Which PSU will you use?

Ordered it !  Will keep you posted on progress !

You wont be dissapointed i've built an X7SPA-HF-D525 system a few weeks ago, but i was dissapointed by its performance. I've replaced the board with an X9SCM-F and an i3-2120T yesterday, and now the thing is FAST, with plenty of headroom

 

It's a bit of a shame i now have a brand spanking new X7SPA-HD-D525 board lying around though... but at least my unraid system is giving me the performance i kinda expected in the first place.

 

What was "wrong" with the performance? were you doing other things with it (plugins)?  I have one, and even running ESXi I get good performace to a FreeNAS VM.  So I assume a bare unRaid system would run just fine on this board.

 

Edit: some other posts got in before mine; so I see what the issue was above.

 

Although someone posted above that with an i3 you would see 110MB/s to a cached share; I doubt that, as your near/at the theoretical limit of a gigabit network.

What was "wrong" with the performance? were you doing other things with it (plugins)?

Copying data from a windows pc over the gigabit network to the cache drive (an ssd) was at 80MB/s, which was ok, but if you would copy to a cached user share, which basically is a folder ON THE SAME SSD disk, performance dropped to 50MB/s. This should be almost 80MB/s as well. If i was copying, i couldnt play a movie (mkv) on my dune from it over the network, it would just all come to a halt and stutter.

 

It didnt matter if i was using plugins or not, tried it with and without. Did a lot of other tests as well, lots of other configs, other versions and beta's, moved disk from the SAS2LP card to onboard and back, nothing improved its performance.

What was "wrong" with the performance? were you doing other things with it (plugins)?

Copying data from a windows pc over the gigabit network to the cache drive (an ssd) was at 80MB/s, which was ok, but if you would copy to a cached user share, which basically is a folder ON THE SAME SSD disk, performance dropped to 50MB/s. This should be almost 80MB/s as well. If i was copying, i couldnt play a movie (mkv) on my dune from it over the network, it would just all come to a halt and stutter.

 

It didnt matter if i was using plugins or not, tried it with and without. Did a lot of other tests as well, lots of other configs, other versions and beta's, moved disk from the SAS2LP card to onboard and back, nothing improved its performance.

 

That sounds like more of a bug in a driver perhaps than hardware capacity issues.  Strange...

Which PSU will you use?

 

CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800

First hurdle found... and solved..

 

The Define XL case has a nice feature in that there is a door on right hand side (within the case), giving you room to screw in the backplate for your cooler.

 

Unfortunately in combination with my motherboard this does not work, two of the screw holes of the motherboard are positioned slightly outside of this "door", this means the whole contraption does not work and you need to attach the cooler with motherboard unscrewed and then screw it in. Possible also but a drag ofcourse..

And this is the case with everything screwed in !

 

Now it is time to Frankenstein my old server, remove ups and drives and put them in this system. I'm not going to do that tonight though, i'll save it for the weekend.

 

Sofar however the case is not a dissapointment (with the exception of the above), there is a lot of easy room to store cables and enough room to manouvre around.

 

That sounds like more of a bug in a driver perhaps than hardware capacity issues.  Strange...

Yeah i was under the impression this system would be powerfull enough. Thing is, others with the same board/cpu can reproduce these effects, so it's not specific to the setup i had. Anyway, i've replaced the Atom motherboard/cpu with an X9SCM/i3, and all is superb now...

And I'm done ! I'll post a pic tomorrow.

 

Few more hurdles:

 

1) The CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800 powersupply (PSU) missed the 8 pin cpu connector, I have used only one 4-pin but have ordered a converter also;

2) The motherboard cabling of the PSU is to short to be routed behind the backplane, the 4 to 8 pin converter will fix that for the cpu connector, I have ordered an extension for the 24-pin.

3) Appears I have not received the screws needed for the 4in1 2,5" drive bay, have mailed Azerty for replacement.

 

 

Also I have ordered a two more fans:

 

1) Replacement fan for the CoolerMaster cooler, I still think it's a bit noisy;

2) A second case fan to blow air into the bottom drive bays

 

Basically the system is more quiet (though not 100%), it used noticable less watts (which I like), also the cpu usage graphs really show the system is having a way more easy job then with my Athlon X2.

 

As soon as I have all parts in I will start on getting IPMI active.

