I'm building a backup server out of mostly spare parts. As a backup server, particularly one behind a 100Mbit ethernet port, performance is hardly of primary concern. Being made of spare parts means the CPU is slow, there's not much RAM, the drives aren't all matched, etc. This should contrast nicely with my original benchmarks of a modern board with matched SATA disks.

First, the test system setup:

• Abit NF7-s motherboard
• AMD AthlonXP (2.08GHz) CPU
• Crucial 256MB DDR1-xx0 DIMM
• 4 x Hitachi 250GB HDDs - HDS722525VLAT80
• 2 x Maxtor 200GB DM+9 HDDs - 6Y200P0
• CentOS 5 X86 linux distribution
• uname: 2.6.18-8.el5 #1 SMP Thu Mar 15 19:57:35 EDT 2007 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
• md driver / mdadm v2.5.4

Then some diagnostic numbers: checksumming speed