preference for 3com 3c905TXb, however, I've not seen any credible argument for on-board processor over off-board processing, since CPU speeds got past 500MHz. Modern comps are waaaayyy fat on CPU cycles.
Yes, the problem *is* I/O but not at the NIC. Those damned drives are too slow and then there are the backplanes. We don't need just fast burst transfer times, we need steady-state transfer rates of 1GBps and a backplane to handle double that, so I can drop in one of those drive arrays and 5 Gig-E cards and not bottle-neck the bus.
As it is, I can only get near reasonable disk throughput if I go with UltraRAID. Even then, if I install one UltraRAID card the back plane is already gagging and I have yet to install 1000baseTX cards, of which I usually need at least 2, sometimes 3. |
