I have gotten in the practice in the last 2 years of using USB 2.0 to connect external storage to my workstations and fileservers. Performance has seemed adequate, and more than anything, the convenience of popping in a 300 GB has been great. I have gotten to the point where in addition to RAID 0, I am using USB 2.0 drives in the place of tape drives for nightly backup. Even serving up MP3 and MPG to my streaming media server off of an externally attached USB 2.0 drive hasn't produced any obvious problems.
In doing some research, I learned that there is a performance cost of doing USB 2.0 to PATA or SATA- obviously, this has been negligible, but I wanted to get some advice from the group regarding theoretical bandwidth of the various technologies that are involved.
Max Theoretical Bandwidth Assumptions (please correct if wrong):
LAN - 100Mbit/sec
USB 2.0 - 480 Mbits/sec
PATA 133 - 1064 Mbits/sec
SATA 300 - 2400 Mbits/sec
Question #1: If I want to mount storage on my network such that it is accessible via the LAN, does it really matter if I am using PATA or SATA since the performance bottleneck is always going to be the LAN (I know that Gigabit ethernet is available, but for now, I am not considering this)?
This brings me to my second question: In looking at some of these SOHO NAS devices, are there any advantages to buying one of these over putting together a cheap little file server with a 100 Mbit card from old parts?
Some examples (ranging from cheaper adapters, to NAS):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833127156
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822106001
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306
TIA,
Rick
In doing some research, I learned that there is a performance cost of doing USB 2.0 to PATA or SATA- obviously, this has been negligible, but I wanted to get some advice from the group regarding theoretical bandwidth of the various technologies that are involved.
Max Theoretical Bandwidth Assumptions (please correct if wrong):
LAN - 100Mbit/sec
USB 2.0 - 480 Mbits/sec
PATA 133 - 1064 Mbits/sec
SATA 300 - 2400 Mbits/sec
Question #1: If I want to mount storage on my network such that it is accessible via the LAN, does it really matter if I am using PATA or SATA since the performance bottleneck is always going to be the LAN (I know that Gigabit ethernet is available, but for now, I am not considering this)?
This brings me to my second question: In looking at some of these SOHO NAS devices, are there any advantages to buying one of these over putting together a cheap little file server with a 100 Mbit card from old parts?
Some examples (ranging from cheaper adapters, to NAS):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833127156
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822106001
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306
TIA,
Rick