So here's my situation. I've acquired a Dell Dimension 4600 (Pentium 4 ~2.5 Ghz roughly, I haven't checked; 512 MB of RAM). I have a Compaq Deskpro (Pentium II 333 Mhz, 384 MB of RAM) running Ubuntu Server 10.10 currently and is a file server.
I sort of want to swap out the Compaq with the Dell. But would there be any noticeable performance increase in any way, mainly in transfer speeds? I don't want to have to reconfigure everything again if its going to be little to no gain. Btw, I'm only running of 100BaseT. We don't have gigabit capable stuff.
Or maybe should I use it as another server for some other purpose that would better suit the more powerful processor? Like hosting games or folding @ home or something?
What should I do?
For a file server, your main things are RAM (for write speeds, at least) and disk speed. The 512mb should be enough of an improvement, but we really need to know about the hard drives involved.
[QUOTE=gman003-main;25929066]For a file server, your main things are RAM (for write speeds, at least) and disk speed. The 512mb should be enough of an improvement, but we really need to know about the hard drives involved.[/QUOTE]
The internal drive on the PII is 10 GB Maxtor running at 7200 RPM on IDE. The actual drive used for storage is a 500 GB Western Digital external USB drive running at 7200 RPM at USB 2.0 speeds through a PCI card.
Ah. At those speeds, you won't really get any performance improvements by switching. Unless your CPU is the bottleneck, which is unlikely, but could be possible if you have a poorly-optimized build. Try just sticking the PII's drive (and the external) in the P4, see if performance is noticeably improved. If you can't actually feel the difference, the increased power consumption won't be worth it.
I didn't think so either. Maybe I might just see how quiet the P4 runs. The internal drive on the Pentium II makes such a racket while its working. Since I keep this server in my room, it can be quite annoying if I'm trying to sleep.
[QUOTE=Demache;25930760]I didn't think so either. Maybe I might just see how quiet the P4 runs. The internal drive on the Pentium II makes such a racket while its working. Since I keep this server in my room, it can be quite annoying if I'm trying to sleep.[/QUOTE]
I just shut my file server down when I'm not using it. Since I can just SSH in to shut it down, all I have to do is hit a switch to boot it back up. Takes about 30 seconds, and I'm going again. Of course, an original Athlon is a lot quieter than a P4.
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