Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P67A-D3-B3 P67
CPU: Intel Core i3 3240 3.40GHz
Memory: G.Skill 4GB DDR3 1600MHz RipjawsX
Power: Corsair HX750i
SATA Card: SYBA SI-PEX40071
Storage: 30GB Kingston SSD (Boot Drive)
10x 6TB WD Red (NASware 3.0) (No RAID)
Case: Antec Nineteen Hundred
OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
I own a small production company which have a total of 8 staff members. We are planning to move to a new office and I have been building a storage server for the team to store all project files. We handle uncompressed 4K video files so a 30 second clip is around 10GB. I want to upgrade to 10GbE networking on the server side and provide each client computer with the full 1GbE bandwidth. Is this possible without having to purchase 10GbE cards for all 8 client computers? Do you think 1GbE is enough for the client computers or should each computer be upgraded to 10GbE? What performance benefits would each machine receive in terms of read and writes from WD Red HDDs? The drives themselves have a sequential read speed of 173 MB/s and write speeds of 165 MB/s.
I want to wire everything up with our existing Cat6A F/FTP cables. Also, is an i3 with 4GB DDR3 enough for what I am wanting to do with the server? Does memory speed matter much?
I know this isn't relating to your question, but, will you have any backups? You say you're not going to use any raid so a hardware failure could be catastrophic
The main reason I wouldnt buy it is not the price but warranty and replacement, Even if seller respects the warranty a server downtime in case something goes wrong would be too long , waiting a month or more to get replacement nic is a bit to long, ok if its for home use.Also components might be cheaper ones, might be reused ,defective parts. If its 1 gig nic than you might loose few bucks but 10 gig nics are expensive, 10 times the price. If i was on a budget I would get few used mellanox 10 gig nics with sfp+,
cheap enough to get a spare one or two. Also you can get cheaper switches with all 1 gigabit rj45 ports and a few sfp+ ports.
I already ordered the supposed knock off card a few hours before you messaged here, we'll see how it performs but I am very surprised by how cheap the Mellanox card is. Is there any difference in performance between that and the Intel cards other than possibly more features? Or is 10GbE just 10GbE and makes no difference in speed when transferring files? I'd love to get 5 of those to stick into each client computer with a NETGEAR XS708E-100NES ProSAFE Plus: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00B46AEE6?colid=1GI576ZHKR89R&coliid=I2ZOA861NRBOH0&psc=1&ref_=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_ttl
have 1x10Gig if you must and then 8x1Gig, don't use built in network interfaces on machines unless they are good ones (realtek usually are not) ensure it supports hardware offload, and work out some TCP tweaks for your systems. Ensure you have highest possible jumbo packets enabled on both switch/ and clients/server side.
If you don't tweak it, you may see issues where whole PC/server bogs down because you do ~1Gig. (It happens trust me) also ensure you are working on ramdisks (all files temporary etc is located on ram disk) It would be good if you did bulk updates instead of stream update.
Thus ramdisk on server also, and save changes each hour or so. Else it won't matter that you have 10Gig network... you won't be able to read fast enough. (even if you use SSD's it may be problem) so the more memory the better.
Are you sure 1Gigabit would be fast enough for each client PC? They are editing uncompressed 4k footage with an average video bitrate of 250-300MBps from the drives located on the server. The max speed of gigabit is 125MBps, won't the video be very choppy and not playback in real time? If you still think 1Gigabit on the client side is good enough, what NIC would you recommend?