Does CPU/bus speed affect sustained transfer rates for modern HDDs?

I am considering converting a spare machine into a file server for my small home network, which consists of my computer and my wife's computer. The spare rig is relatively outdated, consisting of a Pentium III 900 MHz (100 MHz FSB) and 640MB of RAM. I plan to get a 250GB Western Digital PATA drive for the machine.

My concern is that the old architecture of the computer might compromise its capabilities as a file server. Will the sustained transfer rate of this hard drive suffer because of this? I should point out that I don't expect the file server to see much simultaneous access from both machines. Usually it will be one computer or the other accessing the music, movies, pictures, etc.

I also wanted to add a question... is memory important in a file server?

KillrBuckeye said:

I am considering converting a spare machine into a file server for my small home network, which consists of my computer and my wife's computer. The spare rig is relatively outdated, consisting of a Pentium III 900 MHz (100 MHz FSB) and 640MB of RAM. I plan to get a 250GB Western Digital PATA drive for the machine.

My concern is that the old architecture of the computer might compromise its capabilities as a file server. Will the sustained transfer rate of this hard drive suffer because of this? I should point out that I don't expect the file server to see much simultaneous access from both machines. Usually it will be one computer or the other accessing the music, movies, pictures, etc.

Click to expand...

I don't think you should have any problems. Your HD would communicate across the PCI bus at the standard 66mhz regardless of if it were in a modern machine or not.

thegreek said:

I also wanted to add a question... is memory important in a file server?

Click to expand...

Memory is not an issue for a simple file server, you just need enough to run the OS.

Deathknight said:

I don't think you should have any problems. Your HD would communicate across the PCI bus at the standard 66mhz regardless of if it were in a modern machine or not.

Click to expand...

Standard PCI is 33MHz. There's also the exception that some P3s came with chipsets that connected to the drive controller directly and not the PCI bus. Those allowed for faster overall transfers and better performance due to the dedicated paths. This is very common on modern chipsets, but far less so then. It pays to read the block diagram of your motherboard manual.

As far as memory and processor consumption goes, neither are particularly crucial for home fileservers. You generally want enough memory to fit the OS, your other daemons, and several medium-sized files in. Files will be cached in memory during reads and writes to smooth out performance. Processor usage is generally low, though Samba can use up quite a bit during GigE transfers. Other factors such as virus scanning also skew things upwards, but again, it depends on how you want the system configured.

All told, P3s are more than adequate for home fileserving. I've been using them for years and even have a P200 serving at another home.

All PIII chipsets have integrated southbridge controllers, so the PCI bus plays no part.

PIIIs make great file servers. If you want to reduce power consumption you could drop the FSB down to 66mhz - it shouldn't make any difference if you're only accessing it remotely. This may also allow you to run passive cooling (a plus if you're running 24/7)

You only need enough system memory to stop it from paging. My file server is a Celeron with 512MB.

Unless you're running a pre-pentium machine, your network card will be the bottleneck, by a large margin.

Just off the top of my head, the 440BX and Via Pro133 chipsets both hung their southbridge controllers off the PCI bus. Also, many motherboard manufacturers would hang their non-integrated drive controllers (e.g. the HPT and Promise controllers added on to many boards) directly off the PCI bus.

how many watts do PIII's run? I was thinking about buying the Conroe 1.33GHz 35W cpu for my file server.

Between 13W and 30W, depending on clock speed. You can find the numbers on page 56 and 57 of the PIII Datasheet. The chief advantage of these today is that they're still not that bad, they're cheap, and you or someone you know probably has some laying around. The drawback is that they're slower, low-speed Conroe's are pretty cheap themselves, and that PIII boards don't have integrated SATA.

You could always underclock the Conroe...