[NMLUG] RAID5 - ATA vs SATA

[timothyemerick at yahoo.com (Tim Emerick)]

I've been contemplating converting my 2 disk raid1 to a 4 disk raid5.  Couple of questions to those in the know.

Machine: Intel P4 1.5Ghz Stepping 02, 512meg ram, 2-WD 80GB UDMA/100 raid1 mirror using debian testing.

Usage: General office/campus use as a samba file server.  About 150 PC's connected to it with maybe 20-30 users max performing simultaneous read/writes.  Activity is mostly database type with small read/writes.  Others are accessing office type documents.

With a 4 disk raid5 array (safety matters ya know).  Will I notice a huge difference in read/write speed from what I have now or just nominal?

Does SATA vs ATA make a big difference?

I'm pretty sure the bottleneck at this point is the sluggish disk access but how can I verify that it's the disks and not a saturated network connection?  I've been using a utility called bwm-ng to monitor bandwidth and have not seen it come close to the 100mb/s that my NIC is rated.

Thanks for any insights.

Tim Emerick


 
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