Silverstone DS380 / ASRock C2550D4I Build


Recommended Posts

Haha, yeah I hear you... all the stories of problems with this board make me super nervous... but this is going to be a pretty basic setup - just downloading and streaming over plex... as long as she stays on 24/7 I'm happy.

 

More news to come as I get more time with it this week.

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...
  • Replies 122
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Hi Everyone,

 

I've been up and running for a week or so now, so I thought I'd share some of my feedback.

 

1)  Really... clear CMOS - I'm such a noob lol - but ok, now that we're up and running.

2)  I have the server in a Fractal Design Arc XL (as size is not a concern) with 4 - 3Tb WD drives in Raidz, there are 3 140mm Fractal fans that were included w/ the case and 2 120mm Noctua's that I added.  The fans are all on direct power to the PSU (more on that later) and I have low-noise adapters wired in so you can't hear her one bit even with nothing else on in the room.  Dead silent.

3)  IPMI for this type of application is AWESOME.  The only things that have ever been plugged into the machine are a power cord and a cat5... it's a huge advantage of the board.

4)  I have FreeNAS set up running Transmission and Plex - everything is streaming around the house wonderfully.  Torrenting on this machine is awesome as I don't have to leave the big rig powered on.

5)  I had some event logs - the fans plugged into the onboard headers would slow enough to trigger an alert, then the CPU temps would overheat triggering an alert there (the fact that this information is all so accessible is amazing - I never would have known otherwise)...  Not sure what the problem with the headers was - but in any case everything is wired directly to the PSU (again with low-noise adapters) and everything is silent.  Since that changeover - I've been running 24/7 for a couple days downloading torrents and streaming via Plex - 0 problems, 0 event logs.

 

Anyways - just thought I'd put some positive comments out there... the board is sweet and I'd do it all over again, no question.

 

Again, thanks to everyone for your help getting me up and running.

 

John

Link to comment

Sounds good. Haha that's a big ass case for an itx.  Are the fans 4 or 3 pin? Only 4 pin pwm fans are controllable with this board.

 

Yeah - it's a little silly when you look at it - I'll try to post some pictures...  The fractal fans are 3 pin, the noctua fans are 4... but the noctua fans were failing as well, so not sure what exactly was going on there - but a buddy has a spare fan controller that I'm going to steal so I can ramp them all up just to the point of being able to hear them - then roll them back.

Link to comment
  • 3 months later...

Any updates on this board ?  have subsequent revisions or firmware updates addressed the SATA issues ?

 

I'm looking at pairing this board with the Fractal Node 804

Well, I'm still using it. Don't know about anyone else.  For me the sata issues were solved by cables. However there have been several kernel updates now since then with some driver updates for marvell chipsets.  I haven't had a sata problem since feb. Until a little over a month maybe two ago I was running unraid 6b6/xen. Everything had been rock solid.

 

I then switch to plain unraid and kvm and played with dockers. Everything was fine till a few weeks ago dockers froze the server. I then moved to vm only and would get freezes after being up a few days. Given the random errors I could see in the console I gathered it was memory related.  I didn't do any testing since I wanted ECC memory anyway.  So I bought 16GB ( 2x8 ) Crucial ECC memory on the asrock list.  I flashed the new bios and bmc and then upgraded to unraid 6b7. I've only been up for 3 days now but without any issues.

 

Truthfully I don't regret buying this board but I might have gone with one of the asrock e3c224d4i-14s, e3c224d2i or the e3c226d2i and a xeon 1230 v2 for just a little more money and vt-d support instead of vt-x only.

 

Link to comment

Thanks for the update.  I'll be interested to see if the ECC and new bios stays stable.

 

I've looked at the xeon boards but I'm after something relatively low power.  Doubt I will use VM as everything I need seems addressed by Dockers

I'll let you know how it goes.  It's hard to beat 30-35 watts that I usually see under mild usage.  I just looked and it says 25.5 watts.  Everything is spun down but 1 drive. I was liking dockers.  Maybe I had too many running but it started freezing up. I was also testing a lot. I also had some problems with some dockers not shutting down and not being able to stop the array.  I didn't test a whole lot just moved everything back to a vm.

 

I'm betting it was just memory.  The only other time I had freeze up problems was trying to pin cores in xen and in the vms.  This board didn't like that, unlike others who had to pin cores so it didn't starve out unraid and crash.  It was otherwise stable from Feb to July.

Link to comment

Thanks for the update.  I'll be interested to see if the ECC and new bios stays stable.

 

I've looked at the xeon boards but I'm after something relatively low power.  Doubt I will use VM as everything I need seems addressed by Dockers

So far I've been running 6b7 for the past week with no problems.

 

The only thing that still bugs me about this case is even with fan filter off I have to manually set the noctua fans to about 600-700 rpms otherwise they will run at 400 and the drives will be 40ish under normal usage. So during parity check they would get towards 50C.

 

It would be nice if sensors displayed a valid fan rpm instead of 0 for this board and they could be controlled based on hard drive temps

Link to comment

Nice to hear the board has been reasonably stable ("... from Feb to July ...").  Hopefully that means that the BIOS updates are resolving all of the issues.    The Avoton-based systems certainly SEEM like a nearly perfect platform for UnRAID ... very low power with excellent performance.    Didn't start off so well for the early adopters, but sounds like they're now ready for prime time.

 

The case fans are another story -- sounds like the DS380 doesn't quite match a Q25B in terms of ventilation ... but it's still a very nice case, and it's not that big a deal to adjust the fan speeds -- are you using a manual controller so you can "set and forget" ?

