[ILUG] Dell Poweredge dual p2 450 vs Athlon 800

[Wynne, Conor]

Raid 0+1 or 10 as somepeople like to call it, is actually faster than JBODS! However, it is the MOST greedy on disk space. 

Raid 5 is the slowest [I think], RAID 1 is faster than raid 0 but obviously uses twice the space for the same job [but is the safest option for redundancy]

To answer your question, I sincerely doubt you will notice ANY speed increase/decrease at all. In a higher load situation then yes, and the dual mobo would be my choice over any single one. I presume this dual architecture has two PCI busses so that it allows balancing of PCI stuff right?

Then again it all depends on what services are being run on the boite. If its just a filestore, then an additional NIC would probably give you better performance [or upgrading the switch if its crap], depending on the nics chosen, you can bond them together in software, intel based nics [which I believe is in the poweredge] support ALB [adaptive load balancing] to double your transfer rate. Two nics bonded is faster than 1, init?

More RAM is of huge benefit of course [depending on services], faster I/O with SCSI [though not always]

My Athlon 1Ghz gives me 2000 odd bogomips, my dual celeron 400 gives 1600 bogo's, so I reckon the CPU intensive apps will do better on the SMP system. Assuming they understand SMP and if they are services then your sorted.

Now all this could be crap but someone will point this out if that is the case :)

My choice, go with the SMP boite and use the athlon for a desktop.

CW