More to come when I’ve tried fixing the driver.

It sounds like your Sage data files have become corrupt (see elsewhere on this blog as to the technical reasons this happens due to design decisions made by Sage). The solution is to get Sage to help – they have tools for recovering corrupt files. Yes, you have to pay Sage to do this. However, the are nearly always successful. It’s not something you can do yourself; for a start, Sage don’t release the software they use to get your data back. Even if they did, it probably wouldn’t be easy to use it.

A debate can be had on the morality of Sage’s business model and whether their software should prevent and cope with corruption automatically, but if you need your accounts data back this is a debate for another day. Good luck!

it also will not open properly and freezes at
checking transaction link integrity

we cannot use the Sage at all do you know of a resolve to problem?

[Ed: Someone is spamming this to any blog mentioning a Kindle Fire with a link to a particular web site

[Ed: This was posted by someone from accountingoursource2india, with a yahoo email address. If anyone gets benefitted by them do please leave a note here]

Yes, Sage is really messing with the network in a bad way. I spent some time analysing the traffic it produced before I decided to upgrade anything. See http://blog.frankleonhardt.com/2010/why-is-sage-line-50-so-slow/ for the results.

One thing that convinced me that upgrading the workstations too was the predictive drop-down lists on some forms. A direct connection improved these at least 5x – from 15 seconds on 2-3 seconds (i.e. unusable to slow).

On this particular site the server isn’t my problem; when I decide to make it my problem I’ll probably go for the fastest I can find (SAS disks, or even SSD). The Sage Authorised Reseller used a Dell workstation, and then upgraded it to another Dell Workstaton (as far as I can make out).

Sorry I didn’t really read the title very well I have to say. I found this post by googling Sage Line50 issues. I appreciate your insightful reply though. You covered a lot of ground on drives in your reply and I agree with you on most parts.

Now did you notice any improvements on Sage after your grade to Gigabit ethernet? That would be my first course of action too given how much gigabit switches cost these days. However I can’t make sense of how it could help – gigabit ethernet would improve the bandwidth but it won’t necessarily improve much on latency. Would Sage Line50 saturate a 100mb link often enough to make a gigabit network show significant improvement? Or maybe I’m missing something else completely. Any thoughts?

SAS has controller optimisations that are supposed to make access quicker by optimising head movements. SATA can do this too, but OS support is more patchy. (FreeBSD has been doing it for a few years, and Windows 7 now supports it if enabled). I’m not convinced that SAS is inherently better than SATA with NCQ. But SAS uses SCSI commands, SATA uses ATA commands – different driver families. The SCSI command set has more functionallity, but I’ not convinced this gives it an advantage. However, SCSI drivers are often better optimised for server use, so might perform better even if the underlying hardware should be about the same. I’m rambling. I used to write an awful lot on hard disks in the 1990′s. Back to the real world.

An alternative approach would be to have a massive disk cache. If the OS is rarely hitting the drive because it’s almost all available instantly in RAM then the speed of the underlying drive becomes irrelevent – no hard drive is faster than RAM (hostage to fortune, but I think I’m safe for a while).

You also have to tweak the disk system and make a good choice on write-through, but I’m not sure how much this can be achieved under Windows. I’m planning (one day) to run Sage on UNIX which has more advanced and optimised disk handling.

As an update to the original post, I have now found that using a good 1Gb network card on the workstations can also make a lot of difference in some circumstances. You also need a big switch, and to hang the workstations directly off it, although using good quality workgroup hubs can also work.

Also on a subnote: When I have sent complaints to abuse@volumedrive.com & support@volumedrive.com I notice that the welcome string from mail.volumedrive.com is “220 mail.volumedrive.com Motha Fuckin VolumeDrive Biatch!” – This confirms my initial suspicions that their intent is not good and unprofessional. If this is how they configure their welcome string then I suspect Volumedrive is run by a group of kids with little respect or common sense.

[Ed: Personally I'd like something more than hear-say, but interesting]