Anyone work with the new Mac Mini Server?

[C(-)ris]

silvarios wrote:
[quote=DRR]Contrast that with internal RAID over SATA I, which would give you much more headroom - 375MB/s in a 2 drive configuration.

What drives? I haven't seen speeds that fast in the various benchmarks.


Nathan
Me either...I only got around 270 in a 4 disk RAID 5.

[Trouble]

tahoedrew wrote:
All this talk about RAID-ing the dual 500GB internal drives of the mini server: isn't that still a SOFTWARE RAID configuration?! I thought software RAID arrays get nowhere NEAR the speed of a hardware RAID array?

~A

Yeah, software RAID sucks. But right now, it is all that is available.

[Trouble]

silvarios wrote:
Hmmm. Saw a benchmark with a Mac mini server with dual 500Gb drives RAID 0, and speed was about 110-114MB/s. Still pretty fast.

The benchmarks I saw http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/miniserver/ had the read and write speeds over 150 MB/s.

[DRR]

C(-)ris wrote:
[quote=silvarios]
[quote=DRR]Contrast that with internal RAID over SATA I, which would give you much more headroom - 375MB/s in a 2 drive configuration.

What drives? I haven't seen speeds that fast in the various benchmarks.


Nathan
Me either...I only got around 270 in a 4 disk RAID 5.
To clarify - I was talking about the interface throughput potential with a two disk striped RAID, not actual disk performance. Was merely illustrating that disks are now faster than FW800, but will never be as fast as SATA striped RAID. You will never be able to saturate with SATA striped RAID because every time you add a disk, you have to add a new interface - you'll never saturate the bus.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

DRR wrote: You will never be able to saturate with SATA striped RAID because every time you add a disk, you have to add a new interface - you'll never saturate the bus.

Some of the new SSDs have hit the limit. They do not reach full speed unless they are connected to a SATA 6 Gbps controller, something Intel is not going to put on their motherboard until 2011. There is also an issue with where the SATA controller is in the system architecture. There is a throughput limitation on disk performance on older machines because they only use two PCI-x lanes. Putting more than two SSDs can run up against the limit. The mini is not affected because it only has two SATA connectors and you would run up against the SATA bus limit before hitting the north bridge limit.