On Sun, Sep 17, 2006 at 03:02:29PM -0300, Guilherme wrote:
> Hi misc@,
> I must set up 2 new SATA disks into an OpenBSD server running version 3.9.
> These are on NTFS file system and I must share them on a network so the
> users can access data.
> Now my question is: which application will have the best performance?
I'm fairly certain you don't mean what you say/don't say what you mean.
Unless you really mean that you have SATA disk images (and why SATA is
relevant here, I don't know) on a NTFS filesystem that you'd like to
share with NFS, at least. Even in that case, the advice given below
should be relevant, though some additional advice might be added (why
NTFS, why disk images?).
If you want to share some files over NFS, you must do so from some
filesystem; it's probably best to go with ffs, as this is the
best-supported filesystem on OpenBSD. However, a filesystem is to a
large extent just a filesystem (some features of NFS won't work if the
underlying filesystem doesn't know about groups and such, though).
This filesystem is running over some block device; such a block device
might be a SATA disk, a vnd(4), a raid(4), some sort of hardware raid,
and so on and so forth.
The application to use is pretty simple; there's only one nfsd(8) in
OpenBSD, so go with that one.
The only thing I could see as being relevant is the amount of servers
(nfsd's -n option), and some of the mounting options on the clients
(highly system-specific).
For optimal performance, you could try striping the disks - raid(4) can
help here; RAID0, preferably in hardware but also in software, or a
simple ccd(4) device, is very fast. RAID1 offers data integrity and fast
access, but at the cost of a 50% capacity loss.
However, this is unlikely to matter any. As long as you don't go above
100Mbps, disks are unlikely to be the bottleneck, at least IME. The
added reliability of RAID1 is nice, though.
Joachim
