On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 22:45, bill wrote: > Ow Mun Heng wrote > > Okay.. I'm confused. are those 4 in 1 boards really NICs or are they > > juts built in switches for routing? The shop did say that they had one > > of those and since it was basically a switch, I didn't want it. > > Those were plain old NICs, 4 of them on a single board. With software, > it was possible to aggregate them to pool their bandwidth to a single > IP address. Again, that was back in the days when 100mbps was a big > deal and getting 400mbps was fantastic. Add a switch and get duplex > for 800mbps - WOW. Truly Wow then.. I didn't know you could bind all 4 and get a large throughtput. But hey, doesn't that mean that you would need a GiG Switch to realise that speeds or is it that it means 4 diff RJ45s into 4 diff ports on the switch? I think that's it. > > This is what i look for. > > 1. NIC > > 2. Sound card (don't really care for a server but most of it's built in > > anyway) > > 3. Graphics (usually runs headless anyway) > > 4. USB (they're built in anyway, but I'm sure there's a way to turn it > > off via the BIOS) > > 5. SATA. Now, this is a MUST. > > > > Most of the above will have a high chance to run via shared interrupts. > > So.. what choices am I left with?? > > > For a server, we turn off the serial & parallel ports (except for 1 > serial on the box that might have the control function for UPS > monitoring), all USB ports, sound, OK. Nice.. > and we could care less about sata on board - actually we don't want > it. We use 3WARE controllers for true hardware RAID via sata and > they're bullet proof. We can't afford to use those junk builtin SATA > controllers for RAID. Using the built in SATA for non RAID is OK, and > we do use them for that, but we're talking servers, and servers always > get hardware RAID, which means they always get it via a 3WARE > controller. We also don't do software RAID simply because we believe > that hardware RAID is superior, and for the price its a business > decision that's never let us down. Not being a business, Money is a Problem. I'll pass with whatever lands on my feet and what little money can buy. But it's great to learn about it and be able to use it when the need comes. (or when money _isn't_ a problem) Some ppl argue that software RAID, (not via BIOS) but via LInux Software RAID is a good _enough_ alternative for something like a small SMB server. > > With built in graphics, we always set the buffer size to 32k via the > BIOS, BEFORE we install the O/S. What's thei buffer? Is the the RAM? I've not seen any options for 32k. (only like 16MB/32MB/64MB) > > I've never used a AMD before but am willing to try since it's a > > _big_ > > difference in price. And for a normal Desktop/Server usage, I don't > > think it's such a big deal. > > > There's absolutely nothing wrong with AMD for a server or workstation. > We've done lots of them. When the P4 first came out, we went with AMD > to avoid the problems in the new architecture. That gave us first hand > experience with AMD as a rock solid alternative. You might have just won me over with that statement. (at least for SMB servers) > BTW - There are "server" NICs that can boost performance above what > even a good regular NIC can accomplish. We don't have any clients > where their bottleneck is LAN bandwidth, so we haven't used any > "server" NICs in years. A friend of my just purchased some Intel Dual (PCI) NICS. I believe these are what you're talking about? I've not seen others but I believe Adaptec makes some too. Thanks -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 12:15:24 up 3:13, 6 users, load average: 0.19, 0.45, 0.38
