Hard disk buffer sizes

[jthsmak]

I use a program called copyhandler to manipulate files on my drives for my windows machine. I have a gigabit network between two computers: one runs windows, the other fedora linux. The windows machine has a raid 0 of 2 western digital 120 gig drives with 8 megs of cache each. The Linux computer has a single 200 gig western digital drive with 8 megs of cache.

OK, now that thats out of the way, my question:
In the options for this program I can set buffer speeds (in MB) for file transfers for copying inside one disk boundary, between two different disks and for copying with network use. What settings should i use for optimum speed for my hardware?

edit:
Bonus question:
Can/should i set similar settings in some linux config file for the other machine?

 

[DaFinn]

Find the specs for your HDDs, there is a mention of max internal and external transfer rate that you can use as a guideline. Between networked discs... I'm not sure. Depends what kind of HW you have running this gigabit network, and can it really use all available bandwith...

 

[jthsmak]

these are the specs for the 120 gig drives:

General
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 8 MB
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)
Contact Start/Stop Cycles 50,000 minimum

Seek Times (Average)
Read Seek Time (Average) 8.9 ms
Write Seek Time (Average) 10.9 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average)

Transfer Rates
Buffer To Disk 602 Mbits/s (Max)
Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100.0 MB/s
Mode 4 Ultra ATA 66.6 MB/s
Mode 2 Ultra ATA 33.3 MB/s
Mode 4 PIO 16.6 MB/s
Mode 2 multi-word DMA 16.6 MB/s

These are also in a raid though, that should increase the transfer rates some...The lan is just a single crossover cable, I'm not sure what the real max transfer speed would be. I'm going to clock some transfers at different rates to help decide once I get an idea of where I should set these values, I'm totally clueless about the network one.