Smackre

I have large files I want to share between 3 computers. And I would like to share them the FASTEST way I can. Two of the PC's are right beside each other. The third is in a nother room about 50ft away. Here is keys to my plan. Please let me know if you think I need to change anything.

The server would be a pc with winxp pro on it.

And four SSD SataII hard drives set at raid0+1
Newegg.com - RiDATA NSSD-S25-32-C04MPN 2.5" 32GB SATA II 3.0Gb Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Solid State Disks

I am having trouble finding a 4 port Raid controller for these drives. I keep finding external controllers. I want a internal one.

Would this be faster than two raptors as far as read and write?

And then do a gigabyte network between the 3 computers.

Using this switch.
Newegg.com - LINKSYS EG008W 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Workgroup Switch 8 x RJ45 - Switches

Also do I need to run cat6 cables to get the full speed out of the 1000mb network?

What do you guys think. Also would the RAM and processor speed of the server matter on this?

What kind of things do I need to avoid that would bottleneck this setup.

Thanks,

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Vigilante

You can use plain ol drives, it won't matter in the end because the bottleneck will be the network connection, which is vastly slower than the drive throughput.

The RAID controller I use is the Fasttrak SX4. Works great. I have a question though....32GB each? Really? They have low reviews, looks like crap IMO. You're better off with 4x750GB drives in RAID 0+1. Even with gigabit, your network will still be the bottleneck.

CAT6 will do, but so will CAT5e. Don't put any tight bends in the cable or it will drop your speed. Sloping curves, no bends. Nothing parallel to power circuits, either. RAM and CPU speed will not matter much, unless you handle very large files. In that case, go with the fastest RAM. You could underclock the CPU quite a bit and still feel no effects.

If you do lots of random writes and reads, the flash drives will make you whine.

If you still want super speed, these will do the job for random writes over the flash drives...
Newegg.com - Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives
Newegg.com - Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (bare drive) - Internal Hard Drives

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Smackre

Thanks for the info. How much of a diffrence does it make between a 5ft cable and a 50ft cable as far as performance?

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Zweiblumen

Here are few points on this setup
1. Consider other OSes than XP, it's a workstation OS not optimized for server
2. I don't see need for SSD, you should be able to get similar performance from high end HD with lower cost per GB.
3. What is your goal with raid, raid 1+0 should give you more performance than 0+1, raid 0 would give the maximum performance and raid 5 is often considered to be the best trade of between performance, redudancy and cost.
4. Cat5e. You should look up the diffrence between 5e and 6 too see how they apply in your setup.
5. I have nothing against this switch, I'm using 5 port older version of Linksys. But you will never get 1000mb/s sustained transfer on your network.
6. For Windows OS I would say 1 Gb, and if it's going to "play" server then disable all screen and display features (like show content while dragging) and max priority for services vs applications.

And alternate that would probable have less bottlenecks is to use Firewire800 external harddrives on sneakernet :-)

Yours
Zweiblumen
-----Added 12/11/2008 at 05 : 47 : 41-----
At the speed of light the diffrence isn't that much.

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Vigilante

Right. Good call.

I use RAID 5 for my server, but the access times aren't quite as fast.

RAID 1+0 will probably be best over 5. 5 will be more likely to create a parity error as you increase data storage size. 2 drives RAID 0 is less than 3 or 4 drives RAID 5 (parity regions count against).

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Zweiblumen

?!?
Raid 0 and Raid 5 have same speed for the same usable drive size (2 drives in 0 vs 3 drives in 5). Raid 5 gains speed as you add drives (spindles).
Raid 1 gives no performance gain.

I have never had parity error on a Raid 5 (hardware raid) but I have had HD failures (and users failures) both in Raid 1 and Raid 5 setups. In all cases there was a performance loss while the new HD was populated but never so much that the users noticed.

But if you really want data integrity then you go for mirrored raid controlers, ie 2 or more raid controlers that write the same data to diffrent raid arrays.
My most complex setup had each controler on seperate PCI bus and the raid arrays were external each about 0,5 mile from the server and close to a mile from each other.

Yours
ZB

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Vigilante

...sigh.

Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com
It's not about usable space, it's about physical capacities. The higher you go overall, the more likely you are to see a random error that hoses the whole array.

