December 1, 201411 yr Good info, thanks Justin. So are you able to have a hdmi+audio, disks, usb passthrough and take advantage of the dual nics without trouble on this MB? My previous board was also an ASRock, and on that board I was able to use both NIC's with unRAID. I was using network bonding, and it worked. As I said before, I was having all kinds of weird issues, so i stopped using bonding (I don't think it ever really gave me any advantage, I was just using it because I could). But, because of that, I've not tried using the dual NIC's with the new board. However, I would be VERY surprised if they didn't work work just fine on this board also. Maybe I can enable the other NIC later today and test, just to confirm. I am passing HDMI & HD Audio (both from my video card) and several USB devices thru to a windows 8 VM with no problems; under KVM. I'm planning on trying to build a XEN based windows 8 VM this week, to see if I'm also able to pass thru my iGPU and HD Audio, so I can get rid of the video card. Someone has reported success, so I'm going to try to follow their path. I've not tried passing any specific disks thru to a windows VM, but I don't see any reason that wouldn't work also.
December 1, 201411 yr Author That's very positive news Justin, I will also be sticking with asrock instead of the gigabyte. Hopefully I can also help you with some trouble shooting down the road. Wouldn't disk pass through for make it easier to stream and work with the law Windows? I have a Radeon r9 280x that I plan to use in this MB so that I can try gaming as well.? Good info, thanks Justin. So are you able to have a hdmi+audio, disks, usb passthrough and take advantage of the dual nics without trouble on this MB? My previous board was also an ASRock, and on that board I was able to use both NIC's with unRAID. I was using network bonding, and it worked. As I said before, I was having all kinds of weird issues, so i stopped using bonding (I don't think it ever really gave me any advantage, I was just using it because I could). But, because of that, I've not tried using the dual NIC's with the new board. However, I would be VERY surprised if they didn't work work just fine on this board also. Maybe I can enable the other NIC later today and test, just to confirm. I am passing HDMI & HD Audio (both from my video card) and several USB devices thru to a windows 8 VM with no problems; under KVM. I'm planning on trying to build a XEN based windows 8 VM this week, to see if I'm also able to pass thru my iGPU and HD Audio, so I can get rid of the video card. Someone has reported success, so I'm going to try to follow their path. I've not tried passing any specific disks thru to a windows VM, but I don't see any reason that wouldn't work also.
December 1, 201411 yr Wouldn't disk pass through for make it easier to stream and work with the law Windows? I have a Radeon r9 280x that I plan to use in this MB so that I can try gaming as well.? I have my windows VM installed/running on an SSD I have mounted outside the array, using SNAP. Others have something similar, not using SNAP, but the SNAP plugin worked great for my needs, so I'll leave it this way. Installing the VM on an SSD outside the array seems to be running at/near bare metal speeds. I did a Windows Experience Test on the VM, and it scored as well as I would have hoped/expected if it were running on a native build. It recognized the SSD as an SSD also. I see no reason to run it any other way. I still need to figure out how to automatically backup the image on a regular basis, but for now, I'm just shutting it down, then copying the .qcow2 file to my array manually, in case anything crashes, or gets jacked up. As for streaming; I'm not sure what you mean specifically. However, as for streaming movies to other machines in the house, my setup works great. The windows VM has direct access to the server/array, so speeds are at/near native, and I can watch a movie on the VM, stream a movie on another machine directly from the server/array, and stream another movie from my media player installed in the windows VM all at the same time, and they all playback glitch free. I even started a parity check a few days ago while doing this, and they all continued to play just fine. So, I see no need/reason to pass thru any disks to a VM. It's working fine for me with simply accessing the array from inside the VM, just like I do with my laptop. I map all my computers to shares on the array, so they all see the same files with the same path i.e. m: maps to /mnt/user/Music on all my machines, and inside the VM. This way i can share my JRiver media library on any machine and they all see the same files the same way. Works great. I just did another test. With a parity check about 70% finished and still running... I played a 1080p movie with JRiver in the windows VM I played a different 1080p movie on my phone, streaming from the first instance of JRiver in the windows VM I played a different 1080p movie on my laptop from a different instance of JRiver, streaming from the array I played a different 1080p movie on my desktop from a different instance of JRiver, streaming from the array I played a different 1080p movie on another phone, streaming from the first instance of JRiver in the windows VM Everything but the first movie was streaming via wifi. The final phone played the movie fine, but did stutter a couple of times after I skipped forward a few minutes, to get into something other than credits. It might have been a wifi issue, might have been too much stress on the windows VM, as it was the 3rd 1080p movie streaming from JRiver in the VM. Movie was totally watchable, just stuttered a couple of times. I only let that movie play a couple of minutes. I suspect wifi as the problem, as it was in another room, thru a couple of walls. Anyway, that seems like a positive result to me.
