ASRock M3A785GXH/128M --- haven't seen anything on search, any experiences?

[osli]

Looking to build the cheapest and lowest power consumption unraid box that can easily expand to an eventual 20+ drives.  The drive requirment seems to knock out a lot of the cheap and low power options like atom platforms etc. especially if price is figured (the supermicro atom is better but not cheap!).

 

So after a lot of reading and searching I'm thinking about a combo containing:

ASRock M3A785GXH/128M

Sempron 140 (.45nm, 45W TDP)

Kingston HyperX 2 x 1GB PC1600 DDR3

 

With some undervolting and underclocking options that seems about good as I can do on the processor front aside from atom, which seems to be out of the running.  Mobo has 6 onboard SATA and 3 PCIe slots (x16, x8, x4) so I think future expandability is decent.  Onboard video (Ati 4200) which I could do without, but read reports that least the onboard and PCIe x16 could work simultaneously.  I could disable and use and old PCI card if needed, and may consume less power anyway?

 

Total prices from a place like newegg is in the $165 range.  I have a nice server cube case with lots of power and room for at least 12 internal HDD's with good cooling, maybe more if no floppy or optical.  So good for now there.  I'll need a new PSU, probably something like the single ~45A rail Corsair 80+ or similar.

 

Any thoughts?  A search here didn't turn up any hits that I could find.  Anyone used it or know of any specific problems?  I'm trying to dig deeper into the specifics of which chipsets and such might work better or less well with unraid, SATA controller cards, etc. but this one from what I can tell shouldn't have any problems.

[bcbgboy13]

The memory you picked is not a standard one - it requires higher voltage 1.7V to 1.9V in order to operate at the posted specs.

 

Why not this one - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134788

 

 

[osli]

Ah, good catch, didn't look at the voltage.  Memory isn't that important... well, it's important, but at this point I'm looking for any advice/knowledge on mobo/cpu combination and will fit appropriate memory when the time comes to pull the trigger.  But thanks for pointing that out as I might have never noticed!

 

I've read dozens upon dozens of threads here and elsewhere on what mobo/platform to use.  Since I've pretty much settled on an unraid and unraid only box for file serving, I would think cpu power would be minimal.  I want low power consumption, but it just doesn't look like there are any good atom, nano etc. options for supporting 20+ HDD's of eventual expansion.  And I don't want to break the bank, thus looking for expandability in a platform that is low cost, and reasonably low power consumption.

[prostuff1]

One of the lowest power consumption setups you can get is an i3 based one.  The CPU power available is nice to have if/when you ever need it but the power consumption is minimal when not needed.

[osli]

I've been looking that route as well... the popular x8sil (or whatever the alphabet soup is on that one!) with processor is about 3x the price of the Asrock/Sempron combo.

 

Any suggestions on a cheap alternative that can easily accommodate 20+ drives?

[osli]

Best I can find for an i3 system will be $100 more and sacrifice a PCIe slot with otherwise similar features.  It's likely that the ASRock AMD board I'm considering will lose a PCIe slot if onboard video is enabled.  I guess with a few PCI cards lying around I don't mind... displaying text isn't too hard.

 

I guess I really need to research the power consumption of these two options, and decide how far $100 will go.  Plus 22 drives max vs. 30 drives max might eventually make a difference in future unraid versions, and with around 100TB of data to transfer, that could become important.  I suppose it isn't 22 max... 16 port cards or expanders are always an option!  I'm just trying to be reasonable about the cost.  And don't expanders remove the single drive spin up/down ability?

[bcbgboy13]

You cannot beat an AMD system on cost alone but you can come very close - you just need to know how to search and to pay attention to the deals:

 

Aug.24 - http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7555.0

It is still available for $65 

Works well but it has not been tested with the SM card yet - if you decide to go this route make sure you have the "Spread spectrum" enabled.

 

Aug.6 - http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7323.0

 

Jul.2 - http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6871.0

 

Fry's and Microcenter frequently run promotions and you can score a nice and cheap board and/or CPU. Then there are the "Open box" deals at Newegg - for example this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138281R

 

Apart from the i3-530 there is the less known and cheaper G6950. There are even talks for "Celeron G1101" but these are now found at the retail for now.

[osli]

From searching, it looks like all H55 boards are limited to 2 PCIe x16 slots.  Not sure that is a deal breaker, but I like the idea of having 3 for any future growth of the unraid server drive capability.  I'm still a ways off from pulling the trigger so I'll keep my eye open for deals available between now and then.

