Home server questions

[RCN_Moose]

Hi guys, I have a couple of questions regarding home servers. I currently have 4 computers on a home network all running through a Linksys router. (it also has a Xbox on it).

Main Computer - my room
P4 2.6C w 1Gig of DDR400 and a 10K Raptor (SATA) on an ABIT IC7-G Max 2 Advance. This is my main computer that I use for gaming and everything else.
2nd Comp - spare room
AMD Athlon XP 1700 w 512Megs of DDR333 and a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus ATA133 hard drive. This is in my other room and gets used for the internet and school work.
3rd comp - living room
AMD T-Bird 1.2Ghz w 512Meg DDR266 and 2 diff hard drives. Both 7200RPM and ATA 100. This is used for the internet and listening to music. The second drive is shared over the LAN and has approx. 40Gigs of music.
Laptop - in kitchen
P4 1.6Ghz w/ 512 DDR266.

All computers run XP Pro. My questions are,
1. Can XP Pro act as a server okay for this small a LAN? ie. would there be any performance diff. between it and 2000 or 2003 Server? It currently can take a while to access the music over the lan, (a few seconds) and I am trying to think of ways to speed it up.
The LAN is 100Mb full duplex.
2. Does XP Pro have any settings that can be tweaked for using it as an improtu server?

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Fred

[Siliconjunkie]

Depennds on what you are calling a "server" if you just mean someplace to store files, it will work fine, you won't notice any performace differnce going to a "server" OS.

Basically, as it comes out of the box it is fine. Don't believe all the posts you will see telling you to "tweak" the MTU and RWin. MS knows more than them and out of the box I can get 80-85% network utilization in spurts. The rest of the PC is the bottleneck more than the network.

[M_Six]

The advantage of Win2k Server over XP is that with the server OS you can set up mirrored drives or RAID. With XP you need a PCI raid controller card. But speed-wise I doubt you'd see any improvement.

[Siliconjunkie]

And centralized authentication if you setup a domain. Just looked and you can mirror in XP Pro. Not sure about striping.

[M_Six]

You cannot mirror XP Pro. Try it. There's a whole spiel about it in Help, but at the very end it tells you that you can only mirror in Win2k Server.

[Siliconjunkie]

interesting, if you right click on a volume in disk management there is an option. figured it was grayed out because I have no free volumes. I will read around about it.

[M_Six]

One of my major complaints with XP is that it won't allow you to mirror. With hard drives as cheap as they are, it's really sorry that Microsoft's premier desktop OS won't allow mirroring for data redundancy.

Straight from XP's Help files:

To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Click Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.

You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings may also prevent you from completing this procedure.

You can create mirrored volumes only on computers running Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.

[RCN_Moose]

Hmm. All of my motherboards have built in RAID and I was thinking about getting a couple of 120Gig drives and setting them up as a single volume (raid stripping I believe). Does XP support this and do you think it would spead up network access any?

[Siliconjunkie]

Yes, XP will support that since it happens outside the OS. It is doubtful that you will see any performace advantage. Everything I have read shows little if any speed gain. Some even show that it is slower. Hardware RAID such as you have will do better than OS RAID every time.

[John Prophet]

Quote--> "It is doubtful that you will see any performace advantage. Everything I have read shows little if any speed gain. Some even show that it is slower"

Are you saying that SOFTWARE raid is slower or that ALL raid is slower?

I have never heard that striping (Raid o) is slower than regular.

Software raid? no, I wouldnt tocuh it, lol. (what would I know, Ive never done any raid). I just cant see adding that load to the cpu all the time...especially when raid cards cost like $20 and every other mboard now has hardware raid.

As far as XP 'allowing" raid.....as you said, if the Raid is on the motherboard, then XP doesnt even know its there..correct more or less?? (since all the 'raiding' is done on the raid cards bios etc).

JP

I have some raid boards, I keep saying I am gonna play with it but I keep being lazy.