brad> At work, i might be getting a piece of instrumentation in my lab brad> that that is capable of out putting out 1GB of data per brad> second. Fun! You're going to have an interesting time handling data from this device for sure. brad> In the past i was pretty pleased to write 60MB/s under brad> real-world conditions on my linux systems a few years back. I brad> just wanted to ping the group about this. Does anyone know if a brad> hard drive or even memory come close to writing data at this brad> speed on a linux system? Or, what might the limit for data rates brad> on a linux PC these days. From my google'ing it appears hard brad> drives top out at around 100MB/s. If you're serious about grabbing all the data and writing it to disk, then you'll need to setup some sort of RAID, where you spread your writes across a bunch of controllers and disks. In this case, if you get say three high end PCI-express SATA cards with four ports, you could stripe the data across 12 1Tb disks at 1GB (You said GigaBYTE, right?) without too much trouble, assuming you have a bunch of PCIe slots on the board. I'd probably setup RAID 0 (striping) with a stride setup so that every 1 to 16 Megabytes you write to a new disk, so as to take advantage of the cache on the disks. You'll have to do some testing to determine the best numbers. Also, if this data is important, I'd setup mirrored pairs of disks and then stripe across those disks. More controllers and disks and power. BTW, How will this device move the data to your file server? 10Gbit Ethernet? Direct PCI-E interace? Infiniband? Do you need to actually keep all the data, or can you pre-process it and compress it or summarize it, etc? Then write those results to disk? Loading up the system with lots of RAM will give you more leeway, but you're still going to be hurting to handle this flood. brad> Note: This piece of instrumentation has onboard memory for brad> writing, which i'll probably have to use, but if there was a way brad> to stream the data, it would be preferable. You're going to have to invest in a big box with lots of bandwidth to handle this, along with the disks to hold all this data. And I'd really really really suggest you try to pre-process and summarize and reduce the data before you try to write it. Good luck, and let us know what you end up doing! John