December 1, 201411 yr Author Justin - That's great, good to see a fellow Jriver fan with the same setup as I have been intending to do. Just got the 240gb m500 ssd from Amazon this morning. Looks like you are going to hear a lot more from me as I am setting this up What speeds are you getting for the party checks? thanks again! Wouldn't disk pass through for make it easier to stream and work with the law Windows? I have a Radeon r9 280x that I plan to use in this MB so that I can try gaming as well.? I have my windows VM installed/running on an SSD I have mounted outside the array, using SNAP. Others have something similar, not using SNAP, but the SNAP plugin worked great for my needs, so I'll leave it this way. Installing the VM on an SSD outside the array seems to be running at/near bare metal speeds. I did a Windows Experience Test on the VM, and it scored as well as I would have hoped/expected if it were running on a native build. It recognized the SSD as an SSD also. I see no reason to run it any other way. I still need to figure out how to automatically backup the image on a regular basis, but for now, I'm just shutting it down, then copying the .qcow2 file to my array manually, in case anything crashes, or gets jacked up. As for streaming; I'm not sure what you mean specifically. However, as for streaming movies to other machines in the house, my setup works great. The windows VM has direct access to the server/array, so speeds are at/near native, and I can watch a movie on the VM, stream a movie on another machine directly from the server/array, and stream another movie from my media player installed in the windows VM all at the same time, and they all playback glitch free. I even started a parity check a few days ago while doing this, and they all continued to play just fine. So, I see no need/reason to pass thru any disks to a VM. It's working fine for me with simply accessing the array from inside the VM, just like I do with my laptop. I map all my computers to shares on the array, so they all see the same files with the same path i.e. m: maps to /mnt/user/Music on all my machines, and inside the VM. This way i can share my JRiver media library on any machine and they all see the same files the same way. Works great. I just did another test. With a parity check about 70% finished and still running... I played a 1080p movie with JRiver in the windows VM I played a different 1080p movie on my phone, streaming from the first instance of JRiver in the windows VM I played a different 1080p movie on my laptop from a different instance of JRiver, streaming from the array I played a different 1080p movie on my desktop from a different instance of JRiver, streaming from the array I played a different 1080p movie on another phone, streaming from the first instance of JRiver in the windows VM Everything but the first movie was streaming via wifi. The final phone played the movie fine, but did stutter a couple of times after I skipped forward a few minutes, to get into something other than credits. It might have been a wifi issue, might have been too much stress on the windows VM, as it was the 3rd 1080p movie streaming from JRiver in the VM. Movie was totally watchable, just stuttered a couple of times. I only let that movie play a couple of minutes. I suspect wifi as the problem, as it was in another room, thru a couple of walls. Anyway, that seems like a positive result to me.
December 1, 201411 yr Cross posting from another thread. Your might want to consider this card: Addonics AD4SA6GPX2 ( 6G 4-port SATA PCIe 2X controller), $55+$8 shipping at Addonics online store. It supports 4 drives in RAID configuration, or up to 7 drives with use of a 4-drives port multiplier. Marvell chipset (don't know the model). I've installed this card for experiments in my unRAID 6-beta2 server (Supermicro H8DME-2 mobo), configured 2-disks RAID-0 for cache drive - it worked right away. I've reconfigured it as 2-disks RAID-0 for parity drive - it's working, rebuilding parity right now. Next experiment will be to check if unRAID will see individual drives via this card, and eventually, a 4-disks RAID-0 for cache drive.
