Network upgrade advice

[re:FORM]

This is one for the network heads...

I have a modest renderfarm which I am looking to upgrade soon.

At the moment, I use my workstation as the fileserver so I have maximum HD performance when working in Max or AE.

With my current setup, I get around 150Mb/s read speed from my RAID 0 array. Would I be able to retain this or even exceed this if I purchase a dedicated fileserver running a 2 or more 15k rpm SAS drives drives in RAID 0 ?

I am a one man band (at the moment) so it seems a little uneccessary to go down the route of having a dedicated file server running windows server, especially if I dont intend to expand the network beyond 10 nodes, but I am interested to know if I am missing out in some benefits I am not aware of or if my current setup is causing any serious bottleneck for the rendernodes.

And before anyone warns me of the RAID 0 setup, I have the drives backed up every night to another machine so am willing to take the risk of losing a days work if it all goes tits up!

I have my eyes on a server machine running dual quad xeons which I would use as a fileserver and rendernode, but I think the hardware only supports windows server....


Thanks for any advice.

[jujubee]

I think it's dependent on which file server you choose to use. Are your files currently local or are they on the network? Those are some really extreme speeds so I'm guessing local. Most people can pull 50-90 (90 being the extreme) over a network. I guess it's possible to go over 90 but I've never heard of anyone.

File transfers are primarily limited by hard drive speeds. You can have a Gigabit network which pushes everything through to multiple computers, but the hard drives and the OS seems to be the ultimate speed determinant.

I run NASLite at home for a file server. It's very basic and low on permissions. Last I checked, it didn't support software/onboard RAID fully but this may have changed. Besides, you really don't want to use onboard RAID - in fact people are known to have taken performance hits because of it. The best solution is still SCSI with an independent RAID controller card - which can be very expensive.

As for rendering and serving up large amounts of data - I really don't recommend that unless you have a very good system. For me, it's not worth the dropped buckets on an animation or a long rendering that goes overnight.

[re:FORM]

Yep, I'm running RAID 0 on my workstation to maximise speed.
Can't say I have any problems with dropped buckets. the only issues I've had I think have been due to Vista sp1 connection limitations (ie when using BB and DR pushing connections above 10)... but I have't had this problem since going to the latest SP, and even if it does happen it is easily fixed by collecting the maps and placing them on my old opteron system before sending to BB...
I think the only way to get comparable speeds from a server would be to use fiber connections... but I dread to think what this would cost and with only one user, there is no real point taking the storage off my workstation.

[flino2004]

what i got is, a workstation and my render nodes are conected to a network drive
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11471 ....I've been using it for about 3 years without problems.
One of my rendernodes is the BB manager and it has some network license for some plugins as well.

very simple setup!!

Fernando