RAID 5 is slower than RAID 0. Always. RAID 5 is equivalent to one drive usually, no matter how many spindles. They all still have to read and write together. I've run RAID 5 on 10K SCSI drives, still wasn't fast. True hardware RAID, mind you.

I have had a parity error, the one the article mentioned. It never made sense to me why it happened until I read that. That's why I use a spare single drive that matches or is larger than the array as a secondary backup. The array can freak and I'm fine. The controller can freak and I'm fine. The single drive can die and I'm still fine. It pays to know these things before you think you're safe

No need for 2 controllers unless you're in an enterprise environment. Just use the single as secondary and you'll be fine. That is, unless you want to go 2TB+.

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Lucifer

Instead of using WinXP Pro for the OS, why not use Windows Home Server OS? It's designed to handle this type of thing, from all the internet buzz I hear, it's the best OS Microsoft has ever come up with, totally foolproof, and even automates your backups.

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Vigilante

If the OP already has an XP license laying around from a previous build, I would just stick with that. I use 2003 here at home for my server, but I got it through my college. The server OSes, while pretty robust, I would not describe them as foolproof by any means.

XP does the same share permissions as 2003, unless you create a domain in 2003, then the authentication method changes for any machine on the domain. However if the machine is not on the domain, you can type in user/pw and save it and it still behaves basically the same.

Smackre, if you have to buy 2003, I wouldn't bother unless you want to tinker with it for fun. Otherwise I would stick with an XP license.

You could also play around with linux. Ubuntu is the flavor of choice for the past couple of years or so, but there are tons of distributions to choose from.

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Martian

For running a server, Linux will do you much better than XP. Really, it's not that hard to learn.

I'm not sure I understand the need for RAID at all. For a typical home setup, keeping two copies of mission critical data is enough. I leave RAID for data centres or other professional applications. Even if you feel the urgent need for the redundancy, you really don't need to stripe; your drives will outpace your network no matter what you do. Striping remote drives doesn't make sense.

Also, using SSD drives for data backup is just silly.

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Smackre

Tell me. Can you setup one computer with all the files and remote connect to it with 3 computers.

Like setup 3 users on that one computer and login using remote desktop. So your not transfering the files between computers just hooking up to main pc with the other pc's.

I dont know if you can login to a remote computer with 3 diffrent pcs at the same time.

I tried to do it with logmein and it only allows you to connect with one pc at a time. same results with remote desktop connections.

Is there a special OS that allows you to connect with more pc's than 1?
-----Added 13/11/2008 at 03 : 25 : 40-----
Well after doing some research. I think what I need is a OS that is designed for this. Not sure if there is a such a thing.

I need to build a server. And have all the other computers login to it. The other pc's are just remotes as such. should need very little besides a good network for the remotes.

What kind of software should I be looking for?

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Daemon1313

I'll try and answer the best I can. I'll use my home network as an example.

I have two "servers". One is a file server and the other is a media server. There are 5 people that access the network on a regular basis.

The file server is XP Pro with a pair of drives running RAID 1 and are backed up to an external drive on a periodic basis and kept outside the house. It's for storing files that we do not want to loose. Each user has a share on this server and there is one communal share.

The media server is MCE 2005 with a small OS drive and a 1TB data drive. The server has a share for each media type and one share for "mature" content that is locked down.

I use VNC to remote into the computers and manage them. They do not have a keyboard, mouse or monitor attatched to them. Remote desktop would work but I prefer VNC.

All 5 users can access any of the communal shares without any issues. I have network drives mapped to appropriate shares on the various users PC's for my own sanity's sake.

As was pointed out already the bottleneck for performance is the network. I've tested this on my network and I'm running gigabit. RAID 0, RAID 5, SSD drives or Raptor drives won't get you anything with a normal home network. As long as you are using decent quality cable (5e or 6 for gigabit) there is no performance impact up to the max cable length of 100 meters. The RAM and CPU won't make an impact on performance as long as it is enough to run the OS decently.

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Smackre

I think I found a solution.

Build a server. And install windows xp on it. And then install 3 windows xp virtual OS on it. And then log into each virtual OS using remote desktop or what ever remote software I perfer.

