Hi,

 

I'm currently planning to upgrades my unRAID server. The candidate motherboard is a Gigabyte P35-DS3R which features ICH9R plus 2 extra Highpoint SATA connectors for a total of 8 non-PCI SATA connectors. But the NIC on it is a Realtek 8111B.

 

I have seen it mentioned in the forum that Intel NIC's are preferable. Can anyone comment on how much faster a board with an intel NIC would be?

 

And could I install a PCI-E Intel NIC as an add-on card and would that bring improvements ?

 

Would I need to have Intel on my desktop as well to take full advantage of it ?

 

Thanks,

Morten

if you currently arent pushing clsoe to 115MB/sec no, an intel NIC wont be any better. the realtec onboard gig chips are pretty good, under windows you can push about 118MB/sec, my intel PT's get around 123MB/sec. im sure linux based drivers are much mroe efficient.

I don't believe anybody are getting those speeds from unraid, even on reads or writes to a cachedrive. I'm seeing people are mostly in the 40 or 50MB/S range, right? Hoping I am not mistaken, and going out on a limb here, it seems like something other than the harddisks are holding back the speeds.

 

Are you saying that these speeds will be the same with intel vs. Realtek NIC's, and do you have actual experience with born in unRAID ?

thats just a genreal performance difference. onboard realtek has come a long way.

 

i can get 100MB/sec effortlessly off my unraid box reading from multiple drilves.

I'm curious, what is your write speeds on your server terrastrife? Also, do you have a cache drive? Thanks.

 

thats just a genreal performance difference. onboard realtek has come a long way.

 

i can get 100MB/sec effortlessly off my unraid box reading from multiple drilves.

write speed peak at 40MB and stays above 30MB at the end (slow) of the disk. no cache drive. parity sync final average speed is 95MB.

hdd are hitachi deskstar 7k2000.

This might be a obvious answer, but how did you gage these benchmark results? Also, what are you running on your network (ie: Gigabit switch, direct connection to the server via CAT6 patch lead) and what Desktop OS are you running? I'm curious about your results. Thanks.

 

write speed peak at 40MB and stays above 30MB at the end (slow) of the disk. no cache drive. parity sync final average speed is 95MB.

hdd are hitachi deskstar 7k2000.

speeds were taken from my windoes explorer enhancment app directory opus. it offers current/peak/average/file count/time remaining etc speed at a glance of what you are copying. i run vista. the parity sync speed is what it says in the log.

both the unraid and my pc have intel pro 1000 pt pcie gig nics, cables are just your usual cat5e, you dont need anymore for gig speeds, cheap gig switch but most importantly it has full 2gig per port switchability.

I'll give Opus a try. Opus being a Windows Explorer file manager replacement, does it integrate inprovement in file transfer speeds like TeraCopy does, or it simply gives you a results of what your read/writing? Thanks.

theres no improvement that i know of. teracopy is more flexible still.

 

either way i see no difference in copy speed.

 

vista/7 do not close the copy window until the copy operation has completed. xp used to close the copy windows once the system cache was filled, teh copy it self could take up to a minute after it was done.

 

vista/7 do the inital file count which is why it may seem slow, but if you get significant increases by using robocopy (teracopy/supercoipier) then there may be something serverly wrong somewhere.

 

if teracopy implements some form of packet offloading then it would be your network card which is bad, but tbh i have no idea how it works. read ahead? dunno.

In terms of speed to a single client, Intel NICs arent any faster, a couple of reviews found them to be slower. What they do offer though is better throughput to multiple clients exactly what you want in a server with multiple concurrent clients.

I have a Gigabyte GA-MA770-US3 mobo with a 8111C NIC omboard for my unraid server. I've used Intel Pro 100 kn the past and I currently have a Intel Pro 1000GT in a server that has multiple guests running off it which is used in a VMware ESXi server, it performs well.

 

Realtek NICs seem to be good on a Linux OS I think. I'm getting decent read/write speeds with the one on my unraid server.

 

i have had no problems with current gen realtek and marvell onboard solutions, they can easily do 115MB+ to multiple clients upstread, but the realteks do have some trouble with full duplex, where it does slow your upstream a bit when you download  but shouldnbt be to much of an issue with unraid.

cheap gig switch but most importantly it has full 2gig per port switchability.

 

By full 2G per port, do you simply mean full duplex ?

 

Also, I am a bit shocked at the speeds you are getting. In my old setup with an XP pro client and another XP Pro "server/htpc" computer, I used to get only 20% utilization when looking in taskmanager under networking. I guess that translates to ~25MB/s - a lot slower than what the disks are capable of (1.5TB Seagate and 1TB WD Green). That was also with CAT5e and an 8-port netgear full-duplex switch. Sounds like I have been missing out - any idea what was wrong with my setup ?

 

Anyways, I am looking forward to my unRAID upgrade, this temporary solution with 4 disks on the PCI-bus just totally blows 

from what i understand, 4.5.3 which is what im running is much faster than previous builds.

 

remember you need a fast disk to write to, too. my raid5s can write 300MB/sec each so its not a bottleneck in reading off my unriad.

The disks I mentioned are capable of somewhere above 70MB/s if I remember correct. A far cry from the 25MB/S I was getting between two XP machines.

 

As for unRAID - is 4.5.3 supposed to be faster than 4.5.1?  Just curious, but I think the PCI bus it what is limiting my current unRAID server.

 

Also, please clarify - You did simply mean full duplex on thet ethernet switch, right ?

yes. i have a generic 8 port gig switch but it has a full 16gig backhaul. many cheap switches cannot handle gig throughput.

Direct answer:  Intel pro/1000.  All kinds of server chipsets available from surplus stores; new pci-e version from newegg $30.

 

What you didnt ask for:  Just use onboard.  Seriously.  An extra 5-10 MB/sec transfer rate, if you can even get it (you can't, most likely), is not worth the significant cost and care you must put into quality switches, quality NICs everywhere, and quality cat6e cabling.

 

There is a lot non-obvious.  Like, in an nForce board, I stick in an pro/1000 card, and it performs signficantly worse than the onboard non-jumbo-frame ethernet.  Score!

 

If you're getting 60-70MB/sec, just declare victory and be happy.

my system gig only 30 MB/s  ???

 

my system gig only 30 MB/s   ???

 

That's a completely normal write speed if you aren't using a cache drive.