need suggestions on server specs for 100mbps+ file serving machine

[Maezr]

this is for a server to be colocated, not a file serving machine for a home / office network, just for the record

this will exclusively be used to send large, high-bandwidth files. 100,000+ mp3s. I want the machine to be able to pump things out at a pretty high rate-- hopefully to be able to send at 100mbps or close to that without system load becoming an issue.

I plan on using 3 400 or 500GB SATA drives in RAID5. do you think disk io will be an issue?

how much ram should I be looking at? what kind of CPU?

appreciate any help you can give

 

[azev]

for file serving you dont really need a super computer. A P4 2.4Ghz with 1gig of ram will be more than sufficient for your need. My friend and I have similar setup with lots more data, but we normally run out of bandwidth before we reach the machine max transfer speed.

 

[Maezr]

are you serving things on the same kind of speed I'm talking about though? I'm going to have it on a 100mbps unmetered line

 

[JonnyBlaze]

you should worry more about the nics than anything. what are you planning on running? and can i get an account?

 

[Maezr]

the nics aren't an issue, I've got those covered. I'm just worried about disk io mostly, and what sort of ram / cpu would be optimal

 

[Zepper]

100mb/s is only 10MB/sec. Almost any current drive technology can more than keep up with that. 512M to 1G of RAM would be plenty and most recent CPUs (except the old Celerons and Via/Cyrix) could keep up with that in standby mode (even my trusty Duron 1600)...

.bh.

 

[gramboh]

As he said 100mbps isn't really fast.

The only problem I could think is if you have a huge number of users accessing the site at once. Is this HTTP or FTP or something else? If you are doing a closed access site without a huge number of users, SATA drives in RAID5 should be fine without I/O problems. If you are doing HTTP and could have 100's of people hitting various files it might slow down.

If you can afford it, try RAID5 with 6 drives, that way you lose one for parity and have 5. Striping 5 good drives = fast. I suggest the Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA2 (perpendicular recording), they are also cheap.