June 3, 201115 yr http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131630 Comments? Thinking about getting this for a 4 drive setup....
June 3, 201115 yr well... Pointing out the the obvious, it only has 2 sata and 1 PCI slot. 4 drives would be the max once you got a PCI 2 drive card. The drives on the PCI adapter might be a bit slower in a parity check if you have 2. The Nic is a Realtek RTL8112L, while it is a Realtek and some people say they don't all work, there is at least 1 level 1 Asus board with that NIC. everything else about it looks like it should be fine from what I know. the price is hard to argue with. and I do run several d510 servers with no issues. Personally, I would probably pop a few buck more and get a supermicro atom board. You would get rock solid server class performance and stability and room to grow up to 14 drives with an MV8 added later. If this is your budget, while this board should be fine. I'd also consider the ZOTAC GF6100-E-E AM3/AM2+/AM2 and AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz for less money. It would still be mITX you can run up to 6 drives in it (4 on mobo and 2 on PCIe card)
June 3, 201115 yr well... Pointing out the the obvious, it only has 2 sata and 1 PCI slot. 4 drives would be the max once you got a PCI 2 drive card. It will make a nice 6 drive unraid with a 4 port sata card installed. No required fan on the cpu is a big plus if you are looking to make a small, quiet machine. I have something similar in my unraid, 2 port sata atom board. But my atom has a fan on it My unraid is only a 5 drive system as there is no room for a 6th with the small case I used. Great little system to have sitting in the living room next to the TV.
June 3, 201115 yr Author Thanks for the comments guys. I'd like to get something super small and quiet... working on a custom case with 2.5 inch disks.
June 3, 201115 yr That is correct, i forgot about the 4 port PCIx cards that can run in a PCI slot. It has been a while since i used a PCI card. again they would be a bit slow on parity checks due to PCI bus speeds. but you wont need to do that often. for day to day use, it would be ok. Also, this atom board plus the 4 port card will bring the price up to the same cost of a supermicro atom board with 6 ports already on the board if i am not mistaken? The supermicros are also passive cooled.
June 3, 201115 yr Author The supermicro seems silly to me for the cost... Yes it's a good name and a nice board, but I could a "real" cpu/board combo for that price. For my purposes I'll never need more than 6 drives. Especially @ 2tb each (3 whenever unraid supports them)
June 3, 201115 yr I picked up a SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPA-H-O for $100 on eBay a while back. You might want to shop around, maybe you'll find something similar. The first one I got was actually defective so I had it replaced through the Supermicro warranty. The second I've only had for a few weeks, but it appears to be solid. I personally wouldn't go for board that doesn't have any PCIe slots, but then again parity rebuild speed is important to me. If you don't mind the slower performance during multiple disk operations, then a cheap 4 port PCI card like this should work fine for you. There's no need to spend extra money on a PCI-X card when you won't see any speed benefits anyway. You might want to consider Zacate boards also, since they have similar power profiles to Atom boards, but tend to have better expansion options.
June 3, 201115 yr With the card Raj pointed out. that makes your proposed build a good value then.. I picked an open box SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPA-HF-O for $108 + shipping from newegg a few weeks back. If you are not in a rush, you can find some good deals. The zacete boards do sound promising. check the the zacete thread since a few might have a nic issue while some others dont. I will believe that the current generation of atoms appear to be at the end of their lifespan. the I3 and Zacete are replacing their niche. Intel is fastracking the next generation of atoms but it s a long way off still.
June 4, 201115 yr Author http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500046&cm_re=ATOM-_-13-500-046-_-Product This one looks pretty great. PCI-X wait... only 100mbit lan. STUPID!
June 4, 201115 yr http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500046&cm_re=ATOM-_-13-500-046-_-Product This one looks pretty great. PCI-X wait... only 100mbit lan. STUPID! That board has a PCIe x1 slot, not PCI-X. Don't confuse the two, they are very different. Where are you seeing that it is 100mbit LAN? On the Zotac site, it looks like all the Atom boards are Gigabit LAN. This one looks pretty solid: ZOTAC IONITX-E-E - expandable up to 6 drives.
June 6, 201115 yr I did some speed tests with my Atom tonight and I'm seeing 40ish MB/s performance without the parity drive. I expected to see close to 80-100 MB/s. This is what I see in 'top' - I think Atom is just not able to keep up with the load and is bottlenecking the system. Thoughts? PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1600 root 20 0 47348 1768 700 S 54 0.4 2:27.46 shfs 1579 root 20 0 13960 4004 3092 S 43 0.8 1:49.58 smbd 1258 root 20 0 1664 236 156 S 22 0.0 1:09.75 dhcpcd 5680 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 17 0.0 0:15.28 flush-9:1 1489 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 8 0.0 0:13.58 unraidd 124 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 6 0.0 0:16.91 sync_supers 321 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 5 0.0 0:10.31 kswapd0 5681 root 20 0 2116 992 788 R 0 0.2 0:00.06 top 1 root 20 0 700 304 264 S 0 0.1 0:03.41 init
June 6, 201115 yr I have atoms running software raid 5's on them and can transfer data at greater then Gigabit network speeds. They average 13% cpu and a few megs of ram under extreme network load in 2008r2. I would be surprised unRAID would use more resources with less overhead.
June 6, 201115 yr I agree, no modern CPU will bottleneck your transfer speeds. The issue in your case is likely the network or the disks themselves.
June 6, 201115 yr I did some speed tests with my Atom tonight and I'm seeing 40ish MB/s performance without the parity drive. I expected to see close to 80-100 MB/s. This is what I see in 'top' - I think Atom is just not able to keep up with the load and is bottlenecking the system. Thoughts? Small files or big files? What drives? What are your addons? That's a big load for shfs at 40MB/s reads. Wait, those were read tests, right?
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