[Cialug] Virtual Box and NAS

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Dave Hala Jr <dave at 58ghz.net> wrote:

>
> I'm not an expert on this, I'm trying to figure it out. It would appear
> that the bottleneck is between the hard drives and the Nic, correct?
> I'm assuming that you could come close to saturating a decent 1GB nic
> with a hardware raid array consisting of a bunch u320 scsi drives, but
> not even come close with Sata drives.
>
>
>
The theoretical max throughput of a 1G/bps ethernet would be 1,000,000,000
bits per second / 8 = 125 MB/sec (though we know TCP/IP will take a good
chunk out of that). A Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA drive can transfer up
to 300MB/sec.

I don't think the problem is getting the data off the disk fast enough. It's
the fact that the NAS's CPU/Controller can't process the data that fast and
is the bottle neck.

The suggestion is to use an inexpensive PC as a NAS server since even an
older one is more than fast enough to saturate network connection. Another
benefit of using a PC as a NAS is that the OS can do more tricks, such as
ATA over ethernet, and as protocols change it can be updated (for example
the recent incident with netatalk and Lion's Time Machine support).

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter

♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
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