Toy Server

[Ol Bob]

I have an old , wannabe file server on my house lan made up of a dual P-3 866/133 on a Abit VP-6 mb.Seems to work ok for backups and storage and such but slow. I have collected parts to re-do it into a P-4 3.2C with a MSI 875 P neo2 fis2r.Before I do I'm wondering what potential this old double P-3 box has? Can it be made to do anything like Hyper-threading? Nothing in Bios that resembles HT and no bios updates have been issued for this board in a couple of years.This board has built in ata raid and I'm running raid 0 with a pair of WD 120JD's for the storage and a 40JD boot drive and Win2k sp4. Has 2 gigs 133 sdram so thats about maxed out. Anything else I can try,short of overclocking, that will hop this up a bit while still being stable and reliable ??

 

[airfoil]

No HT for the dual 866s, but then you've already got MP. Why would you want to OC a File Server anyway? You've got 6 P4s to do that kinda stuff.

Assuming you really **need** 8 computers at home, the best you could do is leave it as a file server and maybe think about upgrading the storage to a RAID5 setup via a PCI card.

I'd love to know what each of these rigs is used for, other that this one...

 

[imported_Kensai]

I'd just play with it as a server.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

I'd sell it to me. :Q

- M4H

 

[Dough1397]

i would take an 866 if you dont want it... i cna put it in my 733... (the 733 is my best comp :/ )

 

[Snoop]

dp

 

[Snoop]

Originally posted by: Ol Bob
I have an old , wannabe file server on my house lan made up of a dual P-3 866/133 on a Abit VP-6 mb.Seems to work ok for backups and storage and such but slow. I have collected parts to re-do it into a P-4 3.2C with a MSI 875 P neo2 fis2r.Before I do I'm wondering what potential this old double P-3 box has? Can it be made to do anything like Hyper-threading? Nothing in Bios that resembles HT and no bios updates have been issued for this board in a couple of years.This board has built in ata raid and I'm running raid 0 with a pair of WD 120JD's for the storage and a 40JD boot drive and Win2k sp4. Has 2 gigs 133 sdram so thats about maxed out. Anything else I can try,short of overclocking, that will hop this up a bit while still being stable and reliable ??

So its not transferring files fast enough? I doubt file transfers are maxing out your CPU, I would bet it would be something in the network or with your RAID Array not working at max performance. Also, why in the world would you use RAID 0 on a file server? Typical file servers are for keeping data relatively safe, and running RAID 0 more than doubles your chances of losing data, while only gives a small (if any) performance boost!

 

[Ol Bob]

My thinking is that there's something about the PCI bus / chipset / raid controller thats just slow.Read-write performance, tho Ok for background tasks, do not keep up with the network . Its as if the nic is running at 10m on this 100m lan. All drivers are updated and, yes, it is a 100m network card. I know that the PCI bus standard has been updated over the years, but instalation of the latest Via drivers should be getting the most out of this old box. Sure the new i875 mb will run much better but I just hate to give up .

 

[Snoop]

Originally posted by: Ol Bob
My thinking is that there's something about the PCI bus / chipset / raid controller thats just slow.Read-write performance, tho Ok for background tasks, do not keep up with the network . Its as if the nic is running at 10m on this 100m lan. All drivers are updated and, yes, it is a 100m network card. I know that the PCI bus standard has been updated over the years, but instalation of the latest Via drivers should be getting the most out of this old box. Sure the new i875 mb will run much better but I just hate to give up .

I do not have a solution for you but any machine from post 2001 (way older than your machine) with an up to date hardrive should saturate a 100 mbit connect (with overhead only about 8-9 megabytes per second) when doing a straight file transfer. Either you need to play with your network settings, get a new Nic/Router, or upgrade to gigabit ethernet.

 

[Ol Bob]

Well, this is a Win98 era mb design. My production date is a bit later than that, but this VP-6 was replaced with a VP-7 model around the time of WinMe.So it is a bit dated, tho I agree with you in that it should do better with file transfer rate.I've messed with settings in the past without any results but I'm no big expert so probably over looking something.