Question about small network speeds

[mojoman317717]

I have a small business network consisting of a T110 server with a four disc RAID 5 array on an S100 software (fake raid) controller. There are approximately eight client machines some windows xp 32 bit and some windows 7 64 bit with never more than two users making heavy demands on the server (mostly big data files because it's a photography studio). The RAID 5 array is new and when testing the read and write speeds to one of the client machines I had 50-60mbps both reads and writes. For writes that seems decent, but I was expecting significantly better read speeds. Are my expectations too high, or could something be configured wrong?

Just FYI, the server and the client between which this test was conducted both utilize onboard Broadcom gigabit capable network adapters, but they do not support jumbo frames. Is it possible that PCI-E network cards would deliver better performance? Also, there is one gigabit capable and jumbo frame capable switch between these two machines with good quality cable. And the client machine has a 7200rpm hard drive with a 32mb cache (don't have the model # in front of me, but it's a decent hard drive).

Any thoughts??

 

[RealBeast]

That is about what I am getting on a couple of 4 disk RAID 5 installs that I'm testing at the moment. Actually getting 66MB/s on large file writes currently with a PCIe RAID card and Intel NICs.

edit -- once the large (200GB) write that I was in the middle of finished, I ran LANSpeedTest (a free app) from a machine on the network with an SSD to one of the RAID arrays with a 200MB file and got 102MB/s write and 100MB/s read. The first large write that I did was from a HDD to the RAID array, so it looks like my bottleneck in the first transfer was the HDD writing to the RAID array.

You might want to try that speed app out from several locations to check your network, it is available free at http://www.totusoft.com/lanspeed2.html

So perhaps the drive in your client machine is the issue with your speed? The software RAID could also be an issue, I don't think that network cards in place of the onboard adapters will help.

 

[mojoman317717]

Best answer selected by mojoman317717.