Have I outgrown my Seagate GoFlex Home?

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PixelFarmer

New Member
Aug 21, 2013
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London England
Hi to all in the forums!

I have a small render farm to output 3D animation (Lightwave 3D)

Server = 3TB Seagate Goflex Home NAS
1 x Main Workstaion = Lenovo Xeon 8core
5 x Render Nodes = HP Xeon 8core
1 x Gigabit Switch
Cat 5e cables

Things had been going ok, but I recently did a job rendering 3k EXRs
I.E. I was rendering REALLY REALLY big images not just in terms of pixels,
these are floating point and multi-layered like psds, so about 50mb per frame.

I have been getting problems with the nodes not being able to write to the server.

Since that could be 48 nodes plus lots of other tasks all talking to the nas - am I running out of connections?
Or.. am I running out of bandwidth somewhere... I doubt it cos GBethernet is what everyone uses..
Is there any good software I can use to diagnose my entire system?

I can't find any manufacturers data on the goflex gome's "concurrent connections" - is it super low with this NAS?

I'm thinking of getting a QNAS - as their spec lists 256 concurrent connections,
That's got to be enough...
 

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
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NYC
How many frames total and what is the finished file size? Sometimes NAS has issue with large single file sizes.

One idea is why not run the NAS on the workstation?
 

PixelFarmer

New Member
Aug 21, 2013
3
0
0
London England
Frames = I'm rendering many hundreds per day. mostly 50mb EXR float - 2700 x 1500 pixels

I could set up a spare workstation as a nas easily next time I get down time though - good idea...
I can't change the nas location right mid job - too much at stake with paths, mapped drives, configs, static ips, etc etc..

Once I do do that - or even now - Is there any kind of stress testin software I can use to find out what part of my system is failing?
Like something that would create loads of connections and or use bandwidth and monitor the stress on the system?
 

PixelFarmer

New Member
Aug 21, 2013
3
0
0
London England
Thanks dba - I agree! The NAS is of, course, the weak point.

Is there an industry standard way of quantifying how much traffic is on a small network so I can see what kind of server I need to buy or build?