December 1, 201411 yr Justin - That's great, good to see a fellow Jriver fan with the same setup as I have been intending to do. Just got the 240gb m500 ssd from Amazon this morning. Looks like you are going to hear a lot more from me as I am setting this up What speeds are you getting for the party checks? Parity check finished earlier today, I got this... Last checked on Mon 01 Dec 2014 05:12:14 PM EST (today), finding 5 errors. ? Duration: 15 hours, 49 minutes, 41 seconds. Average speed: 70.2 MB/sec I don't know what the error are, but considering all the problems I've had for the last few months, and that I don't know when the last successful parity check was, I guess 5 errors isn't too bad 70 MB/sec seems better than I remember, but not much, if any really. I think it's about average. this is with a 4TB parity drive. Oh, and I've been using JRiver for at least a dozen years, maybe 15. I still haven't found anything even close to its' equal.
December 2, 201411 yr Author weebo - Seems like a tested card that would work for us when we need that extra slots, thanks for the pointer. As I am looking at how the bandwidth is allocated between different cards, do you think a M1015 with only 4 sata slots filled will have the same bandwidth available for the HDDs as this Addonics 4 port card when both of them are plugged in a pcie3 x2 slot? Cross posting from another thread. Your might want to consider this card: Addonics AD4SA6GPX2 ( 6G 4-port SATA PCIe 2X controller), $55+$8 shipping at Addonics online store. It supports 4 drives in RAID configuration, or up to 7 drives with use of a 4-drives port multiplier. Marvell chipset (don't know the model). I've installed this card for experiments in my unRAID 6-beta2 server (Supermicro H8DME-2 mobo), configured 2-disks RAID-0 for cache drive - it worked right away. I've reconfigured it as 2-disks RAID-0 for parity drive - it's working, rebuilding parity right now. Next experiment will be to check if unRAID will see individual drives via this card, and eventually, a 4-disks RAID-0 for cache drive.
December 2, 201411 yr Author That's eerily close to what I am getting for my parity checks on the current unraid setup. "Duration: 15 hours, 15 minutes, 57 seconds. Average speed: 72.8 MB/sec" On my array, I have used about 19.75T out of 30.5T available, 11+1 disks ranging from 1.5T to 4T. Justin - That's great, good to see a fellow Jriver fan with the same setup as I have been intending to do. Just got the 240gb m500 ssd from Amazon this morning. Looks like you are going to hear a lot more from me as I am setting this up What speeds are you getting for the party checks? Parity check finished earlier today, I got this... Last checked on Mon 01 Dec 2014 05:12:14 PM EST (today), finding 5 errors. ? Duration: 15 hours, 49 minutes, 41 seconds. Average speed: 70.2 MB/sec I don't know what the error are, but considering all the problems I've had for the last few months, and that I don't know when the last successful parity check was, I guess 5 errors isn't too bad 70 MB/sec seems better than I remember, but not much, if any really. I think it's about average. this is with a 4TB parity drive. Oh, and I've been using JRiver for at least a dozen years, maybe 15. I still haven't found anything even close to its' equal.
December 2, 201411 yr weebo - Seems like a tested card that would work for us when we need that extra slots, thanks for the pointer. As I am looking at how the bandwidth is allocated between different cards, do you think a M1015 with only 4 sata slots filled will have the same bandwidth available for the HDDs as this Addonics 4 port card when both of them are plugged in a pcie3 x2 slot? Cross posting from another thread. Your might want to consider this card: Addonics AD4SA6GPX2 ( 6G 4-port SATA PCIe 2X controller), $55+$8 shipping at Addonics online store. It supports 4 drives in RAID configuration, or up to 7 drives with use of a 4-drives port multiplier. Marvell chipset (don't know the model). I've installed this card for experiments in my unRAID 6-beta2 server (Supermicro H8DME-2 mobo), configured 2-disks RAID-0 for cache drive - it worked right away. I've reconfigured it as 2-disks RAID-0 for parity drive - it's working, rebuilding parity right now. Next experiment will be to check if unRAID will see individual drives via this card, and eventually, a 4-disks RAID-0 for cache drive. Yes, they will provide the same speed given the bottleneck of the x2 gen2 PCIe interface 6Gbps SATA III 4 Ports PCIe Gen2, 2-Lane Host Adapter Four SATA connectors Marvell 88SE9230 Compliant with 10Gbps x2 PCI Express 2.0 EDIT. Where the Addonics card can help with the bottneck is by combining the smaller drives into larger RAID 0 arrays. While you loose the spin down benefit, you can combine drives into 1 to the operating system. Then you are only communicating to one device while the controller offloads the rest. Also if you used the RAID card in RAID mode for your cache or parity drive, you would utilize those bays for the drives, yet keep bus communication within performance limits. In my particular case, I'm considering to RAID0 2 3TB drives for 6TB and purchase 6TB for the data drives. Since some of my data is outgrowing my organized spindle limits. (my own OCD there. ) I believe the M1015's can do RAID also.
