Memory Bandwidth Bottleneck?

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BLACKBERREST3

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May 23, 2017
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I don't even know where to begin on this one. How does memory bandwidth relate to the maximum amount of sequential or random access speed of the drives of a system in a server or desktop? Say if you tried to turn your current pc into a DAS/NAS then what processes would the memory undergo?
 
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JamesSneed

JamesSneed

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Oct 26, 2009
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Memory bandwidth will have zero bearing on it. Memory bandwidth on any half modern PC way exceeds any NAS platform. An old AMD FX system will do around 20GB's per second. The speed of the hard drive/ssd on the PC or the network interface speed will be the bottleneck nothing else.
 
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rhysiam

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Mar 24, 2013
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That's a really general question. You need to be a bit more specific about what you're trying to do and why.

Generally speaking when you're writing to or reading from drives, those drives, along with the source/destination media are much slowest links in the chain. Sure, data will pass through RAM and faster RAM can theoretically transfer data more quickly, but even the slowest RAM configuration will be vastly faster than any home storage array, and vastly faster than the remote source/destination device whether it's connected via LAN, USB or even Thunderbolt. In those cases the impact of RAM bandwidth is essentially entirely irrelevant in the overall picture.

There are cases where RAM matters. As an example, FreeNAS running multiple ZFS pools runs far better with large amounts of RAM. My understand is however, that even there it's the amount of RAM that matters far more than how fast the RAM is running.

As I say, it's hard to generalise over different operating systems, file systems, drive types, etc. Can you be more specific about what you're trying to do and why?
 
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BLACKBERREST3

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I'm trying to turn my pc into a server that is only going to be accessed by 1 person at a time (me). I need it to have high sequential read/write speeds and a reliable redundancy. My system has a memory bandwidth of 34.1GB/s, 16 free pcie 3.0 lanes to do whatever with, 4 extra lanes from the (DMI 3.0) chipset, and can support 64gb of ram. I am hoping to connect this NAS to the main PC as a DAS or a SAN or whichever is faster or as fast as it can support. I want to use windows server 2016 because of ReFS. How does the size of ram affect transfer speed? Don't mean to thread hop, I have a lot of questions :\
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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I see a lot of fancy numbers.
I don't see any 'use'.
 
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