DoeBoye Posted November 9, 2010 Share Posted November 9, 2010 Looks like the deal on the SuperMicro chassis morphed into a full server deal from the same vendor: http://cgi.ebay.com/SuperMicro-CSE-933T-R760B-NAS-Network-Storage-Server-/250720945297?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a60220491 Price-wise, it seems pretty solid (comes with everything but the drives). And free shipping! $599 Anyone know if that board would work with unRaid? X6DHE-XG2 Motherboard (http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon800/E7520/X6DHe-XG2.cfm) Hardware Specifications SuperMicro CSE-933T-R760B 3U Chassis X6DHE-XG2 Motherboard 2 x 2.8GHZ / 2M Cache XEON CPU'S (EM64T Compatible) 4GB ECC REG PC3200 DDR2 Memory 15 SATA Hard Drive Trays 2 x 8 Port SATA Controllers AOC-SAT2-MV8 IPMI Board AOC-IPMI20-E 3 x HOT PLUG Power Supplies Rack Mount Rails 3 x Power Cords Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 9, 2010 Author Share Posted November 9, 2010 Here's another one from a different vendor for 100$ less but no free shipping: http://cgi.ebay.com/SUPERMICRO-3U-SERVER-DUAL-XEON-CSE-933T-X6DHE-XG2-/170551985103?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item27b5b0c3cf Vendor says "They appear to be new" Price: $499 Quote Link to comment
ccharmatz Posted November 9, 2010 Share Posted November 9, 2010 I use the same board in one of my unraid servers with the same sata cards. cc- Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 9, 2010 Author Share Posted November 9, 2010 Nice! Thanks for the vote of confidence on this board! Grrr.... So tempting! I'm running out of slots in my Centurion590 for drives. I had started looking into getting a Norco case, but now I'm torn... I could keep my existing 12 drive server, pick up one of these guys and an extra Pro license, and I would have the ability to go to 27 drives for less then a new 4224 and 2 8 port cards... Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 9, 2010 Author Share Posted November 9, 2010 Done! Just bought 2. Go big or go home, right? Quote Link to comment
fitbrit Posted November 10, 2010 Share Posted November 10, 2010 Price-wise, a great deal. However, that's a lot of power-hungry CPU(s) right? Also, would the PCI-X bus be a bottleneck compared to a PCIe x4? Looks like the deal on the SuperMicro chassis morphed into a full server deal from the same vendor: http://cgi.ebay.com/SuperMicro-CSE-933T-R760B-NAS-Network-Storage-Server-/250720945297?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a60220491 Price-wise, it seems pretty solid (comes with everything but the drives). And free shipping! $599 Anyone know if that board would work with unRaid? X6DHE-XG2 Motherboard (http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon800/E7520/X6DHe-XG2.cfm) Hardware Specifications SuperMicro CSE-933T-R760B 3U Chassis X6DHE-XG2 Motherboard 2 x 2.8GHZ / 2M Cache XEON CPU'S (EM64T Compatible) 4GB ECC REG PC3200 DDR2 Memory 15 SATA Hard Drive Trays 2 x 8 Port SATA Controllers AOC-SAT2-MV8 IPMI Board AOC-IPMI20-E 3 x HOT PLUG Power Supplies Rack Mount Rails 3 x Power Cords Quote Link to comment
prostuff1 Posted November 10, 2010 Share Posted November 10, 2010 Price-wise, a great deal. However, that's a lot of power-hungry CPU(s) right? Also, would the PCI-X bus be a bottleneck compared to a PCIe x4? PCIe x4 is technically faster and if the drivers are as good as the PCI-X version then it should be faster than a PCI-X card. See here and you will find this quote " While standard PCI-X (133 MHz 64 bit) and PCIe ×4 have roughly the same data transfer rate, PCIe ×4 will give better performance if multiple device pairs are communicating simultaneously or if communication between a single device pair is bidirectional." Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 10, 2010 Author Share Posted November 10, 2010 From my understanding, both PCI-e x4 and PCI-x 133mhz have the same bandwidth (1 gig/sec). Where the PCI-e outperforms is that it is a bidirectional transfer rate (1 gig/sec up and down), whereas the PCI-x bus is unidirectional. With applications such as video cards, I think there would be a marked performance difference between the two, but from what I've read (NOTE: I have no practical experience with PCI-x! All theory!), it makes little to no difference for hard drives. This board has 2 133mhz PCI-x buses, so assuming the cards are plugged into the correct slot (one card per bus), each card can provide 128 MB/s of bandwidth to each drive (1024 MB/s divided by 8 ). Factoring the bandwidth other system functions require (ethernet etc), and that there is one less drive on one of the cards (15 drives total), that should still be more bandwidth then a regular SATA platter-type drive could ever consume.... Again, this is all theoretical! If anyone has practical experience comparing the speed of both buses, don't hesitate to chime in and tell me I'm completely wrong! [edit] Didn't see prostuff1's answer. Started writing post, then got pulled away. Apologies for the repeated content. [/edit] Quote Link to comment