As soon as I have all parts in I will start on getting IPMI active.

Tip: do NOT use the dedicated IPMI lan connector (the one above the usb ports) but instead connect BOTH lan1 and lan2 to your router. Lan1 will function as IPMI connection, lan2 as 'network' connection.

That figures... i was not able to get a network connection with the lan plugged into port1, worked with port2 right away.. Apparently the lan1 is ipmi then ?

 

 

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Yep.

System is still performing great. At the moment the ambient temperature in the room is 35 degrees (yes we've got a heatwave in the Netherlands folks) and the cpu temp is at 36 degrees.

 

This is largely due to the fact that the cpu does not generate a lot of temp (I will test with running it without fan, only with the fans of the coolermaster cooler), and also because they files I use a lot are placed on an SSD, this means that my disks are largely spun down.

System is still performing great. At the moment the ambient temperature in the room is 35 degrees (yes we've got a heatwave in the Netherlands folks) and the cpu temp is at 36 degrees.

How do you read the cpu temp? I can only see 'system' temp in IPMI (41C) and cpu temp is stated as 'low'... and yes it's hot here in Rotterdam as well

I use Istat for that, it gives me the temperature per core ..

 

Basically its the output of the "sensors" command on console ..

As soon as I have all parts in I will start on getting IPMI active.

Tip: do NOT use the dedicated IPMI lan connector (the one above the usb ports) but instead connect BOTH lan1 and lan2 to your router. Lan1 will function as IPMI connection, lan2 as 'network' connection.

 

 

Why is that? I use the dedicated IPMI LAN all the time, without any problem.

I could not get it to work that way, as did others... the 3rd, dedicated port (the one above the usb ports) doesnt even work... there is only one way to get IPMI AND a network connection simultaniously and that is to use lan1 for IPMI and lan2 for network, so you need 2 wires... they cant even share a connection like on the X7SPA board. If i ONLY connect lan1, unraid does NOT get an ip address, you can only login using IPMI nothing more.

 

Maybe you changed some jumper or bios setting to enable the 3rd lan port?

No, I haven't changed anything. It worked right out of the box. Do you see any light on the back of the port?

Its built in now, i could try it later on. Just to be sure, you do have 2 cables connected, one to the dedicated, 3 rd ipmi port, and the other one, on what connector is that?

Behaviour with me was also: lan1 for ipmi, lan2 for lan. Lan on lan1 did not work, did not get an ip

Its built in now, i could try it later on. Just to be sure, you do have 2 cables connected, one to the dedicated, 3 rd ipmi port, and the other one, on what connector is that?

 

Yes, one to the one alone above the USB port, it is recognized by my router as IPMI console. The other shows in unraid as 1 GB port, it's one of the two close to each other. don't know if its LAN 1 or 2. Will see which one later, its too hot in Drenthe, Netherlands.

Behaviour with me was also: lan1 for ipmi, lan2 for lan. Lan on lan1 did not work, did not get an ip

 

 

So far i have experience with 3 X9SCM-F boards. When first starting up I only have one cable attached to the dedicated IPMI LAN port. I also have a unraid stick in the internal on-board USB port. I have a laptop with IPMIview installed and can start the board, run memtest and evt. boot unraid.

 

I just follow the fist steps here:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=14695.msg138464#msg138464

 

 

 

Nope. The 'dedicated' IPMI port does NOT function on my X9SCM-F. Only 1 green light at the connector, nothing more. Also the IPMI software can not discover the device. Rebooted once, and did a total powerdown- and up as wel.

Nope. The 'dedicated' IPMI port does NOT function on my X9SCM-F. Only 1 green light at the connector, nothing more. Also the IPMI software can not discover the device. Rebooted once, and did a total powerdown- and up as wel.

 

Seems to me your board is broken then or some weird BIOS-setting is spoiling things. You also live in the Netherlands? Just check with Supermicro support in NL. They have been very helpfull in the past.

Well... Helmonder has the same effect, and another person on the forum had the same problem as well. I dont think its broken, maybe some other firmware feature? I've read somewhere that you had to explicitly enable the dedicated port somehow, that it was disabled from factory, or that some linux versions couldn't handle the NIC controller that was used, since the dedicated port uses some other chipset or something like that.

 

Anyway, i dont see any gain or profit in using the dedicated IPMI port in stead of lan1, do you?