New Atom Asrock ITX Board


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I just found a shop close to me that sells this board quite cheap, but I would really like to know if this supports standby / s3. probably not, but some ASRock Xeon boards do, so it's worth a shot. The Supermicro never support S3.

 

Can you check using 'cat /sys/power/state' what the output is?

 

my output from the above command is:

NAS> cat /sys/power/state
disk
NAS>

 

I hope that helps. FYI, I am not running unraid ATM I am currently running xpenology on this machine.

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So in theory if he was able to decode multiple 1080p Streams with the 8 Core Avoton, the 4 Core Unit should be fine with one stream?

 

As dirtysanchez noted above, Yes, it should easily handle a couple of 1080p streams.  It's running at the same clock speed, so it's reasonable to assume it'll have half the CPU "horsepower" as the 8-core version.    You'll also use less power (14w TDP vs. 20w for the 8-core version)

 

 

I'm planning on getting my hands on this Supermicro Board: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SAi-2550F.cfm

 

Certainly a very nice board.  Has a couple of nice features that the AsRock board doesn't => an internal Type-A USB port (so you can plug your flash drive in internally without the need for a short header-to-Type-A cable);  and USB v3

 

 

I don't really trust ASRock yet when it comes to Server parts, whereas Supermicro already has made a name for themselves. This one only got 6 SATA Ports but that's fine since I'm not planning to buy the Pro Version of unRaid anyway.

 

Based on the various reviews on this board, I don't think there's anything to be concerned about.  It's an excellent board -- IPMI, 12 SATA ports, ECC memory, Intel NICs, etc.    And roughly twice the power of the Supermicro board.  The only significant feature it doesn't have relative to the SuperMicro board is USB3 ... and for UnRAID use that's irrelevant.   

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Thanks for the reply. It's a tough choice between the ASRock and the Supermicro. I don't really plan to have more than 7 drives ever, so I do not need all the SATA from the ASRock. As for the 8 Core Version - currently I'm used to having my NAS in S3 Sleep until I need it, that's like 22h a day. When I have it running 24x7 in the future even 20W is much for me. So the 15W for the 4 Core is a little less and asides from transcoding with Plex or Air Video I do not need the processing power I think.

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I agree -- it's a tough choice.  Supermicro certainly has a better reputation in the server motherboard arena;  but AsRock has come a long way in the last few years ... they're no longer the "cheapie version of Asus", since they were sold and are pushing hard to have a quality brand name.    I haven't built any AsRock systems, but have certainly looked at them, and wouldn't have any problem using one of their boards these days.

 

Between the two, I like the Intel NICs on the AsRock, and of course the 12 SATA ports => but those extra 6 SATA ports are also going to draw power (whether or not they're active) ... so the Supermicro board will clearly draw less power, especially if you use the 4-core version.

 

If you're confident you don't need more than 6 ports, I'd go with the Supermicro.    Note that to get a 7th port, you'll need an add-in card, which will likely draw as much power as the extra SATA controller on the AsRock.

 

... as you said:  tough choice  8)

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Noticed that the Supermicro boards use Marvell NICs vs. the Intel NICs on the AsRock.

 

Probably not an issue, but something to be aware of.

 

Not quite true - the Marvel chips on the Supermicro board are phy chips, but the important part of the NIC that the OS drivers mostly talk to is on the main chip in the form of the i354 NIC.  Allegedly, Asrock chose to go with off-chip i210 NICs due to its wider adoption.  So, Intel in both cases, just different. 

 

Some further info here... http://www.servethehome.com/Server-detail/asrock-c2750d4i-atom-c2750-storage-platform-review/

 

If I had to choose, I'd go with Asrock - the standard sized DIMMs help, along with the additional SATA ports.

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Thanks for the reply. It's a tough choice between the ASRock and the Supermicro. I don't really plan to have more than 7 drives ever

 

;D famous last words often said in this forum.  I was a committed 5 drive user until, well, until i succumbed to the fever.

 

Definitely true.  No matter how much you THINK is enough ... you'll soon find that you need more !!

When I bought my first hard drive (~1981) for the bargain price of $4500 (a 10% discount), I thought the 26MB of storage was amazing  :)

 

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I know :) I remember my first 100 MB drive. It was like: "I will never have so many floppy disks to fill this".

