Urgent HW upgrade advice request

[Cogeanu]

Hello to all,

I need to polish by the end of the week my NAS setup.
There will be 5 clients connected to the network and all will browse hi-resolution pictures (12MB each file) from the NAS using their gigabit cards (2 Lenovo laptops, 3 macs, all are equipped with SSD hard drives)

At the moment this is what I have and I need your advice to make it better:

MSI mother board 760GM -E51 (AMD 760G and SB710 Chipset) On-Board SATAII ports by AMD SB710 (up to 3Gb/s) latest BIOS: 7596v1A.zip - date: 2011.02.28 - version: 1.A
1xCPU Sempron 140 (2700Mhz - 1MB L2 cache) does not go below 100% when I copy big files (10GB) from NAS using only ONE client (constant with more than 85MBps)
4 GB RAM (2x2GB) ADATA Premier - 1333 MHz - CL9 - 1.5 V
1 x WD Red WD20EFRX 3.5" 2TB NTFS formatted (64 kilobytes)
1 on board network card: Realtek PCI-E GbLAN controller 8111DL
2 x PCI network cards TP-Link TG-3269 (Chipset: Realtek RTL8169SC)
All network cables are CAT6 (550Mhz)
The SATA cable is SATA3 compatible

I have installed NAS4Free 9.1.0.1 - Sandstorm (revision 636) on a USB stick Sandisk 4GB USB 2.0 (Cruzer Fit)
I have used all 3 network cards (Network|Interface Management|Link Aggregation and Failover) Aggregation protocol -> Roundrobin
I have connected all of them in a 8 port gigabit D-Link switch (DGS-1008D) that is an extension from the main router: Asus (RT-N16) that has connected another router acting as an AP (TP-Link TL-WR1043ND). To the rest of the ports in the switch and in the router + AP I have connected the 5 laptops.
I have the lasted version of the firmware installed on Asus router: ASUS RT-N16 Firmware Version 3.0.0.4.260
On Tp-link I have the latest version of dd-wrt: (ftp.dd-wrt.com/others/eko/BrainSlayer-V24-preSP2/2013/02-11-2013-r20675/tplink_tl-wr1043nd/)
I am thinking that till the BIG event I could invest some more, but I am not sure where could I spend it more wisely:

I have approximately 100 euro, my options are:
1 - replace the D-Link switch with this one: HP ProCurve 1810-8G v2
2 - change the CPU of the system with this one: Phenom II X6 - core: Thuban - code: 1045T - FSB:200 - Speed: 2.7 - L1: 768kB - L2:3M - L3:6M - Watt:95
3 - insert another 2TB HDD WD Red WD20EFRX 3.5" and create a stripe RAID 0
4 - insert an adapter AXAGO PCES-S1 (Marvell 88SE9128) to have SATA3 available for the RAID and for the WD Red hard drives (is it true that BSD does not have drivers for this chipset?)
5 - add some memory: Kingston HyperX Beast XMP 8GB (kit 2x 4GB) 2400MHz - CL11 (11-13-13) - 1.65 V
6 - change the CPU cooler with this one: Scythe Ninja 3 rev. B (470 - 1900 ot./min)
7 - upgrading both the TP-Link network cards to Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop (Intel 82541PI) and not using the on-board network will decrease the CPU load?

Huge thanks in advance to all of you that could give me a hint.

[raulfg3]

Please notice that NTFS is not supoort by BSD, use ZFS instead, (Raid0 is stripe in ZFS)

[Cogeanu]

Please notice that NTFS is not supoort by BSD, use ZFS instead, (Raid0 is stripe in ZFS)

Thank you for the advice, once I will add the second hard drive and I will create the raid, ZFS will be used to format the disks.
My question is now if I should use the NAS4Free menu to create the RAID or the menu on the board itself, there is a menu when I boot the PC (I press F5) and in that menu I can configure the RAID.
Happy data storing.