December 2, 201411 yr Author Sorry for harping in this detail but can you help me understand this. If a 8 port m1015 requires pcie2 x8 slot to enable 6Gb/s for 8 HDD, on 1/4 of that slot bandwidth, i. e. a 2x slot we should be able to get only 3Gb/s for 4 HDD. How is this Adonis card or even the Syba 4 port card provide 6Gb/s for the 4 HDD as advertised? All of these are Gen2 cards, so they should be saturating the pcie2 x2 slot at 12Gb/s. weebo - Seems like a tested card that would work for us when we need that extra slots, thanks for the pointer. As I am looking at how the bandwidth is allocated between different cards, do you think a M1015 with only 4 sata slots filled will have the same bandwidth available for the HDDs as this Addonics 4 port card when both of them are plugged in a pcie3 x2 slot? Cross posting from another thread. Your might want to consider this card: Addonics AD4SA6GPX2 ( 6G 4-port SATA PCIe 2X controller), $55+$8 shipping at Addonics online store. It supports 4 drives in RAID configuration, or up to 7 drives with use of a 4-drives port multiplier. Marvell chipset (don't know the model). I've installed this card for experiments in my unRAID 6-beta2 server (Supermicro H8DME-2 mobo), configured 2-disks RAID-0 for cache drive - it worked right away. I've reconfigured it as 2-disks RAID-0 for parity drive - it's working, rebuilding parity right now. Next experiment will be to check if unRAID will see individual drives via this card, and eventually, a 4-disks RAID-0 for cache drive. Yes, they will provide the same speed given the bottleneck of the x2 gen2 PCIe interface 6Gbps SATA III 4 Ports PCIe Gen2, 2-Lane Host Adapter Four SATA connectors Marvell 88SE9230 Compliant with 10Gbps x2 PCI Express 2.0
December 2, 201411 yr Sorry for harping in this detail but can you help me understand this. If a 8 port m1015 requires pcie2 x8 slot to enable 6Gb/s for 8 HDD, on 1/4 of that slot bandwidth, i. e. a 2x slot we should be able to get only 3Gb/s for 4 HDD. How is this Adonis card or even the Syba 4 port card provide 6Gb/s for the 4 HDD as advertised? All of these are Gen2 cards, so they should be saturating the pcie2 x2 slot at 12Gb/s. The 6Gb/s for HDD is from the card to the drive. for each PCIe GEN 1 x1 slot, you can run a spinning HDD at close to max speed. With current technology that is 226MB/s with 6TB 7200 RPM drives. Average speeds are 90-190MB/s depending on spinning technology. SSD will max out about 200-220MB/s. PCIe GEN 2 X1 slot is double that, so 2 HDD's at top speed at the same time. With a PCIe GEN 2 x2 slot I was able to get 450MB/s to an SSD. No matter how you slice it, a GEN 2 card in a x2 slot is going to only deliver 500MB/s x 2 = 1,000MB/s. That's enough for 4 spinning drives since the technology puts them around 225MB/s if they were to all communicate at exactly the same time. With SSD, that's about 1 if it were to achieve the max, but that's not normal, so you would get 2 at near full speed. The 3Gb/s, 6Gb/s comes into play from the controller to the drive. There's a disparity from PCIe x rating and the SATA speed rating. http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8142/~/difference-between-sata-i,-sata-ii-and-sata-iii PCIe x2 GEN2 = 1000MB/s SATA III = 6Gb(its)/s = 600MB/s (but you never get that speed on spinners, a high speed SSD is usually around 450~550MB/s) There is communication protocol overhead for SATA. The fastest spinner I've measured so far are the Hitachi 6TB 7200 RPM drives at 225MB/s on the outer tracks. The 3TB Seagate 7200 RPM drives rate around 190MB/s on the outer tracks. Other average drives are from 90MB/s to 160MB/s depending on model. It's my understanding that the Serial ATA protocol is done by the controller and may have more bits per message then the CPU to controller interface which would be in blocks of a different protocol. Where the raid controller could come in handy for this is by using multiple drives per device, One block is sent to the controller and PCIe x2 speed, and the controller buffers and re-arranges those requests to go go the individual drives. Also, if you put the slowest and smallest drives on the x2 controller, It will hold back the parity check until they are no longer used, but once they are passed, parity check speed will increase. Since they are slow/small, might as well arrange them on a controller that has the limits since the drive technology itself could not saturate the board anyway.
