Assuming the exact same drives and interfaces, is there a significant performance benefit (from the user perspective) to running unRAID on something like a lower end core 2 duo and a GB or more of ram compared to a PIII 1 ghz with 512 MB, assuming Gigabit ethernet either way? I assume that bootup times would be significantly different, but once the OS is loaded is there a real performance difference serving up miscellaneous files and multimedia content?

 

And a related question...if you built an unraid server on the aforementioned PIII 1 ghz with a half-dozen drives and then decided to swap motherboards and whatnot in a few months, can you just stick in the same 6 drives and carry on like before with the array and data intact, or would the whole thing need to be reconfigured?

CPU/memory?  The short answer is "not much".  The longer answer would need to point out that no one (to my knowledge) has posted results of extensive testing to validate that - Tom has, however, stated that it doesn't matter much and he very well could have done lots of testing.  It makes sense since most of the time the PC is waiting for data to travel across the bus, not for the CPU or memory.  I used 1GB and a low-end multicore just because I had to buy something anyway and the dollar delta was tiny.  Various transfer results posted by users also seems to indicate no clear trend.

 

New mobo?  The simplest thing would be to just put in the datadrives (in whatever order) and the parity drive (the right spot) and tell the system to rebuild the array.  You should also be able to get everything in the right locations so no rebuild would be required.  I think this may have been addressed in a previous post, but I couldn't find it.

 

 

Bill

I do not know the answer to your first question, but typically, the PCI buss is the limiting factor, not the CPU. 

You will probably not see too much difference with additional memory.

 

As far as upgrading, yes, it is as easy as plugging in a new motherboard, or SATA card, or whatever.  You will want to take note of which drives are assigned which logical slots in the array.  Stop the array, swap the hardware, re-start the array on the new hardware.

 

You will not need to do anything to your data on the drives other than make sure the disks get assigned to the correct slots on the drive assignment page.  (that way, what used to be on the /disk1 share will still be on the disk1 share and not on /disk8)

 

Joe L.