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Can I raid 0 two networked computers?


zach115th

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I have a few computers all with a small network partition. I was wondering if I could use some kind of raid to make one big virtual network drive I guess you would call it.

I dont really know why anyone would need somthing like this, but I've just been curious to know if it can be don.

Thank you very much.

1st post =]

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Not exactly. You can use DFS to build one big network share where different folders are stored on different servers. I have a share where some folders are physically stored over EMEA but are all accessible from a single path. This is using Server 2008/2008 R2 however, but you might want to look at OpenAFS if you haven't got a Windows domain or want to use Linux.

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Ok I guessed that the performance would suck, but I tested it anyways.

I used 10 computers all donating 10GB of space

Turns out that, yes you can Raid together network drives(It is now one 100GB drive).

It is somewhat slow and if any of the 10 computers powerdown, you cant access anything(to be expected).

Something I didn't expect did happed though, I installed some games on this drive and they ran much better than I would have guessed. Do you think this is because it is taping into the GPU of all 10 computers?

All and all not worth doing unless you can find some use for it, next test will be installing an OS on it =]

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There is no way the other computers could be improving performance in the manor in which you describe. Distributed computing with CUDA and regulate CPU's is possible, but would not be of any benefit for gaming as the latencies between CPU's and GPU's would be intolerably high. In addition to this, the game would have to support many threads for it to be possible to distribute a games processing, most games are still single threaded, a number are optimised for dule core processors, and a small hand full can make full use of quad cores.

I think you should stop using the RAID 0 networked file system and see if the improvement in performance remains.

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Without technical details of how you are raiding 10GB chunks of disks across a network, how this is presented to your gaming machine and performance data from this array, we cannot possibly comment with any accuracy.

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