Asked by:
Memory or Processors, which is more important

Question
-
I just installed whs on an PowerEdge 600SC, 2.4 P4 533 Bus. I picked this box out of two possible boxes because it had 4GB of RAM. However watching the processor work balancing & rebalancing disks (got a bunch of disks), it appears that this is a very processor intensive OS.
My other machine, sitting in the corner, is a dual Processor 1.6 with only 1.5 GB of RAM. The ram for that system tops out at 2GB and it's expensive Rambus memory so I didn't consider it.
My question is, I don't appear to be using any RAM, so did I install this on the wrong server, or once I have all my files finially copied on to the storage will my 2.4 processor be enough ?
Thanks in advance - Steve
Wednesday, January 23, 2008 12:01 AM
All replies
-
You certainly don't need a full 4 GB of memory for Windows Home Server. Most people are finding that 1 GB is sufficient, as long as they aren't treating it as Window Server 2003 Lite™.
A faster processor really wouldn't help that much, though; you'll find that Windows Home Server is really fairly I/O bound in normal operation.
I wouldn't say you picked the "wrong" box to use; just one with higher specs than you need.Wednesday, January 23, 2008 5:04 AMModerator -
Depends on what you're going to do with your server. I stream video from my WHS and it does some on-the-fly transcoding which can be memory and processor intensive. As such I threw 4GB and a Intel 6550 into my WHS. Purrs along like a kitten.Wednesday, January 23, 2008 2:20 PM
-
I believe it is NOT an either or thing, but rather it depends on what one is trying to do. For me I seem to need just a little over 1 GB of memory, so 1.5 would have worked, but 2 GB was cheap, so that is what I have.Wednesday, January 23, 2008 2:54 PM
-
Thanks for the response, the reason for my questions is that my Processor rarely drops below 50% in task manager. Of course, all I've been doing for the past two weeks has been coping files over to the storage, I guess I'll have to wait until I finishing staging the files & start using it as planned, pretty much read only.
Can I assume that the processor is busy handling the different write speeds of the variety of disks used in my storage, (usb2, firewire, & SATA 2 spread over 9 drives)? It is almost constantly "rebalancing storage".
Steve
Thursday, January 24, 2008 10:49 AM