I’ve heard people talk about the impact of backups on their server. With disk based backups being more common place these days, I thought I’d take a look at one on my test server. This screenshot shows a base Windows 2008 server doing a backup direct to a USB 2.0 connected 2TB drive (1 x 1TB in RAID0 configuration). You can see the low level impact that this is having on the CPU right now – barely registering at all. Disk however is pretty solid at around the 50MB/second which is great throughput for a USB 2.0 connected device. What this means however is that the disk subsystem on this server is really being used a fair bit at this point in time and whilst CPU utilisation is low, any other disk based operation you might be performing will suffer. You need to bear this in mind when you configure your SBS 2008 backups, as you can configure them to run every 30 minutes if you choose, but I recommend that you run them every 2 hours at most to minimise the potential for performance problems
“50MB/second which is great throughput for a USB 2.0 connected device”
Wouldnt this be the HDD activity on the actual computer, not necessarily the speed of transfer? I didnt think it was possible to get over 32/35MB/s.
Maybe that (50MB/s) takes into account compression? I dont know – never used the build in backup much.