Quote Originally Posted by WoLpH View Post
Perhaps a little off-topic, but as I'm facing the decision to get a new system and I have a pretty high-end disk array, I'm wondering what the performance would be using a 'normal' motherboard?

My current workstation (dual opteron 246), has an Areca 1280ML with 16x WD5000AAKS on it and 2GB cache. But as these processors clearly need an upgrade I'm thinking of buying either a fast Core 2 Quad or a (most likely less fast because of the price) Xeon system. So I'm wondering, has anyone around here have experience with a regular desktop system running a high-end disk setup? I haven't found anyone with a similar setup in this topic.
Since workstation motherboards don't offer any overclocking possibilities and are a lot more expensive I find a Core 2 Quad a nice option, if my raid card will still be used to the maximum. I really like the high disk performance I have right now.

PS: I only run Linux and Unix, so some hardware might not be completely compatible/possible.

If you're not going to change your disk subsystem (ie, type of drives, or separate your work flows to different spindle groups et al) you're not going to see much at all of an improvement. Basically your computer MB/cpu, et al is generally NOT the bottleneck. It's mainly the drive subsystem that kills you (at least first, there are numerous bottlenecks in a system but that's a much bigger discussion a decent reference would be John Hennessy's/David Patterson's book "computer architecture: a quantitative approach")

Before anyone can really point you in a direction a lot more information would be needed to model your type of access requirements and setup. I've just posted in the storage/raid thread some spreadsheets to do some quantitative analysis but they are only a start.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=150176&page=2

Really comes down to is what is your workload type, and what performance level are you seeking. From that then you design the system to match. There's also the issue of disk subsystem utilization curves which come into play (Queuing theory & Markov models like the M/M/1 or M/M/m).