Do I need a Gigabit Bandwidth for this situation

[dvdman3]

nearly 1000+ files each file over 100-300mb Training material and other media files all on 8 160 Gig maxtor Drives. 4-5 computers use these files sometimes to serve audience. Would a Gigbit PCI Network card work in this situation and how to configure it.. sometime it is also used to copy to cdrw or dvdr to take home for analysis [training] Help and suggestions for setup and improvements

 

[gaidin123]

Are these drives RAIDed together at all? If multiple clients are accessing data off of different drives at the same time you could theoretically benefit from a faster NIC. Instead of a gigabit card you could also buy one of the Intel Pro 10/100 dual cards and bond them together providing your switch supports that. That would give you 200Mbps of bandwidth in each direction.

You might want to check CPU usage of the machine while clients are heavily accessing your drives. The usage is probably reasonably low but for serving that amount and size of files typically you would want to go for a multi-drive SCSI RAID array or bump yourself up to a faster machine that can deal with the increased overhead of heavy IDE drive file serving.

If your client machines are running on a 100Mbit switched network then at most they could possibly want to pull around 320-400Mbps combined (4-5 clients) so a gigabit card would be overkill. Also, whatever switch they plug into would need a gigabit uplink port. I don't know current prices but I believe that gigabit uplinked switches are still pretty expensive.

If you're running out of bandwidth now the cheapest solution, providing that your network supports it would be to bond a dual port NIC. The best solution for future growth would be to get a big SCSI RAID and gigabit wiring.

Gaidin

 

[mgpaulus]

I think I would also throw as much RAM into the server as I could. I would think that even 100Mbit would be plenty fast enough, IF you can get it on the wire.... Add more ram, so the system can cache more of the Info, and feed the network as fast as it can pump it......