 

I'm used to Raid, as such expanding was not always possible. So by the time my storage becomes full I have to do a full upgrade and by then we will have drives with double the capacity.

 

Still it's better to have the SATA already available. So I'm leaning towards the ASRock Board. The review also said that the additional SATA controllers use very little power: " Both controllers use about 1w of power each so they are a very energy efficient way to add additional storage ports to a system." http://www.servethehome.com/Server-detail/asrock-c2750d4i-atom-c2750-storage-platform-review/

 

An additional PCIe card in the Supermicro would likely use more power. And it got 4 Gigabit NICs which I don't need.

 

The only thing that still worries me a little is the power consumption due to it being online for 24x7 when I don't need it to run all the time. I was thinking about adding a cronjob to shut it down during the night. unRaid should have no problems which a clean shutdown -h command, should it?

Serverboards tend to take a lot of time to boot up, and I read that the ASRock takes up to 40 seconds until VGA post screen comes up due to memory checking (can't find the link right now) so having it just woken up by WoL is probably not an option.

 

Can you check if the board supports wake by RTC? See here: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup

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The only thing that still worries me a little is the power consumption due to it being online for 24x7 when I don't need it to run all the time.

 

Conceptually it'd be nice if the board could "sleep" when not needed ... but with these low-power boards it's really not much of an issue.  My SuperMicro D525 board draws ~ 20 watts when the drives are spun down.  20w x 24hrs x 365 days = 175kwh/year.  At the average US power rate of $0.12/kwh that's $21/year.  Not exactly a number that bothers me.  The Asrock board with 12 SATA ports and the 8-port CPU would probably draw a bit more than that -- but even if it's 50% higher (30w) that'd only be a bit over $30/yr to run 24/7.    If it supports sleep, that's nice -- but I doubt the cost if it doesn't will be something you'd actually notice.    Obviously that cost would be higher if you happen to live somewhere where the power cost is appreciably higher.

 

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Since both the AsRock and the SuperMicro boards support IPMI, there's a very simple workaround if the system won't support S3 ==> you can simply shut down UnRAID when you're done with it for the day, and turn it on via IPMI when you need it  :)

 

... you could simply make a shortcut on your desktop to turn on the server by double-clicking an icon that sends an IPMI turn-on command to the server.    You could, of course, do the same thing via wake-on-LAN.

 

 

 

 

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That's not the problem. I have written Nagios checks and scripts that use ipmitool to monitor servers and in case of fire or power outage shutdown all specific servers to preserve data for example.

 

My use case is usually this: Family member is using Logitech Harmony to turn on the TV and the XBMC HTPC which then sends a WoL Magic Paket to turn on the NAS in the room next door. Since the NAS is in S3 it takes roughly 3-5 seconds for the NFS shares to be available - even the TV takes longer to come up. When they are finished they just hit the power off button on the remote and the TV and HTPC power off as well as the NAS after a period of inactivity.

 

So even my son and girlfriend can use the system without knowing anything about it. It's foolproof. But if the server is not on standby it takes...I dunno...maybe about a minute until the NFS shares are available. By that time they hit some button on the remote and will get an error message from XBMC, maybe even have to restart the HTPC. I always like to keep it simple and stupid :)

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Yes, S3 is clearly far preferable for that scenario.

 

Hopefully one of these boards will support it.  But if not, a Haswell motherboard and low-power i3 would also be very power-efficient, and they definitely support S3.  Might be a better choice for a new UnRAID server.    Wouldn't be quite as low-power as the Atoms, but since you have it set to sleep over 90% of the time anyway, the difference would be very nominal.

 

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Due to stability and durability concerns I would have rather had server hardware than desktop hardware.

 

Anyway, I emailed ASRock because one of their Xeon Chipset Boards (the E3C226D2I - also ITX and 6 SATA afaik) stated in the manual that it got S3 support, but a reviewer on newegg wrote that it does not support S3. So I got a lengthy answer after just one day (very good support I must say) complete with screenshots stating that the E3C226D2I really supports S3 but the option was removed from the BIOS upon release. There are currently no plans to add it in again but the technical support could send me the engineering BIOS to enable S3 support.

