Content area
Full Text
If you are looking for a PC server with plenty of horsepower and storage space, a 450 MHz Intel Corp. Pentium II dualprocessor system may be the answer.
This class of workgroup servers is designed for file storage and data safety. However, the dual processors offer good investment protection because they let you add storage later or run applications directly from the server, which frees up desktop space. And these servers are affordable, priced at about $10,000 or less.
The newest PC servers on the market are powered by Intel's Xeon processors. However, most servers with Xeon processors are being offered only in four-processor configurations, which places them in the enterprise server category. For a workgroup file server roundup, the dual 450 MHz Pentium II processor configuration is more appropriate, which is why the FCW Test Center chose to test the Pentium Is instead of the Xeons.
We tested offerings from four vendors: Compaq Computer Corp., DTK Computer Inc., Gateway Inc. and Micron Electronics Inc. We also requested servers from Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intergraph Corp., but these companies declined to participate in this review. (Dell told us its product was at the end of its life cycle, HP said the company was between product cycles, and Intergraph said its product was in transition.)
All the servers in this comparison feature Intel's 440BX chipset with a 100 MHz frontside bus, 256M of SDRAM and up to 32M of Redundant Array of Independent Disks cache. We asked for a RAID 5 disk configuration, which offers faster performance than other RAID configurations and protects data by striping it across all five hard disks. Therefore, the 40G to 45G of total storage space we specified was reduced to 30G to 35G of usable storage space.
To measure server performance, we ran Bluecurve Inc.'s Dynameasure/File Professional Edition 2.0, a benchmark that simulates users working on networked clients and servers. We reported the results using two measurements of hard disk performance: throughput and average response time. Throughput represents the input/output rate for file workloads, measured in kilobytes per second. Average response time is the average amount of time, in seconds, that each client request to the server was acknowledged (see sidebar, Page 38).
In all four servers,...