My friend is about to blow $600 on a Firewire CD-RW and a Firewire 80-gig drive for his G4. He will be using the hard drive for realtime digital video capture and playback. I recognized that for that price, he could build a new computer with an ATAPI CD-RW ($80) and a couple of 60-gig ATA-100 drives ($140 each) in a striping RAID configuration. All the rest of the system (700 MHz CPU/MB combo at $110, 128 MB RAM $20, case, keyboard, mouse, floppy, cables $70, video card $25, 100 Mbps 3COM card $40) would cast around $275. In all, for $650, he would have what he originally was going to buy, in addition to 40 extra gigs and a new computer. I would configure the system like so: - Software RAID - netatalk - Crossover cable connection between the Mac and the Linux box, so they are the only two boxes on the network - Disable vitual swap space - Disable all crontab processes - Compile kernel without module support - Prevent any process from loading that isn't necessary to simply run the network and the filesystem I asked the netatalk mailing list for benchmarks under netatalk, and people running 100Mbps networks get 7-8Mb/sec on average; one guy running a RAID was getting 9.5Mb/sec. The key thing is, I need to be able to *guarantee* my friend a 5Mb/sec continuous transfer rate. That is, I don't care what the max or average transfer rates are... all I care about is that the transfer rate never drops BELOW 5Mb/sec, not even for a millisecond (doing so would cause frames to be dropped, and for a videographer that is a Bad Thing(tm)). So, what do you think? Is this a realistic expectation? If so, what else should I consider as I set up this network system for real-time video capture and playback? Mike - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