December 7, 201411 yr Author Weebo - That helped, thank you. I still have more questions but will reserve them for another day. Meanwhile, I am reading up on pci architectures, seems quite interesting and heavily industry influenced. Sorry for harping in this detail but can you help me understand this. If a 8 port m1015 requires pcie2 x8 slot to enable 6Gb/s for 8 HDD, on 1/4 of that slot bandwidth, i. e. a 2x slot we should be able to get only 3Gb/s for 4 HDD. How is this Adonis card or even the Syba 4 port card provide 6Gb/s for the 4 HDD as advertised? All of these are Gen2 cards, so they should be saturating the pcie2 x2 slot at 12Gb/s. The 6Gb/s for HDD is from the card to the drive. for each PCIe GEN 1 x1 slot, you can run a spinning HDD at close to max speed. With current technology that is 226MB/s with 6TB 7200 RPM drives. Average speeds are 90-190MB/s depending on spinning technology. SSD will max out about 200-220MB/s. PCIe GEN 2 X1 slot is double that, so 2 HDD's at top speed at the same time. With a PCIe GEN 2 x2 slot I was able to get 450MB/s to an SSD. No matter how you slice it, a GEN 2 card in a x2 slot is going to only deliver 500MB/s x 2 = 1,000MB/s. That's enough for 4 spinning drives since the technology puts them around 225MB/s if they were to all communicate at exactly the same time. With SSD, that's about 1 if it were to achieve the max, but that's not normal, so you would get 2 at near full speed. The 3Gb/s, 6Gb/s comes into play from the controller to the drive. There's a disparity from PCIe x rating and the SATA speed rating. http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8142/~/difference-between-sata-i,-sata-ii-and-sata-iii PCIe x2 GEN2 = 1000MB/s SATA III = 6Gb(its)/s = 600MB/s (but you never get that speed on spinners, a high speed SSD is usually around 450~550MB/s) There is communication protocol overhead for SATA. The fastest spinner I've measured so far are the Hitachi 6TB 7200 RPM drives at 225MB/s on the outer tracks. The 3TB Seagate 7200 RPM drives rate around 190MB/s on the outer tracks. Other average drives are from 90MB/s to 160MB/s depending on model. It's my understanding that the Serial ATA protocol is done by the controller and may have more bits per message then the CPU to controller interface which would be in blocks of a different protocol. Where the raid controller could come in handy for this is by using multiple drives per device, One block is sent to the controller and PCIe x2 speed, and the controller buffers and re-arranges those requests to go go the individual drives. Also, if you put the slowest and smallest drives on the x2 controller, It will hold back the parity check until they are no longer used, but once they are passed, parity check speed will increase. Since they are slow/small, might as well arrange them on a controller that has the limits since the drive technology itself could not saturate the board anyway.
December 8, 201411 yr gah want speed get 8 good ssd's in raid 0 on a nice card, for streaming movies do you really need more then 20mb's? get unraid lol and flog every lane till its death gahaha. Really dont get you first question op? running sas 300's in my gaming rig raid 0 15ks woot, there not drives your ever going to use in unraid due to the dam size and cost. Are you running bare metal esxi or running unraid through kvm?
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