Cheapest Possible (Store-Available) Upgrade: Dual Parity Mobo/CPU (Keep RAM)?


wheel

Recommended Posts

Theoretically a simple question, but having found tons of options (most outdated / sold out / no longer being made) through post searching, I figured I'd ask a brand new question in hopes of a November 2021 answer in time for Black Friday:

 

I have a "save and forget" media tower which does absolutely nothing outside of holding drives. No docker, no apps, no cache disk. But the motherboard (AM3 AMD 880G SATA 6Gb/s ATX ECS A885GM-A2) doesn't support strong enough CPUs for my dual parity checks to take less than ~3 days (18 data disks spread across WD 8TBs and 12TBs, mostly even split of EMAZ and EDFZ, and two EDAZs - they're mostly connected to a pair of Genuine LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA LSI 9211-8i P20 IT Mode Low Profile cards, which I definitely don't want to replace).

 

I'm finally ready to upgrade that motherboard, and I'm *guessing* my decade-old 2GB of RAM that's been serving my needs well (Crucial 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1333 PC310600) should probably be upgraded to ECC, but if I wanted to max out my parity check speeds as cheaply as possible without hunting old hardware trade boards or dealing with eBay trust issues, does anyone have any readily-retail-available bang-for-buck suggestions for upgrading that old motherboard (and necessarily CPU, from everything I've read)?

 

If the old-slot RAM works, all the better, but presuming my low-demand needs don't need more than 2GB anyway, a bonus ECC upgrade to match a new motherboard hopefully won't break the bank.

 

Thanks so much in advance for any ideas or guidance on this overwhelming shopping endeavor!

Link to comment

...can you elaborate, why you think the CPU is the bottleneck in your case and what your expectations are?

If it were, the only way of "healing" this is, IMHO to increase the headroom...meaning getting a more modern CPU with higher hardware acceleration functions usable for parity calculation (SSE whatever it is, these days) and higher Frequency per Core.

This is, what my i3-8100 is actually capable of:

kernel: raid6: avx2x4   gen() 29416 MB/s
kernel: raid6: avx2x4   xor() 17775 MB/s
kernel: raid6: avx2x2   gen() 37325 MB/s
kernel: raid6: avx2x2   xor() 20930 MB/s
kernel: raid6: avx2x1   gen() 26141 MB/s
kernel: raid6: avx2x1   xor() 17275 MB/s
kernel: raid6: sse2x4   gen() 16542 MB/s
kernel: raid6: sse2x4   xor()  9707 MB/s
kernel: raid6: sse2x2   gen() 16828 MB/s
kernel: raid6: sse2x2   xor()  9547 MB/s
kernel: raid6: sse2x1   gen() 14106 MB/s
kernel: raid6: sse2x1   xor()  6929 MB/s
kernel: raid6: using algorithm avx2x2 gen() 37325 MB/s
kernel: raid6: .... xor() 20930 MB/s, rmw enabled
kernel: raid6: using avx2x2 recovery algorithm

 

 

What is your CPU model and what does your syslog say about the XOR performance for raid6?

Did you, by any chance enable full disk encryption?

 

 

 

Link to comment

Sorry for the incredibly late response - week totally ran away from me with work.

 

Diagnostics attached; never enabled full disk encryption. CPU's an AMD Phenom II X4 820 @ 2800 MHz.

 

Based on a past conversation (which I'm having an incredibly hard time finding right now), I upgraded my CPU to the best-case scenario for my motherboard, and was told it was just a band-aid improvement, as the CPU is the bottleneck and in order to jump up a level in parity-check speed, I'd need to upgrade my motherboard, too.

 

Serious apologies for not including all of this information in the original post!

 

EDIT: I'm thinking these are the relevant syslog sections:

 

Nov 19 20:20:12 Tower2 kernel: raid6: sse2x1   gen()  3644 MB/s
Nov 19 20:20:12 Tower2 kernel: raid6: sse2x1   xor()  3646 MB/s
Nov 19 20:20:12 Tower2 kernel: raid6: sse2x2   gen()  5785 MB/s
Nov 19 20:20:12 Tower2 kernel: raid6: sse2x2   xor()  6341 MB/s
Nov 19 20:20:12 Tower2 kernel: raid6: sse2x4   gen()  6777 MB/s
Nov 19 20:20:12 Tower2 kernel: raid6: sse2x4   xor()  3230 MB/s

 

 

tower2-diagnostics-20211123-0735.zip

Edited by wheel
Extra Info
Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.