Server Motherboard Questions

Zooter1940s

Junior Member
May 27, 2004
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This summer I'm going to build a server to host various multimedia files at my school. Last year I just hosted all of my files on my Windows XP machine and it didn't work out (ran out of RAM constantly, and that damned 10 user limit is annoying). So I'd like some advice on what motherboard(s) I should be looking at for use in this rig. Currently I'm hosting 4 200GB hard drives (not RAID). I hope to expand this to about 2 terabytes when I'm finished building, with all drives being 200GB. My current drives are your standard ATA drives, although I'm thinking of going with a SATA RAID, and getting the ATA to SATA converters for my old drives. Also, do you know if those ATA/SATA converters will slow down the transfer rate or not?

I'm not sure if using one of those PCI cards for my RAID will bottleneck the system or not. Last year I normally served about 6-7 people at a time. It's hard to tell what kind of traffic I'll have during peak hours since Win XP capped the max users at 10. But they would max out my 100baseT connection. Next year the dorm should be outfitted with a Gigabit line, and I'd like to have a motherboard and drive setup that won't be afraid to max out this network connection. Any suggestions?
 

mechBgon

Super Moderator<br>Elite Member
Oct 31, 1999
30,699
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A 100Mbit network connection has a theoretical peak throughput of about 12 megabytes per second, so I wouldn't worry about any other bottleneck until you've eliminated that enormous one.
 

Zooter1940s

Junior Member
May 27, 2004
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I was thinking about that, if the school hasn't upgraded their ethernet lines. I saw some motherboards with dual channel ethernets and was wondering if that would help the 100Mbit bottleneck. Would that give me 2x the speed? or is it just for connecting to two different networks?
 

Peter

Elite Member
Oct 15, 1999
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On those toy mainboards, basically everything will share the approx. 100 MByte per second bandwidth of the one 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus they have. This is rather very bottlenecking.

You want something with PCI-X busses, so you can properly attach storage controllers and Gbit Ethernet channels that then actually have a chance of getting something done.

You're going to be in the $300 to $400 range then, and you'll need a more serious case and power supply, different RAM (registered, ECC).
 

Zooter1940s

Junior Member
May 27, 2004
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Thanks for pointing me in the right direction with the PCI-X. I found a couple boards that look suitable for my needs, most of them are tyan boards which I hear are pretty reliable. A little pricey, but they look worth it. Thanks for all the heads up.