Likely bottleneck on IDE drive for PowerMac G4 (Digital Audio)

Greetings,

I need to replace the internal IDE drive on a PowerMac
G4/733 MHz  
(Digital Audio) which will act as a mail/web/file/database
server.  
I'm considering RAID-0 to improve performance and hence I'd
be  
interested in anyone's advice on what will likely be the
first  
bottleneck on such hardware - the inbuilt 10/100 NIC, the
inbuilt IDE  
bus or new IDE drive/s.

Thanks,
Damon

thus Damon McMahon spake:

> Greetings,

Hi,

> I need to replace the internal IDE drive on a PowerMac
G4/733 MHz 
> (Digital Audio) which will act as a
mail/web/file/database server. I'm 
> considering RAID-0 to improve performance and hence I'd
be interested in 
> anyone's advice on what will likely be the first
bottleneck on such 
> hardware - the inbuilt 10/100 NIC, the inbuilt IDE bus
or new IDE drive/s.
> 
> Thanks,
> Damon

Errr, are you sure you want to use RAID0? Then have a very
good backup 
handy. IDE drives never were of decent quality, and in the
last ten 
years it got worse IMHO.

If you have some bucks left, get an external RAID box and
put a nice 
(non-Adaptec  SCSI HBA
into that box. That gives a really nice 
(hardware) RAID.

Doing RAID5 (at least three discs) gave me much better
overall 
performance than RAID0, and it is much more secure (you
still should do 
backups!!).

Don't use the internal IDE bus for data storage; you can
boot off of it 
and use a nice SATA HBA and connect two (or three) discs to
it holding 
the data stuff, possibly on a RAIDframe. NB: You don't need
a special 
'Apple' HBA for this, plain PeeCee Promise HBA will do it.

And get a decent NIC. And a good switch. Otherwise you're
wasting time 
and money.

HTH,

Timo

> what will likely be the first bottleneck on such
hardware

The onboard IDE controller, which I think is DMA/66, is
likely to be
slower than recently-manufactured drives.

Your connection to the internet is likely to have lower
capacity than
your NIC.
http://www.bluebottle.com

On 30/05/2007, at 4:32 PM, John Brendler wrote:

>> what will likely be the first bottleneck on such
hardware
>
> The onboard IDE controller, which I think is DMA/66, is
likely to be
> slower than recently-manufactured drives.
>
> Your connection to the internet is likely to have lower
capacity than
> your NIC.
> http://www.bluebottle.com
>

Thanks for your response, John.

I should clarify - this will be mostly an internal server
serving a  
100 MBps LAN. I want to make sure that I'm not spending
money on  
better drive performance (whether that be via RAID, HBA or
whatever)  
when my network can't push the packets through fast enough
to make  
use if it.

Regards,
Damon