[madgabz]

PLEASE, do NOT use builtin-raid, this is not REAL hardware-based RAID, as it will STILL use your CPU for calculations (mostly!). Also. your raid-repository is locked-in to your motherboard, if any hardware fails you will HAVE to the exact same hardware replaced to get your raid array back - if you're lucky! Using ZFS - which is software RAID, but much much better than builtin - you are creating a disk-array/repository SEPARATE from your other hardware. If any hardware fails, you can simply replace it, then reconnect your disks, reinstall any ZFS-supporting system, and import your complete repository again! Same thing if you wish to upgrade or port your repository/Array to different hardware!
If you plan on enlarging your repository with more space/disks, investing in more RAM is the best option. ZFS will absolutely devour RAM, a good rule-of-thumb is 1 GB RAM per 1 TB gross diskspace. I also think this will increase your speed slightly, but 85+ MB/s does sound really good already.
Don't use dd-wrt for routers which will have to be speedy, you sacrifice speed for features, when flashing dd-wrt! dd-wrt is ALWAYS slower than stock firmware. In YOUR case though, as far as I understand correctly, your TPlink w dd-wrt is the gateway to your internet connection, all your traffic on local net will only be going through the d-link switch, so your TPlink won't be the bottleneck!

[Cogeanu]

PLEASE, do NOT use builtin-raid, this is not REAL hardware-based RAID, as it will STILL use your CPU for calculations (mostly!). Also. your raid-repository is locked-in to your motherboard, if any hardware fails you will HAVE to the exact same hardware replaced to get your raid array back - if you're lucky! Using ZFS - which is software RAID, but much much better than builtin - you are creating a disk-array/repository SEPARATE from your other hardware. If any hardware fails, you can simply replace it, then reconnect your disks, reinstall any ZFS-supporting system, and import your complete repository again! Same thing if you wish to upgrade or port your repository/Array to different hardware!

Great advice, thank you, I will not use the motherboard RAID but I will create it using ZFS

If you plan on enlarging your repository with more space/disks, investing in more RAM is the best option. ZFS will absolutely devour RAM, a good rule-of-thumb is 1 GB RAM per 1 TB gross diskspace. I also think this will increase your speed slightly, but 85+ MB/s does sound really good already.

Yes, I plan in adding 4 more HDDs of 3TB each so in total there will be 8TB ot space, in this case I will need 8GB of RAM, okay clear this point to me.

Don't use dd-wrt for routers which will have to be speedy, you sacrifice speed for features, when flashing dd-wrt! dd-wrt is ALWAYS slower than stock firmware. In YOUR case though, as far as I understand correctly, your TPlink w dd-wrt is the gateway to your internet connection, all your traffic on local net will only be going through the d-link switch, so your TPlink won't be the bottleneck!

There are 2 routers, one asus with stock firmware and one TP-Link with dd-wrt used as an Access Point. Thank you for the advice, I will re-flash with stock firmware (but, just to let you know it is unstable and full of bugs)

[raulfg3]

I aggre with madgabz in all advices excep dd-wrt . I flash my TPlink and I'm very hapy ( not sure if is fast or not than stock firmware, but is stable and have no annoning bugs , at least for me).

I enable DHCP and DNSmasq so I can assing by DHCP the SAME IP allways, so is like if I have a fixed IP in my devices , but asiged by DHCP (Other benefit is that I can assing a name , and identify devices by name easy).

[Cogeanu]

I aggre with madgabz in all advices excep dd-wrt . I flash my TPlink and I'm very hapy ( not sure if is fast or not than stock firmware, but is stable and have no annoning bugs , at least for me).
I enable DHCP and DNSmasq so I can assing by DHCP the SAME IP allways, so is like if I have a fixed IP in my devices , but asiged by DHCP (Other benefit is that I can assing a name , and identify devices by name easy).

I strongly agree that dd-wrt is better thank the stock firmware when it comes to tp-link, I am not sure about the speed, but in this case I will only use the switch function of the router so I think it does not meter.
My problem is that with only one client the CPU is 100%, when I'll have 5 client in the same time, and maybe also the RAID0 in place, how will the 1 core CPU affect.

Is there also an ratio that I can consider like I have seen above for 1TB of space use 1GB of RAM.
I would need the same for the CPU.

Huge thanks in advance