 

After some reading, it seems the Sempron 140 is very close in power consumption to the i3 530.  The Sempron has about the fastest single core available, which should work perfectly for unraid.  System power consumption measurements are all over the board, from just over 30W idle to over 70W idle.  I think this is due to peripherals (gfx cards etc.), HDDs in the system, onboard features (LAN vs none, onboard video, audio chipsets, number of memory slots, expansion slots, ports, etc.) and whether cool n quiet is enabled in the OS in test system.  Hard to compare directly really.  Best "comparable setup" review I can find suggests that Sempron on 785 is very close to i530 on P55 at idle and max isn't too different.

 

So it comes down mostly to price and expandability. 

 

Does anyone know if unraid currently supports cool n quiet for AMD processors?  I was under the impression that this depended on the OS as well as mobo/bios.  Is that true?

[BRiT]

From searching, it looks like all H55 boards are limited to 2 PCIe x16 slots.  Not sure that is a deal breaker, but I like the idea of having 3 for any future growth of the unraid server drive capability.

 

Really? Really now? Would you really be running more than 24 SATA drives in 1 case? (6 onboard + 8 PCI-Express 16x #1 + 8 PCI-Express 16x #2 + 2 PCI-Express 1x)

[osli]

If unraid supports it down the road, then quite possibly yes.  I see the need to house large media collection.

[GK20]

If unraid supports it down the road, then quite possibly yes.  I see the need to house large media collection.

 

Before that i think the main issue is how do you find a computer case to host 24 disks?

Most of case out there in the market can host up to 20 disks.

[mcs]

Before that i think the main issue is how do you find a computer case to host 24 disks?

 

NORCO RPC-4224 4U Rackmount Server Case with 24 Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS Drive Bays 

[BRiT]

Right, and the H55 supports 24 disks easily so it's a good fit.

 

The question was finding a case to hold more than 24, which seems to be more difficult. You're typically looking at dual PSUs and 9U form factors, costing significantly more than the consumer range of components.

[Spritzup]

Excuse my n00bness, but haven't people simply connect 2 cases together (ie - 2 CM 590's)?

[osli]

Point taken.  There are of course several choices up to 50 drivs and a few beyond, but they do become expensive.  You can get a 36 drive 4U enclosure but I do not know the price.  2 Norco cases is always an option for a homebrew application but then it begs the question why not just have 2 separate unraid boxes, other than for power consumption issues?  Parity rebuilding would certainly be faster.

 

OK, so I'll remain sensible and consider anything that gives easy 24 drive expandability (by easy that means I'd like to avoide 16 port SATA cards or SATA port multipliers).

 

So now the bottom line becomes price and power consumption.  I'll keep my eye out for cheap H55/i3 combos.  Too bad the Fusion line isn't quite here yet... possibly by the time I'm ready to buy?  Not sure when the product launch is planned.

 

An aside... I know ATI drivers have never really played nice with linux.  I assume from the number of people using AMD boards with integrated ATI graphics that unraid at least supports the necessary driver for simple 2D and text rendering/display?

 

Back to my deal hunting for now...

[BRiT]

AMD/ATI drivers do play nice with Linux. They even have true open-source video drivers. Nvidia only provides closed-source binary drivers. All of the video driver issue nonsense is a non-issue even if you plan on using it to play games. It hasn't been an issue for nearly two years now.

[osli]

I'm a Linux noob so I certainly don't know. Over at xbmc you'd think Ati was still the devil.

[BRiT]

The XBMC realm is vastly different than the Linux Server realm.

 

There's a lot of loving for Nvidia because their ION platform works and works well. The AMD platform does well, but you need to pay attention to what generation of integrated graphics is used. The 5xxx level series works better than 4xxx level series with most of the benefits in supporting HDMI 1.3 vs HDMI 1.1, but either of those should be suitable. There may be some issues with the AMD 3xxx level series on ultra low end boards. This is where most of the XBMC grief likely comes from, the very low end realm.

[greybeard]

I have:

 

ASRock M3A785GXH/128M BIOS 1.70

AMD Athlon II X2 245 Regor 2.9GHz

G.SKILL Ripjaws 4G F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL

two Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

 

I currently have 18 drives in the array totaling 23TB and two more that are ready to go in. I built it about 6 months ago and it is running nearly all the time. Been about two months since the last reboot. Once I figured out what worked and what didn't it has been rock solid. There has never been an unplanned shutdown. No lockup, no failures what so ever. It just keeps running. If I could install new drives on the fly I would probably never shut it down. Anyway as you probable know it has 3 PCIe slots that can take a 4x card. I only have two MV8s but suspect I could install a third if I wanted to.

 

If you lookup my original post on the mobo you will see I had trouble mixing MV8s with a Monoprice SATA controller. Could never get it to boot with both installed. I suspect card BIOS conflicts. Never tested with the base bios on SATA card only the RAID bios.

 

[osli]

Thanks for the thumbs up.  I'm still looking for other sales/deals for alternatives, but the closer I get to the day I pull the trigger the more this looks like a very attractive option.