will the hdd be the bottleneck for a 10gbps server?

0

I have a server with 1 gbps connection (which is ~125 MB/s). The server has normal mechanical Hard disk drives. Afaik their speed limit is also around 120 MB/s. For instance, if I download a file from a very fast server and reach my maximum speed, it would download at around ~100 MB/s which fits well since that's the maximum of my connection + the drive can't write faster than this(afaik).

I was wondering if we upgrade to a 10 gbps connection, which means ~1GB/s up/down speed. Am I going to feel any difference? for example if I download from some fast server like google drive, as far as I understand the concept, I still won't be able to download faster than ~120 MB/second unless I replace the normal HDD with SSD or SAS, since the normal drive can't withstand a faster speed, am I wrong?

P.S: the HDD I'm talking about is 7200rpm Thanks in advance

mooo

Posted 2019-02-05T17:03:13.103

Reputation: 1

1In your first three sentences, you seem to understand that it's already bottle necked with your 1 Gbps connection. Yes, a 7200 RPM will absolutely bottleneck 10 Gbps, and is already a bottleneck with 1 Gbps. – DrZoo – 2019-02-05T17:15:51.403

A conventional hard drive is usually a bottleneck in a file server. That is why the OS allocates such a large amount of RAM to the file cache in attempt to minimize the need to access it. This helps but cannot eliminate the problem. – LMiller7 – 2019-02-05T18:20:45.260

Answers

0

While the HDD will be the bottleneck, you can still get speeds over 120 MB/s because the computer caches data during the transfer. It really comes down to the hardware between the drives in your computer, the software you are using to transfer the data, etc. You would be much better off with SAS or SSD drives if speed is your goal. For example, I have a SAN array that consists of 16 900GB 10K SAS drives and 6 900GB SSD drives (for caching). Between my VMware hosts and the SAN, i can expect around 900MB/s transfer speeds over dual 10GB/s fiber optic NIC cards between the VMware hosts and the SAN array.

If you were able to upgrade to 10GB/s. you will see a speed increase for sure over 1GB/s. Cannot really say how much because I don't know what application or service you are planning to use on the server in question.

Richie086

Posted 2019-02-05T17:03:13.103

Reputation: 4 299

Asked: 2019-02-05T17:03:13.103

Viewed: 279 times

Active: 2019-02-05T19:23:47.620