What do you guys think about this idea? The server would half to be good to handle 3 windows xp virtual OS on it. Lots of ram and ETC.

Should I have 4 seperate Hd's?
1 for the main OS
3 for each Virtual OS?

Would this help the performance.

Also would 4 network cards help the performance in this situation?

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17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen XGA+ Display
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm
256MB NVIDA® GeForce™ Go 6800

Vigilante

The default server 2003 allows (in admin mode) for 3 sessions at once.
One is console (what you see on the desktop)
The other 2 are internal terminals.

I believe server 2008 allows this as well.

That would be your 3 terminals right there

If I were you, if you plan of doing any serious crunching with any given terminals at once, I would use a quad core CPU.

Oh and linux has this by default as well, but it is much more versatile. You can run an application for remote SSH on windows to the linux box, such as xming, then log into the machine via puTTY and run any given app, or even a full desktop session on the remote machine. Observe:

All I have to do is click a shortcut and type in a password:


And there ya go. A windowed session of X (X is the backend for everything graphical) where I run the window manager of my choosing. In this case fluxbox:


The OS is freeBSD (it's free on the web, just like linux) and you can configure it to behave however you like.

In this case you could log into this machine like so from probably 7 different machines at once. I'm running firefox from freeBSD over wireless to the vista laptop. Everything for my firefox profile is on freeBSD. Any program you run in this fashion is on the remote machine, just like remote desktop.

edit: Here's another shot from a while back. This time on my desktop. Same freeBSD box.
image is link to fullsize:

-----Added 13/11/2008 at 11 : 17 : 18-----
I figured if I showed you unix, I should show you RDP with server series windows OSes as well.

Here is 3 RDP sessions to one 2003 install. This is my fileserver and domain controller. XP doesn't allow multiple connections, but server OSes do.

Again image is link to fullsize.

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Smackre

Thanks for the input. I belive thats exactly what I need. Not sure if I understand it all quite yet. But with alittle research I might. I am going to try go the FreeBSD route. So the server should have FreeBSD as OS. And copies of Xming on it for each session?

Then run PuTTY as a remote desktop software to connect to the server?

Would multiple HD's on the server make it run better or will one fast one work just as good?

So a quad core proccessor 4gb ram pc should do good for 3 sessions at once?

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Intel® Pentium® M Processor 730 (1.60 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen XGA+ Display
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm
256MB NVIDA® GeForce™ Go 6800

Vigilante

If you plan to do hard work on the CPUs, then yes quad would be best.

One drive is fine for OS. If you need storage and it's important data, go with 2 data drives (backup + backup of backup) or a RAID array. Cards can die and you'll never recover that data. Backup the array external to the card however you like. It just depends on how much you like your data. I like mine alot, I have data going back to 1999, so I back up and back up the backups.

Xming runs in windows as a library resource for X. X is the backend "server" for the frontend window program in linux and unix, such as fluxbox or KDE. puTTY is the SSH tunnel that sends and recieves the X session data on the windows client. You can open a puTTY session to the machine, run Xming as the library resource, and type "firefox" (provided you installed it) and a firefox window will pop up on the windows machine, with the settings and data being taken from the freeBSD box.

Bear in mind freeBSD is not easy to install. If you are used to it you can do it with your eyes closed, but it takes alot of time and research for someone new to figure it out. You NEED to familiarize yourself with the unix/linux command line first. You don't have to be a programmer, but you do need to have a basic understanding of certain commands. The man pages help alot, even for veterans.

Also bear in mind if you need to run a specific application, it more than likely will not be ported to freeBSD. It might be if it runs within linux natively, but make sure of these things before you get the OS up and going. Also, samba sharing will be a huge pain to configure if you've never done it before. Even I hate messing with samba configs.... Windows programs DO NOT run in unix or linux without emulation (it's a crapshoot, use "wine") or unless they are ported, like firefox.

FreeBSD uses packages. Familiarize yourself before you even try the OS. It's imperative that you know how to use the ports collection as well (and go ahead and install it in the beginning).

If this sounds daunting or you aren't willing to research for, say, the next month (you will be google's best friend by the time it's running to your liking ), then 2003 will make your life much, much easier. It's limited to 3 sessions, but it's already set up from install and it's already familiar.

