB/sec. Soon as I changed the cable segment, got the 25MB/sec.

Network is a bit of a birds nest, we have a 24 port gigabit Dell switch in the server room, I believe both on-board gigabit connections on the server are hooked up to it. Then there are 12 direct cable runs from the Dell switch to the patch panel in the lab (maybe 30-40m). At the patch panel, one of these is attached to a shitbox Linksys 8 port gigabit switch, for additional portage. So some connections go straight to the Dell switch, others via the Linksys to the Dell.

Merc, even with this problem, I believe the SuperTrash6000 is still a POS. It's just that before, the supertrack based servers couldn't provide more than 10MB/sec anyway, now with the supermicro server the cabling (or switching or something else) is the bootleneck.

Bozo · Sep 28, 2005

Some of the problems I've run imto with slow network connections were with the switch-NIC negotiations. Even when set to auto negotiate, they connected at half duplex, when they should have been full duplex. The management software for your switch should allow you to check and set each port. The easiest method is usually at the PC/server. You can usually force full duplex without rebooting the box.

Bozo :mrgrn:

time · Sep 28, 2005

Pradeep said:
So after a knock down drag it out fight with the IT Manager ... The doubt in his mind? ... it's our Gigabit network And he was trying to tell the CEO that IDE drives max out at 16MB/sec

So you fixed the gigabit network, and now you're seeing 25MB/sec from stripes of two or three drive mirrors (RAID 10). From a management perspective, the IT Manager has been proven right. Not good.

Mercutio · Sep 28, 2005

Pradeep, I completely agree with your evaluation of that Promise RAID card. I think they suck too. I said that waaaay up at the top of this page.

Pradeep · Sep 28, 2005

No, server is back in RAID 5. The 25MB/sec I'm getting is when I upload from a client, to the new server.

Scary thing, I just uploaded the same files to a server using the Promiseless controller, got around 45MB/sec!

The network is by no means fixed, there must be an issue with how the new server is hooked up to it.

Pradeep · Sep 28, 2005

Scrap last post, uploading to one of the Promiseless actually gets me 9.5MB/sec.

9.5MB/sec with Promise

25MB/sec with Areca

I'm not worried about management at all.

Godamn Windows SCSI bug is probably not helping either.

time · Sep 28, 2005

Pradeep said:
25MB/sec with Areca

That's a relief, but wouldn't you get better write throughput with RAID 10?

Godamn Windows SCSI bug is probably not helping either.

I've been meaning to ask all along, why are you even using Winblows for this? AFAIK, you're not using any M$ software on the server(s).

Pradeep · Sep 28, 2005

We are using DFS to make each seperate server appear as a logical folder. Also, some of our clients using SAMBA have had some performance issues.

Santilli · Sep 29, 2005

My motto: When in doubt, Promiseless controllers are best used as targets for at least 375 H&H.
:evil:

GS

Pradeep · Oct 2, 2005

Getting 30MB/sec writing 6MB JPEGs from the workstation to the server. Probably the best the shoddy "Calypso" hard drive can deliver. Next week, time to play with Jumbo frames.

Re: NIC driver options, is there a site which explains what any of them do? For example, interrupt priority, which setting is better for what?

Also, I was looking at negotiation, I only see options to set 10/100 speeds, never an option for 1000 Duplex. Have to leave it at auto-negotiation.

New Computer Money just came in

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