noob needing serious hardware support

[poise]

Hi guys,

I've had a good play around with freenas for the past week, ive even installed it on two boxes to see what sort of lan speeds i can get when sharing media to my other devices... speed hasnt increased at all between the boxes even though the first computer is about 7 years older than the other...

running version of freenas 8.3.1 in an installation (8gb usb) running with the following hardware

-Corsair CMX8GX3M4A1333C9 4gb (going to upgrade to 8gb soon)
-Intel Core i5 750 Quad 266Ghz (Lynnfield) 8M Cache LGA1156
-Gigabyte GA P55 US3L Intel P55 Motherboard LGA1156
-Asus GTX 260 Glaciatorplus 55nm 1998MHz GDDR3 GPU 576MHz (would like to take this out but i don't think freenas can run without a graphics card?)
-1x 3tb baracuda drive
-1x western digital 320gb
-700w psu by OCZ (too much? - its loud enough... lol)
-1x 128 kingston v100+ ssd (not sure whether to keep this in the set up??

i havent a clue about server hardware, this is probably over kill?
still im getting about 1-2 mbps over wireless and between 8 - 12 mbps over ethernet cable which is pretty crappy really - its a nightmare when multiple people are on the network at the same time.

im also running a linksys wrt54g-tm for the router if that makes any difference?

any ideas on how i can improve speeds without adding extra ram as thats on the todo list for the next week. ive looked at network adapters, is this the way to go now?

cheers all and thanks for reading...

 

[lpittman]

As you mentioned, the ram is not overkill, definitely add more. As far as the CPU/Mobo - I personally don't think anything could be overkill in a server, but on the flipside, often you can get away with a slower processor if you have to (I am running a Core 2 6600 for example), so you are doing good with your i5. Some may say its a waste in that machine, others may say its not enough. I think its fine. Your video card is definitely overkill however. You can run FreeNAS headless, however most consumer motherboards do not support headless operation. I popped in a passive cooling 512mb PCI-E video card into my 2nd PCI-E slot. It works great (this one here). Cheap and draws much less power.

Before I can talk about performance though you'll need to give us some idea of your configuration. How do you have those drives configured?

The SSD I wouldn't even bother putting in the system at this point. I have one setup as a cache drive in mine, but only because 1) I had a spare one and 2) I open/close a lot of small files all day so it does actually help my responsiveness.

Luke

 

[poise]

As you mentioned, the ram is not overkill, definitely add more. As far as the CPU/Mobo - I personally don't think anything could be overkill in a server, but on the flipside, often you can get away with a slower processor if you have to (I am running a Core 2 6600 for example), so you are doing good with your i5. Some may say its a waste in that machine, others may say its not enough. I think its fine. Your video card is definitely overkill however. You can run FreeNAS headless, however most consumer motherboards do not support headless operation. I popped in a passive cooling 512mb PCI-E video card into my 2nd PCI-E slot. It works great (this one here). Cheap and draws much less power.

Before I can talk about performance though you'll need to give us some idea of your configuration. How do you have those drives configured?

The SSD I wouldn't even bother putting in the system at this point. I have one setup as a cache drive in mine, but only because 1) I had a spare one and 2) I open/close a lot of small files all day so it does actually help my responsiveness.

Luke

Luke, thanks for the response regarding my hardware components, everything you say ive taken on board and i can already see we are on the same wavelength here...

As for the drives, they are configured in ZFS format, they are just single drives at the moment, each with their own shares, "both cifs and nfs shares) no raid configuration or anything like that... (il consider raid when i get more drives i think)

il try taking out the graphics card now as im already running headless, if it works great, otherwise i have a smaller graphics card from an older machine which i can pop in instead...

i hope the info i just supplied was what you after regarding my configuration?

 

[gpsguy]

Assuming you have 1Gb NIC in your server and wired pc's and they are connect to your Linksys WRT54g, then yes, it's the bottleneck. The WRT54g is a 10/100 switch.

At a minimum, I'd buy a 1Gb switch and plug the FreeNAS server and wired workstations into it and plug this ethernet switch into your router. Wireless connections are generally slow. If your other devices support 802.11n (your router is a b/g), you might consider disabling wireless on your Linksys and adding a 802.11n Wireless Access Point. Performance will be better than a "G" connection.

im also running a linksys wrt54g-tm for the router if that makes any difference?

Are you using ZFS or UFS? If ZFS, after you upgrade to 8Gb of RAM, you should get the benefit of ZFS caching.

But the real problem, is having the 10/100 switch in the mix.

 

[lpittman]

Ahhhh - yep, absolutely that would be the bottleneck! Good catch.