SergioK

> Hope this helps. Yes this helped! I will look for a good power source - the one from my main machine throw a good amount of hot by itself (warm air even with the case open)... Not only because the power bill, I think the server will be more dependable if all stays cold when not being used...

I will purchase a power source with Active PFC (Power Factor Correction) because it will reduce the power bill: "Power Factor represents the ratio of usable working power and the apparent power. Fox example power source equipped with Active PFC of 99% is able to use power up to 99% with only 1% loss. Most of passive PFC power supplies can only use about 70%, which surely increases electric utility bills." (In http://metku.net/index.html?path=reviews/seasonicsupertornado350w/index_eng) Someone know the real reduction in power (watts) it will be? Also, I still wish to understand the smaller 1GB data transfers when reading.

I think building an unRAID NAS and reading this thread I have some questions. About the initial post, the cool_runner and the RADIatiON systems: 1) Why is faster to write 1GB than read it? 2) Why the big difference in performance in 256MB tests x 1GB tests, where is the bottleneck? RAM memory? 3) About (2), I ask if the performance in 1Gb test begins fast and remains dropping. So bigger transfers (>1GB) would be slower? 4) About (2), if I have two machines running the test at the same time the total data transfer will be 2x more or will split it (half to each machine?) (thinking where is the bottleneck...) About performance, I think the parity must be the fastest drive (higher MB/s and slower ms/track), so it will not be a limiting factor. The higher RPM drives tend to have slower ms/track. It helps when the files are fragmented over the disk. Faster MB/s drives will not speed much through the network, but probably will give faster rebuild times (rebuild drive, recompute parity). And I would not mix master and slave PATA drives in the same cable because it will slow the rebuild times (never doing this with the parity drive!).