On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 06:41:42AM -0600, Paul Rech wrote: > > It's about 40GB right now. > > I need to copy the entire database at unscheduled times. Which means it could > be in the middle of the day when 100 users are on. So I want to have as little > impact as possible. > It's a failover system, so there is no choice but to do the copy right away. > > With my current 100Mbit connection it takes about 2 hours. > Are you sure it's not the disks that are a bottleneck? Full 100mbit is 12MB/s which means 3333 seconds, or 55 minutes for 40GB, not counting the transport overhead, if the machines on both sides can handle it you might try one of the compaq NC3131 cards (64 bit PCI, hot swap, ethernet bonding) it comes with two 100mbit ports, and is expandable to 4 ports total via a daughterboard, all on one PCI card. You do, of course, have to be able to push and accept 48MB/s on both disks. (This will get you down to 13 minutes) > I'll test out the multiple 100Mbit card idea first. > I suspect the drives would be overloaded by more than one stream of data, as > they are on > the same I/O channel. > > But you never can be sure until you test it out. > try using hdparm, or bonnie to test disk throughput, an ATA100 IDE drive or some SCSI drives can easily do 35MB/s. 45MB/s+ is possible with ATA133 or higher end SCSI disks. > This is very good news that I don't need the switch. > I was told that I needed a switch for this. That was not my idea. > > Thanks to all for the info. > > Paul > >