 

Link to comment

Nice to hear the board has been reasonably stable ("... from Feb to July ...").  Hopefully that means that the BIOS updates are resolving all of the issues.    The Avoton-based systems certainly SEEM like a nearly perfect platform for UnRAID ... very low power with excellent performance.    Didn't start off so well for the early adopters, but sounds like they're now ready for prime time.

 

The case fans are another story -- sounds like the DS380 doesn't quite match a Q25B in terms of ventilation ... but it's still a very nice case, and it's not that big a deal to adjust the fan speeds -- are you using a manual controller so you can "set and forget" ?

 

As far as bio updates they have helped (original bios definitely had trouble) but I think it's more kernel/driver updates in unraid especially with the marvell controllers. I don't think this board is even usable in v5.

 

It is very low power.  Esp. since I removed 4 ddr3 and I updated to 2x8GB ECC also have 1 nic disabled. Right now all drives are spun down except 2 ssd's and a 2.5 500GB, I'm watching tv from mythbuntu mythtv backend vm, I have a Ubuntu app vm but it's not downloading anything and it's using 25.5 watts.

 

I'm just using the bios to set the fan levels.  You can set them all individually from smart to 1-9 to full on. I think I have them at 4.  With the fan filter on I was running them at about 1000-1100 rpms.  Just seemed loud and a waste of energy.

 

Link to comment
  • 5 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...
  • 2 months later...

Any updates on C2550D4I/C2750D4I boards? How many dockers can run on C2750D4I?

Little late but I only ran dockers for a bit to test.  I was only running about 8.  However this board should run more than must given the fact that it has 8 true cores. I run 2 vm's all the time with 2 vpus each.

...an indication of how many simultaneous 1080p transcoding streams it can handle would be nice too ;)

 

I've read 1 to 4 from different sources, so that doesn't help much.

I don't use plex but it has 8 cores, so it can definitely handle a couple If not a few.

Link to comment

I'm curious to know if there are any updates also.

 

This would work well for an unRAID that doesn't require much power.  I use mine in conjunction with an HTPC that does all the processing anyway so the unRAID is only used to store media.

Has anyone tried to mod the DS380 to fit 2 x Silverstone FF123B 120mm Ultra Fine Fan Filter on the other side panel for increased air flow?

Nothing new for me.  Been running for over a year.  Last problem I had was last summer.  I found the memory I was using was unstable for this motherboard. Bought 2 8GB ECC and all is well.

Link to comment

I'm curious to know if there are any updates also.

 

This would work well for an unRAID that doesn't require much power.  I use mine in conjunction with an HTPC that does all the processing anyway so the unRAID is only used to store media.

Has anyone tried to mod the DS380 to fit 2 x Silverstone FF123B 120mm Ultra Fine Fan Filter on the other side panel for increased air flow?

Nothing new for me.  Been running for over a year.  Last problem I had was last summer.  I found the memory I was using was unstable for this motherboard. Bought 2 8GB ECC and all is well.

 

@dmacias do you have your disks connected to each of the controllers on the board? My thought is here - are you going to upgrade in the future and plug into a SATA port on one of the Marvell controllers not in use and then have an issue?

Link to comment

There is a firmware update for the Marvell 9230 to disable the Raid function. According to ASRock this should make the 9230 “more stable”. I am using the C2750D4I in my Backup server but the current setup where I use the 9230 ports has only been running for a few weeks, so far without problems. Initially I used the board in my main server with the old BIOS (2.50) and without firmware update for the 9230 and that was, to put it mildly, painful!

 

Note that this is for the C2750D4I and I am not sure if this is applicable for the C2550D4I board as well.

 

Link to comment

I'm curious to know if there are any updates also.

 

This would work well for an unRAID that doesn't require much power.  I use mine in conjunction with an HTPC that does all the processing anyway so the unRAID is only used to store media.

Has anyone tried to mod the DS380 to fit 2 x Silverstone FF123B 120mm Ultra Fine Fan Filter on the other side panel for increased air flow?

Nothing new for me.  Been running for over a year.  Last problem I had was last summer.  I found the memory I was using was unstable for this motherboard. Bought 2 8GB ECC and all is well.

 

@dmacias do you have your disks connected to each of the controllers on the board? My thought is here - are you going to upgrade in the future and plug into a SATA port on one of the Marvell controllers not in use and then have an issue?

 

I have 9 drives in the system. I know at least one is connect to the 9230 and 2 ssd's for cache and vm's are on the other marvell controller. I haven't had any drive issues for almost a year.  I believe the issues were solved by firmware updates and more so kernel upgrades in unRAID 6 betas. Some of the kernel updates specifically addressed marvell driver issues.

 

There is a firmware update for the Marvell 9230 to disable the Raid function. According to ASRock this should make the 9230 “more stable”. I am using the C2750D4I in my Backup server but the current setup where I use the 9230 ports has only been running for a few weeks, so far without problems. Initially I used the board in my main server with the old BIOS (2.50) and without firmware update for the 9230 and that was, to put it mildly, painful!

 

Note that this is for the C2750D4I and I am not sure if this is applicable for the C2550D4I board as well.

 

I'll check that out.

 

Link to comment
  • 7 months later...

I have been using an asrock 2550 now since December 2014.  Can I ask what speeds people are typically getting from an ssd on this board.  For some reason I am only getting 380mb/s out of an Samsung Evo 850 256gb drive.

 

That seems slow to me, any one else having similar issues?

 

Thanks

 

Paul

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.