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EPIA Fileserver?

C

corfe83

Member
I'm building a linux fileserver (it will host a bunch of files for home use like digital pictures and CD/DVD images, and run daily incremental backups to a secondary hard drive with rdiff-backup). My entire home network is gigabit LAN based, with a couple wireless laptops.

I'm eyeing a mini-ITX 1.2 Ghz C7 system on newegg, with built-in Gigabit LAN, and 1 Gig of RAM. I'm thinking of Via EPIA because I want to leave the system on all the time, and don't want to pay a lot to do it.

My only concern is speed compared to a "normal" fileserver (core 2 duo or athlon based) - will this be slower at sending files over the network? Will it handle a couple of connections synchronously without slowdown? Will it bog down noticeably while the incremental backup is running?

Please note I'm not doing anything else with this computer - it will simply sit there all day, connected to power and network and nothing else, standing by to send and receive files over the network, and running an incremental backup nightly.
 
I would strongly doubt that it would be a bottleneck. IIRC, that chip is around equal to a PIII 800, which should be ok. The EPIA chips are slowish; but file serving will likely be bogged down more by your disks than by your CPU and VIA's CPUs come with integrated crypto acceleration, which should help speed any encrypted connections( rysnc over SSH, or similar).

 
I doubt your EPIA server will be able to saturate your gigabit network if that's what you're hoping for. It's partially CPU power (gigabit speeds combined with ethernet's traditionally smallish frames yields lots of interrupts that must be handled) and partially your bus. I'm assuming your NIC, even if onboard, is connected to a PCI bus which will place an upper limit on your transfer rates no matter how fast your CPU.

Now, that said, you should have no problems achieving as least 10-12MByte/sec over NFS with your EPIA server. If you're running something like IPSec or OpenVPN as your underlying transport then your CPU will be a bottleneck but for a unencrypted transfers you'll be fine.

 
I agree it won't "fully saturate" the gigabit connection (even without those PCI bus limitations, I doubt the hard drive I'm putting in this thing is fast enough).

The server will share files over both Samba and NFS, and I'll tweak as much as I can to get good speed out of it. The transfers will be unencrypted.

My main concern is making sure that the EPIA server won't be noticeably slower at transferring files over the network than, say, a Core 2 Duo-based server would. That is, I want to make sure the CPU isn't going to be a bottleneck if I go EPIA.
 
My file server is a S370 Celeron 667 with 128MB of RAM and it handles multiple read/writes just fine. You shouldn't have a problem. 🙂
 
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