Hi,

I am using Dual CPU AMD Opteron2378 with Sata harddrive with 32MB cache for Samba File Server. I have installed CentOS5.3 64bit on it.

Currently 80 users are using that server at same time. All users are using OpenOffice, Write, Pagemaker on their desktop machines and they work on server directly. It gives good performance.

There are 10 users who use CorelDraw & Photoshop for their work and they work locally. Now I put their data on server told them to work on Server directly. But it reduced their working speed by 50% than locally and on server DiskIOs also got increased. So then I disconnected all users and only provide access to those 10 users. So they are working on the server dedicatedly but still performance was slower than local.

Query : How can I increase Performance for them ? what configuration I should have to serve those users as a File Server ? Note: All network cables are CAT6 and switches are of 100MBs.

Query: If HDD is the weakpoint then, will SAS hdd be helpful under these circumstances? I heard that SAS HDD are faster that Sata. They have 2 catagories 3Gb/s and 6 Gb/s. Even we can get PCIxpress card for SAS ports from Promise. Can Linux supports these cards?

Thanks in advance

Regards Neelesh