Question : How to resolve slow disk writes on Win2003 SBS on Dell PowerEdge server?

We have a Windows 2003 SBS server that has been having some severe performance issues. Using the performance monitor we discovered that it always had queues for reading and writing. What's more, we download a tool to benchmark sequential reads and writes, and while the reads are 42MB/sec, the writes are 1.37MB/sec. We compared to a local workstation with 59MB/sec reads and 67MB/sec writes.

The setup is Dell PowerEdge SC1420, 250GB SATA drives, RAID1 controller, 4GB RAM. The only thing we can change in the RAID controller software is enable disk cache. Would that make such a difference?

As far as software, we run Peachtree and Quickbooks both on the server (the server service). Aside from that, Symantec Endpoint Protection is probably the most intensive program on the server. However, even if we turn off all these services, the performance is still horrible on the drives.

Any ideas?

Answer : How to resolve slow disk writes on Win2003 SBS on Dell PowerEdge server?

Get a public IP address,
Domain Management Control Panel Setup,
Register this IP address to your domain's www record.

Server Setup:
Assign this IP to your server. C
Configure default website of the server.
Set the access settings to "anonymous" using website properties.

Firewall Settings:
Configure your firewall to allow the webserver IP address for port 80,8080 or 443 if your configure on SSL as well.