Hi guys, I have a silly question.

 

I am asked to setup a server for my family's small business.  Their current server is an 4yr old box running 250gigx2 in RAID1.  Needless to say they have outgrown it.  It is a small business of approximately 20 administrative computers with 10-20 classroom computers.  They do a lot of paperwork for medical billing.  The server will be mostly a documents server, nothing like video streaming.

 

Can unRAID with with a dualcore, 2gig machine handle this kind of load?  I am asking is because I see a lot of the servers that are being offered nowadays that run RAID0-6 with quadcore xeons with 8gigs of ram etc.  All the while unRaid chugs along fine with a celeron.  Is there really that big of a difference in terms of speed between unraid versus some of these "commercial grade" servers?  Why would I chose one over the other?

 

I am a recent unRAID PRO owner, and would like two get 2 more keys if this setup is viable.  Any help is appreciated.

 

Victor

Since HIPAA requires such records to be encrypted, you will have some hurdles to jump through to encrypt your unRAID data.

 

I have had to recommend against unRAID for several clients, where ethics rules or HIPAA require encryption, because of this issue.

Unraid might not be HIPAA compliant, but I don't think encryption would have anything to do with it. 

Hmmmm, I didn't think about HIPAA compliance to tell you the truth.  How hard is it really to get some kind of encryption?  I will tell you right now, being a doc and seeing many private practices, 98% of them are NOT HIPAA compliant.  I wouldn't even know where to start to get such a server.

 

Aside from HIPAA, how would the hardware hold up?  Can it hand 20+ request for word docs/ppts/etc?

 

Victor

Hmmmm, I didn't think about HIPAA compliance to tell you the truth.  How hard is it really to get some kind of encryption?  I will tell you right now, being a doc and seeing many private practices, 98% of them are NOT HIPAA compliant.  I wouldn't even know where to start to get such a server.

 

Aside from HIPAA, how would the hardware hold up?  Can it hand 20+ request for word docs/ppts/etc?

 

Victor

 

It should suffice performance wise.

Fill it with 4G of ram and the fastest parity drive you can afford (i.e. 1TB 7200RPM seagate 32MB cache or the 1.5TB version).

 

Set the spin down timer high (if even spinning down).

 

There probably will be configuration requirements for shares, users and permissions.

These are available in the PLUS and PRO version. Keep in mind, if you test with the basic version, certain user permission parts are disabled.

 

unRAID is not CPU intensive. Throughput is governed by raw disk speed and the algorithm of how parity is maintained.

The slower the parity drive, the slower writes occur.

Reads are at the maximum of a single drive speed which should be sufficient.

Having sufficient extra ram for caching helps a great deal.

 

How big are these documents and PPTs ?

 

 

I ordered the system last night, and will be getting 2 Pro accounts.  I didn't think about getting a fast parity drive so I may do that.

 

I got only 2gigs of memory.  Does it make a big difference?  I was under the impression that as of now, it is not that memory intensive either.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

 

I ordered the system last night, and will be getting 2 Pro accounts.  I didn't think about getting a fast parity drive so I may do that.

 

I got only 2gigs of memory.  Does it make a big difference?  I was under the impression that as of now, it is not that memory intensive either.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

 

Minimal CPU, FAST Parity Drive and as much memory as you can afford in that order.

 

Remember your requirements are 10-20 machines reading and writing documents to non striped drives.

I do not know what the traffic requirements are, with more ram comes the ability to cache more to/from the drive so the user does not feel limited to the speed of the parity drive.

 

When writing large ISO files over the net. It will burst at up to 22MB/s yet after the cache fills up a certain percent, it will crawl at 4MB/s until the cache is flushed, then burst up to 22MB/s.

 

The only reason I suggest ram is you have more then one station.

With streamed reads of large files, the machine itself is reading a large file chunk at a time.

With multiple users and small files, the hard drive, directory and super block are going to accessed more often then 1 large file.

 

 

I suggest, try your setup as is... If you see issues, upgrade the parts.

Memory is cheap these days.. 

The fastest parity drive does help a bit.

When I upgraded mine to a 1.5TB Seagate, I did notice a performance increase. albeit slight, but still noticeable.

I suggest this drive because it's reported to be as fast as a raptor in a number of conditions.

A 1TB 32MB cache drive would suffice.

 

 

Hi

unRAID is not CPU intensive. Throughput is governed by raw disk speed and the algorithm of how parity is maintained.I presented unRAID as a storage option to a couple of my smaller clients .... In a business, this should not be an issue, the drive timeout should be the end.The idea of setting up a server in the home is a big step.

 

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