Giraffeninja Posted November 10, 2010 Share Posted November 10, 2010 I jumped in and grabbed one too. Once it arrives I'll get some numbers to compare it to my i3 UnRaid with the PCI-E 4x card. I'm just hoping the "HDIO_GET_IDENTITY" errors will stop flooding my syslog. Quote Link to comment
heffneil Posted November 10, 2010 Share Posted November 10, 2010 I like it too but the power consumption looks like a real bear!!! Neil Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 10, 2010 Author Share Posted November 10, 2010 Yeah. That is the only point that concerns me a bit. Frankly, I'm not entirely clear on how TDP works. If the 2 Xeons each have a 110w Max TDP, does that mean they only consume that kind of power under full load? And if that's the case, how does one know how much is used when idle? Half? a Third?... I couldn't find it published anywhere, and you would think that would be a fairly important number... Quote Link to comment
Giraffeninja Posted November 10, 2010 Share Posted November 10, 2010 Mine should be here monday. I'll pull out my killawatt and get some numbers for you on idle, disks spun up and parity rebuild. Anything else you want tested? Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 10, 2010 Author Share Posted November 10, 2010 Thanks Giraffeninja! I'd love to find out those numbers . I have to get me one of those Kill-a-watt things! They sound pretty handy! Quote Link to comment
heffneil Posted November 11, 2010 Share Posted November 11, 2010 I just ordered one. Here are my thoughts on the price and even the power consumption. If you ripped out one of the processors you could probably save on some power. But who cares? The person selling the empty chassis upped the price to $300 for the chassis. The two cards are $100 a piece so between the case and the cards you have broken even. This doesn't even count the procs, motherboard, memory and the IPMI card which you could easily sell for $200+. I didn't even look at how recent of a proc was in that box and i don't really care. I might turn this machine on at 1 am on a timer and then sync it as my backup unraid box to back up my primary and then shut it down! Quote Link to comment
ohlwiler Posted November 11, 2010 Share Posted November 11, 2010 I do not own this exact motherboard, but I performed some tests on a Supermicro motherboard with a 133 Mhz PCI-X bus. There were 14 2T. drives in the array at the time of the test, three on the motherboard, three on a SAT2 on the 100 MHz bus. The remainder were on the card/bus to be tested, the SAT2 on the 133Mhz bus or the SASLP on the PCIe bus. All drives were green drives with the exception of the Hitachi parity drive. I believe I created conditions to isolate the bandwidth of each card being tested. To conduct the test I configured the machine and started a parity check. After 5 minutes I noted the position of the parity check. After another 20 minutes I noted the position again and calculated the average parity check speed. SAT2-133 705 MBs (90,300 KBs) SASLP 414 MBs (53,000 KBs) Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 11, 2010 Author Share Posted November 11, 2010 I do not own this exact motherboard, but I performed some tests on a Supermicro motherboard with a 133 Mhz PCI-X bus. Three were 14 drives in the array at the time of the test, three on the motherboard, three on a SAT2 on the 100 MHz bus. The remainder were on the card/bus to be tested, the SAT2 on the 133Mhz bus or the SASLP on the PCIe bus. All drives were green drives with the exception of the Hitachi parity drive. I believe I created conditions to isolate the bandwidth of each card being tested. To conduct the test I configured the machine and started a parity check. After 5 minutes I noted the position of the parity check. After another 20 minutes I noted the position again and calculated the average parity check speed. SAT2-133 705 MBs (90,300 KBs) SASLP 414 MBs (53,000 KBs) Thanks for those numbers, ohlwiler! Forgive my confusion, but I'm not entirely clear which numbers belong where. Is SAT2-133 the drives running off of the PCI-X controller and SASLP running off of the MB SATA headers? Thanks! [EDIT] Ok, so I re-read again, with my brain in gear this time , and if I understand correctly, the SASLP card was on the PCI-e bus and was actually significantly slower then the PCI-X bus card? [/EDIT] Quote Link to comment
