Back in February I rebuilt my main home file server. This box is the repository for files from all home client systems, as well as our master picture and music server.
The new rig consisted of a new good quality case, ASUS mobo, Athalon 2200, a gig of RAM, a random NIC card, and two Seagate 200GB drives in a Raid 1 config. I put FC3 on at the time, but have since upgraded it to FC4.
Now, I say the computer has been haunted since the beginning, because the NIC slows to a crawl when transferring large amounts of data (ping times to local machines go to 5 seconds). Usually this occurs on transfers over say 10 GB, but on occasion a smaller amount of say 2 or 3 gigs causes this to happen. I don’t transfer big files that often, and a % service network restart fixes it, so I’ve been living with it while trying to ferret out and replace the bad component.
So far, in 9 months I’ve swapped the following in order:
- NIC card
- motherboard (had another one of same make lying around)
- all cables
- the main home switch (twice, most recently to a good Netgear 16-port gigabit switch that I’m very happy with)
- the hard drives (upgrade to Maxtor 250 gigs paired)
- the NIC again to a known-to-perform-well-under-Linux Zonet gigabit card (priced right too at a whopping $12.99)
And damn if the thing didn’t slow down again last week on the nightly backup run.
So, I bought some new well-rated Thermaltake super-quiet power supplies, and just swapped in a new supply. Newegg is getting to be very happy with me.
That’s it computer, you hear me. You’d better start behaving now young man or else !!!