Quote Originally Posted by wowphreak
illumin8 what yer quoting is interface max speeds not actual drive speeds the fastest drive I can find at the moment is a Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 (300 GB Ultra320 SCSI) - 135.0 MB/Sec it also cost a small fortune.

The interfaces are designed to be able to handle more the one drive without getting bogged down.

High end sata drive average around 88 MB/Sec these are read speeds write would be slower.

When yer loading, the whole game isn't 3 gigs, at most at any one time yer loading maybe about 300-500 megs of data.

I think gigabit ethernet card would more then suffice.
Yeah, they are max interface speeds, but on a SATA drive, that's a dedicated bus to your computer. Start using diskless and now you're sharing your gigabit interface with 5 other clients. No longer dedicated. And from my tests, gigabit ethernet, unless you're using jumbo frames, doesn't usually get faster than about 500-600 megabits (60-70 megabytes a sec). Divide by 5 and you'll probably get roughly 12-15 MB a second when loading all 5 clients at once.

Not idea for performance. Nice for manageability though.