S-L-O-W Mac Mini backup

[dennise]

We have both the Chronosync and DroboCopy working. But, the throughput is really, really, slow. My suspicion is that it is the Mac Mini, we may be saturating its capability with 6-7 TB.

I says this because when we did a 50GB backup it took 20 min and that put the band rate at 0.32 Gbps. This is server storage Gp (primary) to server storage Gb (backup). Also, I did a 6.23 TB erase on of the Drobo backup units and it took 8 hrs, and really slowed down the server performance. It was still working, only very slow to access anything or log-in.

Question #1: In your option, if we go to the Xserve will its performance improve the backup (see performance info below)? Can we address backups to take advantage of the 8-core processing. i.e., assign 4-6 simultaneous backups at once? The Mac Mini is serial in this respect, one backup at a time.

Mini Mac (MC408LL/A) Xserver
Processor 2.53 GHz Dual Core – Duo 2.93 GHz 8 Core – Xeon 5500
Data path ? 64-bit
System Bus 1.066 GHz 3.33 Ghz?
RAM 4 GB 96 GB max

Question #2: if we go with the Xserve and use a smart switch such as the Netgear GS724T/GS748T which as a SFP GBIC module, can the Xserve interface with this SFP GBIC module? Or does it not matter, as the Ethernet connection to the smart switch has the same performance.

We are planning the next generation system and these are questions I need to address. As we add our next Rack with 10 Raid-5 units (DroboElite or ??), half will be for backup and the backup will be managed by the Server.

Appreciate your comments.

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