A short update on the home server because it isn’t to a finished point so there can’t be too much to tell.

The first thing I tried was creating a virtual hard drive and using iSCSI to connect it to my Mac Pro. There isn’t a native iSCSI client in Mac OS X so 3rd party solutions are the only option. They weren’t very stable and using a fixed volume size I lost a lot of the benefits.

The second thing was SMB transfer. This worked very well and was very stable but it used 100% of the server’s CPU which limited file transfers to 30-40 MB/sec reads and 20-30 MB/sec writes. If I got a faster CPU this would be just about right.

The third thing I tried was NFS transfer. This was great at reading files from the server and was able to go over 100 MB/sec approaching the limit of gigabit ethernet. (125 MB/sec) Write speed wasn’t so great. Sometimes it would be 30 MB/sec but after a while or if another write or read was started the speed would drop to around 4 MB/sec. NFS is probably the best if the Mac OS X to Solaris issues get sorted out. This solution also used around 20% of the server CPU so I had enough headroom to enable compression of the data on the server with no performance hit.

So for now I will go with the second method, SMB and upgrade the CPU to something with a few more cores and a higher clock speed.

Update: After some more tweaks I was able to get a little under 50 MB/sec for both reads and writes for most situations. Lots of tiny files still dropped to lower transfer speeds. The processor is still maxed out most of the time.

Update Again: Actually I may not have changed anything. Sometimes it just seems to go faster. I haven’t figured that out yet.

My current project in my spare time is to build one of these Sun x4500 servers for a normal price. It is a really exciting project. It is also the first complete build of a PC that I have ever done. I have taken a few PCs apart and upgraded parts and added things to them but my history with Macs has left me with a series of computers mostly built by Apple with core options.

I ordered did as much research as I thought I needed and ordered all the parts and really had a great time. I got a really efficient and low power AMD processor and a super great motherboard and case but I made an error in picking out my parts. The motherboard I picked out was super popular and full of wonderful reviews but it was also too new. I thought I was being pretty careful and I was but I underestimated the progress that had been recently made with Solaris. I think that if this had been a year from now the situation would have been fine but Solaris is still in the process of moving from a big slow OS to a more versatile and progressive OS.

So after I had a working PC build running Solaris and Spinrite but not network accessable, among other things, I am sending the motherboard back and will try again in a few days, maybe over the weekend.