Quick question about X7SPE

[jimmydrac]

Hey all. I have a couple of questions about the supermicro X7SPE. I am having to replace my Asus P5K-E and I thought about this.

 

1. Can I use it on 4.7 or will I have to use 5.0 beta?

2. Smitty2k1 has it and gave it glowing reviews. But he mentioned that he only gets about 15MB's write speed with parity. That is 

    about half the speed I get with my current board. Does anyone know if this is because he is using 5400rpm drives or that it is the

    board itself bottlenecking the write speeds.

3. I will be using the SASLP-MV8, that's why I asked question #1, and was wondering if this board is powerful enough to run 14

    drives. Right now I am using all Seagate LP's. I know the CPU isn't much involved in parity computation, but I wasn't sure about

    bus speeds.

4. How is the streaming of HD movies with this? Any stuttering or lockups?

5. I had considered using the ASUS P8H67-M LE but read on a thread here that it won't work on 4.7. Is that true? The Asus would 

    be a great little board for using 2 SASLP-MV8 and I doubt it would have any bottlenecks in writing speed.   

 

If anyone has these board's and could answer these questions I would appreciate it.

Also thanks to Smitty2k1 for the info on his setup.

 

Thanks

 

Jim B

[Johnm]

1. yes to both

 

2. err.. the board and nic quite capable of full gigabit speed transfers... i have one with an Areca 16 drive hardware raid6 and it about on par as a SATAIII SSD (over 500GB/s). the onboard sata ports are as fast as your sataII drive for network transfers.

A cache drive can always help with write performance.

 

3. see #2 .. but yes you can make a 14 drive box with a saslp-mv8. I have made more then one with this combo (both unRAID and WHS)

*note* that it might be a little slow on a 14 drive parity check, maybe 90MB/s? this is more a limit of the MV8 being saturated

It has also been stated that  preclears can take a little longer on some older atoms with low amounts of ram. then again, how often do you preclear drives?

 

4. no more so then most unraid boxes.

of course you might have stuttering during parity checks or if you pounding the array at the same time, especcialy on the same drive.

 

5, i see no "obvious" reason that other board would not work if it is a Realtek 8112L NIC. the usb 3 most likely wont work.

if it was posted it wont work. i would check that thread for why.  if it has been tested and stated it failed, there should be a reason given why.

there are several flavors of the P8H67-M, most of them have incompatible NIC's

I will point out that my P8P67 Pro did not work in 4.7 because of the NIC but worked in any beta after Beta4

 

 

 

 

[stanger89]

Hey all, I don't post here much because well, my unRAID box basically just sits in the basement and works.  However the other day my switch died so I ended up getting a new one and as part of that process I decided to do a bit of benchmarking/testing to make sure everything was working as it should.  I've run into a couple questions, and well this has "motivated" me to ask a couple more I'd been wondering about.

 

2. err.. the board and nic quite capable of full gigabit speed transfers... i have one with an Areca 16 drive hardware raid6 and it about on par as a SATAIII SSD (over 500GB/s). the onboard sata ports are as fast as your sataII drive for network transfers.

A cache drive can always help with write performance.

 

I'm curious, how did you test performance?  After I replaced the switch I did a bit of testing and the best I can get between my desktop and my unRAID box (running an X7SPA) is about 500-600Mbps.  I tried enabling jumbo frames on both sides but it didn't seem to make any difference.  The switch is a D-Link DGS-1024D which supports jumbo frames.  Really I suppose this is mostly an academic question as to what (if anything) the issue is as I know I'm not going to utilize full 100MB/sec+ transfer speeds with any of the devices on my network.  But any thoughts on what to check if there's something I've got configured wrong?

 

3. see #2 .. but yes you can make a 14 drive box with a saslp-mv8. I have made more then one with this combo (both unRAID and WHS)

*note* that it might be a little slow on a 14 drive parity check, maybe 90MB/s? this is more a limit of the MV8 being saturated

It has also been stated that  preclears can take a little longer on some older atoms with low amounts of ram. then again, how often do you preclear drives?

 

This is the other question, I did a parity check the other day and only got about half that ~40MB/sec and I don't even have all fourteen drives populated yet, I've only got 7 drives in the array so far.  Right now it's five WD20EARS and two Hitachi 5K3000's (the Coolspin drives).  The parity disk is one of the Hitachi's.

 

I ran hdparm tests on all the drives and all of the ones in the array report 110MB/sec+ buffered reads so that looks OK.

 

OK, and one last stupid question, I believe I've got a hard drive in my unraid box that's "clicking" periodically.  Problem is I don't know which one it is, and haven't been able to find/think of a way to identify it.  Only clue is one drive had a series of errors at one point, but that seems to have stopped, and also that same drive does have a non-zero reallocated sector count according to the smart report, but that number does not seem to be increasing.  Any thoughts on identifying the clicking drive?  I suppose I could just yank drives one at a time until I don't hear clicking anymore, but that doesn't seem like the most efficient method.

 

Thanks for any suggestions you might have.