 

I also inquired about the Avoton Board we are discussing here now, unfortunately there are again no plans to add S3.

 

For the board model C2550D4I, we currently don’t have any newer information to suggest if the S3 option would return to the BIOS update.

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It's unfortunate that they don't support S3 => I agree completely that it's better to use server-class hardware with ECC memory.

 

But for the use case you described I'd be tempted to simply use a good Haswell system to get S3 support.  [Or write a script for the HTPC that adds a 60-second delay with a "Please Wait" message before invoking XBMC  :) ... then the NAS would be ready]

 

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  • 1 year later...

Have the ASrock 4- and 8-core Atoms matured?  Last I remember the DS380/Atom thread, guys were having major problems.  I find myself in a situation where i need 9 drive and an Intel NIC, either Intel onboard and additional drives via PCIe, or everything on board, or 9+ SATA ports on board and an Intel NIC via PCIe.... must be mini ITX and not be prone to all the issues the early adopters of those ASrocks were reporting....

 

 

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Have the ASrock 4- and 8-core Atoms matured?  Last I remember the DS380/Atom thread, guys were having major problems.  I find myself in a situation where i need 9 drive and an Intel NIC, either Intel onboard and additional drives via PCIe, or everything on board, or 9+ SATA ports on board and an Intel NIC via PCIe.... must be mini ITX and not be prone to all the issues the early adopters of those ASrocks were reporting....

 

Re-Check the thread.

 

https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31967.msg365908#msg365908

 

I have just completed my C2550D4I build for my backup server:

 

ASRock C2550D4I Mini ITX Motherboard

Kingston 4GB (1x4GB), PC-12800 (1600MHz) ECC Unbuffered DDR3L, ValueRAM, CL11, 1.35V, Single Stick

Silverstone ST45SF-G 450W SFX Form Factor Power Supply - ST45SF-G

3 x Seagate 8TB Archive HDD, SATA III, 5900RPM, 128MB (in top 3 bays)

 

I am currently filling the 2 8TB data drives (3 in there because 1 is Parity) I have put in it and am having no issues at all. Board came with latest firmware on everything. BMI interface is awesome and the board is a great partner to the DS380 case which with a little air flow management (which I refer to in the thread) is a great case.

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Have the ASrock 4- and 8-core Atoms matured?  Last I remember the DS380/Atom thread, guys were having major problems.  I find myself in a situation where i need 9 drive and an Intel NIC, either Intel onboard and additional drives via PCIe, or everything on board, or 9+ SATA ports on board and an Intel NIC via PCIe.... must be mini ITX and not be prone to all the issues the early adopters of those ASrocks were reporting....

As long as you update the bios and bmc to the latest. AND run unRAID 6. And there's a firmware update for the Marvell controller which I haven't done. Mainly cause I don't have any problems.

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  • 10 months later...

Good morning guys,

 

I have this board now and eveyrthing looks great until I started to setup Windows VM. I need a W7 machine for just one reason that works only with Windows 7. But until now I could not install it. I have always errors during setup: Windows cannot install required files, Error COde 0x80070570

 

Bios is new, change memory execution to disabled, cretaed array with & without cache. nothing gives me positive shot.

 

Has somebody VM with Windows (7) running on this board?

 

Rgds

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Good morning guys,

 

I have this board now and eveyrthing looks great until I started to setup Windows VM. I need a W7 machine for just one reason that works only with Windows 7. But until now I could not install it. I have always errors during setup: Windows cannot install required files, Error COde 0x80070570

 

Bios is new, change memory execution to disabled, cretaed array with & without cache. nothing gives me positive shot.

 

Has somebody VM with Windows (7) running on this board?

 

Rgds

 

Have you tried limiting the allocated CPU cores for the VM to just 1 core to get it installed. Post installation increase the cores back to what you have now?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Now I run on 6.20 beta but still same. Even with Windows 10 it is all not working. Also not with different virtIO iso files and different cpu / mem settings.

 

Is there maybe sth which is disturbing unraid from bios settings? Can´t be that a simple vm task is not working on this board. :(

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  • 2 weeks later...

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