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passthru

After reading through the whole thread I'm not quite sure what the goal is at this point.. If you are planning to connect to the server box from 3 other computers and run things on the server, you won't even need gigabit networking. If you also plan to sometimes use the server to transfer lots of data to two or more of the 3 computers, RAID1 might be worth it. RAID0, 5, SSD's, and raptors wouldn't help, though.

If FreeBSD has too steep a learning curve, try OpenSolaris. The only install in the same category of ease is OpenBSD. There will be some commands you have to learn to set things up in Solaris, but a lot of them will be very easy (e.g. "share /rpool").

"So a quad core proccessor 4gb ram pc should do good for 3 sessions at once?"
You'll have to think about what you want to do with the sessions. A quad running 3 sessions could be massive, massive overkill (for web, email, etc.), or almost completely worthless.

Based on your posts, here are some thoughts:
Only get a quad if you find a good deal, otherwise a good dual core CPU will be plenty. 4GB of RAM will probably also be plenty.
There are OS's designed for exactly what you want to do. But none of them are made by Microsoft; some of their OS's will do what you want but since they aren't designed for it at all, they will suck (think pizza delivery on a train, it's powerful/reliable enough but just makes no sense).
Whichever OS and setup you choose, there will be a _steep_ learning curve for you.
Are you sure you need to have one server with 3 terminals running on it?

Also, what is this for? If you narrow it down, serving files and/or remote desktops (and what they'll be used for), people will be able to give you valid advice.

Smackre

I am tring to fix a issue. We have quickbooks running on 3 pc's getting shared. And because of how quickbooks works and sharing over a network it makes it slow. Very slow. Once you get 3 users on quickbooks it crawls. But if you install it all on one pc so it doesnt use the network for quickbooks it runs alot faster. So this is where I got the idea. Also I have found quickbooks stays alot more stable when not over the network. Ive had the company file crash 2x because of droped connection. And when the file crashes you lose alot of data. The idea is to make it faster and more stable. Do you guys think its a good application for remote?

Passthru,

The file sharing was just my first idea. I dont think that is necessary now. I want to go with the remote desktop. But I am unsure weather I can do the OpenSolaris or the FreeBSD. Some of the stuff right now is over my head. Not saying I cant learn it. I am pretty good with computers so. Never been shy about doing anything on a computer. But I have never done anything not in Dos or windows. I would like to figure it out though.

I would like to setup it up so when they turn the terminal computers on. It asks for login information and that connects you to the server. Not sure how hard that would be though.

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Intel® Pentium® M Processor 730 (1.60 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
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1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm
256MB NVIDA® GeForce™ Go 6800

Vigilante

Oh I see, this is a business issue. Hell you should have just made the above post your first one! LOL

By what you describe, our info is not what you need. You need client terminals going to a central server. I can't speak to that because I've never done it, but it shouldn't be difficult. Most likely you'll need a terminal server and purchased licenses for each user/machine. I would call and speak with an OEM such as dell or HP about what you need, instead of going to a porn forum to figure it out.

This is not an experiment IMO, you should use proven technology instead of trying to hack out a fix. See what the budget is and if a terminal server is what you can get, and if not, THEN you go into cheaper fixes.

I'll add that the times I've messed with quickbooks, I have not had to share any files. It's always been the CFO and the CFO alone that touches it, but every company is different. I would imagine it can be shared easily enough, but only one person at a time can use the files. If a terminal server is not for your group, then a fileserver with the data on a share would be the next bet. If so, then we can build that very easily and quit this guessing game on what you want or need

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Smackre

The budget is not very high. 1000-2000$ really. This is something I was planning on working on for the next year or so. Going at it slowly to spread the cost out.

As the client are you talking something like this?
Thin Clients - comparison results Small & Medium Business - HP

What kind of server do I need for a setup like that? Is it something I can build out of a normal PC or do I need special hardware for it.

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Intel® Pentium® M Processor 730 (1.60 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen XGA+ Display
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm
256MB NVIDA® GeForce™ Go 6800

Vigilante

Yes thin clients. Call HP, seriously. Unless someone here is a thin client expert (not me) you won't get better answers until you call them. They will tell you what server you need, best implementation etc.

Read here too, see if this fits your needs: When to consider a thin client solution - HP Small and Medium Business

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