ohlwiler Posted November 11, 2010 Share Posted November 11, 2010 That is correct, I always thought the SASLP was faster than the SAT2 until I did this test. Even though the bus may have a certain bandwidth does not mean the device plugged into it will be able to utilize that bandwidth. Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 11, 2010 Author Share Posted November 11, 2010 @ohlwiler: Very interesting numbers! Thanks for that . Just a few more observations: 1. Based on the pictures from the vendor, it looks like the controller cards are put in slots 4 and 5. Based on the mobo manual (see attached pic from earlier), I would move the slot 4 controller down to slot three, so that they are using separate PCI-X buses. 2. For anyone concerned with power usage, it looks like this board supports low voltage chips as well. The SPEC code for the supported chips is (Please reconfirm before buying anything. I'd hate to be wrong and blow up someone's board ): SL8RW SL8SV (This one has a few chips attached to it. Make sure you select the chip with 2MB of cache and 800mhz FSB) SL8RW: 64-bit Intel® Xeon® Processor LV 2.80 GHz, 1M Cache, 800 MHz FSB SL8SV: 64-bit Intel® Xeon® Processor 3.00 GHz, 2M Cache, 800 MHz FSB I just saw the SL8RW for $15 on ebay... 3. They initial deal is over, but the vendor re-listed another 10 units: http://cgi.ebay.ca/SUPERMICRO-3U-SERVER-DUAL-XEON-CSE-933T-X6DHE-XG2-/170565094751?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item27b678cd5f Quote Link to comment
heffneil Posted November 12, 2010 Share Posted November 12, 2010 What is the proc installed in the machine? I assume it isn't LV. You could run one and halve it I would imagine as I said earlier. I am excited. When I saw the 3 after the one I bought sold out I was a but regretful of not buying 2 but it looks like there will be more. I want to get this one and see how it does first. Whoever gets theirs first please post your thoughts as brief as they may be asap! Thanks! Quote Link to comment
teamhood Posted November 12, 2010 Share Posted November 12, 2010 So which flavor are you buying? The 599 with free shipping or 499? How much is the shipping on the 499? They are the exact same, correct? Quote Link to comment
heffneil Posted November 12, 2010 Share Posted November 12, 2010 Shipping to me in SWFL was $43 so I went with the $499. I am still awaiting tracking details... Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 12, 2010 Author Share Posted November 12, 2010 About the same shipping for me to the Cdn border in NY. Second server was $20 off . They seem to have identical specs. Though I have no "proof", I'm fairly sure they probably came from the same auction. Some Megacorp probably ordered them, then went bankrupt and the creditors are getting around to selling off their assets.... Though that's just a theory. Why else would they have all these lots of brand new servers with 4-5 year old technology? Quote Link to comment
teamhood Posted November 12, 2010 Share Posted November 12, 2010 I sent the seller of the $599.00 a message through ebay asking if he would drop his price to $499.00 seeing as someone else is selling the same box for that price and see if they would allow me to do a local pickup as I'm in the Chicago-land area... I guess we will see. If he doesn't answer soon I'll probably just pop for the $499.00... Quote Link to comment
teamhood Posted November 12, 2010 Share Posted November 12, 2010 Well I'm going to pick this puppy up right now Quote Link to comment
DoeBoye Posted November 12, 2010 Author Share Posted November 12, 2010 A whack of vendors have appeared selling the LV version of the chip! $25 each. Here's one with 10 available: http://cgi.ebay.ca/Dell-PowerEdge-2850-2800-2-8GHz-1MB-CPU-SL8RW-W8383-/290490692049?pt=COMP_EN_Networking_Components&hash=item43a29831d1#ht_2826wt_906 And the 3 GHZ version @ $45 each: http://cgi.ebay.ca/Dell-PowerEdge-2850-2800-3-0GHz-2MB-CPU-SL8SV-CF837-/290490641861?pt=COMP_EN_Networking_Components&hash=item43a2976dc5#ht_3276wt_906 I'm not sure if the 200mhz and extra MB of cache is worth it or not... Anyone more knowledgeable about UnRaid's cache requirements? Quote Link to comment
Recommended Posts
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.