BioStar Mini Daemon NAS box review

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ghost6303

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I just wanted to write a short review of this little guy because I could not find anything out on the interwebs about it prior to purchase, so I took a chance and just went for it. Here is what was put together....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856115033
also a 2gb stick of 200-pin SODIMM 533 from Crucial.

FreeNAS 0.7.1 loaded on this setup as the boot drive......
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191094
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186050

plus two 1TB SATA drives i had already.

What I needed was a NAS with dual GigE ports with jumbo frame support. I was originally looking at either a Synology or QNAP box, but what I built is cheaper, more robust, has more options (at the slight sacrifice of Synology's nice pretty web GUI, but if you know what you are doing with FreeNAS it does the same things and more), and has an additional PCI slot for either an upgraded RAID card, PCI video card for use as a HTPC media center, or whatever else you think of. FreeNAS detected/had drivers for everything right out of the box.

This Biostar box has an intel Atom 330, dual core @ 1.6ghz. Coupled with 2GB of RAM it will max out your TCP connections before maxing out the processor/RAM. The Bittorrent client runs great, and FreeNAS also enables you to use IP filtering lists like peer guardian along side it if you need that sorta thing, which is not available with most other NAS boxes. You can also have this act as a hardware firewall or internet gateway, web server, media streamer, iSCSI target, etc. The thing boots between 5 and 20 seconds due to the compact flash boot drive which is nice. FreeNAS takes under 100mb of space so a 4GB CF drive is overkill. The onboard video is sufficient, but dont expect quality video playback of any sort. The onboard sound is actually pretty good, but its only analogue so I wouldnt rely on this for HQ sound to a home theater or anything.

Network throughput is as good as you are going to get for under $1k. My network might be a little more overkill the most peoples.... all Cat6 cable, every computer has dual GigE ports, aggregated; one going to a GigE router running DDWRT and connected to the outside world, the other to a GigE switch, the router and switch are linked to each other over another GigE uplink. All interconnected nodes have 7k jumbo packets enabled. I am not using RAID on the NAS currently, so network speeds are limited only by the speed of the hard drives themselves. I havnt done extensive testing so I wont throw out an exact number, but write speeds are similar to what they would be if the drive was hooked directly to the PC, minus 5 to 10% or so for network overhead.

PC to PC transfers of a 4GB zip file over the network are in the 200mbytes/sec range (that is using virtual RAM drives as targets on performance computers, trying to make the bottleneck be the network as much as possible {and I still dont think it was fully saturated!!}, otherwise it would be hard-drive-speed-limited again). Transferring a 4GB zip file from the NAS to a PC uses about 2-5% of the NAS' CPU power and not much RAM at all, that is with 7k jumbo frames.

All together it cost me $350 not including the two hard drives already on hand. That is a savings of $50-300, depending on what you look at, for a similarly performing network storage box. You can even cheap out some more on the compact flash drive portion and save another $50 or so. The only thing I wish it had was room for 4 hard drives instead of two, but two is sufficient for me. When I run out of space il throw two 2TB drives in it, I dont think me and my friends will fill that anytime soon. If you dont need extensive RAID options, but want everything else and to save a bunch of money- this is the box to get.
 
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ghost6303 said:
PC to PC transfers of a 4GB zip file over the network are in the 300mbytes/sec range (that is using virtual RAM drives as targets on performance computers, trying to make the bottleneck be the network as much as possible {and I still dont think it was fully saturated!!}, otherwise it would be hard-drive-speed-limited again). Transferring a 4GB zip file from the NAS to a PC uses about 2-5% of the NAS' CPU power and not much RAM at all, that is with 7k jumbo frames.
Click to expand...

300MByte/sec = 2400GBit/second. Something doesn't add up even with dual nics
 
my bad, that 3 was supposed to be a 2. its actually just under 200MBytes/sec, or around 1.5- gigabit.

(and 300MByte = ~2.4GBits btw, not 2400 ;D )
 
Cool... Good short review. I haven't browsed the barebones stuff in a while. This is a neat fine.
I'm sure the Atom 330 performs pretty similar to the rest... but it's neat what you can do with such a small box...

Although, just for kicks to break it down... that case looks eerily similar to the one I picked up last year from the egg for my mini-itx DC. So the case was $50 then the other $130 goes to the motherboard? That should mean you can upgrade motherboards down the line....
You could also add another small case and use esata or something to add more drives. I'm sticking a Core i5 setup and converting to an ESXi node...

thanks for the mini review... good option for a small nas or even a small WHS box.
 
What kind of power consumption are you seeing with this setup? I know that chipset isn't exactly the most efficient. I've been considering building an Atom-based DIY NAS but debating which board to use.
 
Don't buy anything without PCI-express, and carefully look at idle power usage; not at the TDP.

You can get some very nice Intel/AMD micro-ATX Mini-ITX boards with alot of power and still having PCI-express x16 for a serious expansion card (SuperMicro 8x SATA for example).
 
this case is actually larger in cubic inches then that APEX case you mentioned, but its much shorter which is good for where i am sticking it (ha!).

out of all the Atom-based boards i saw on newegg and amazon, this is the only one that had the dual gigabit ethernet controlers which i wanted. the processor itself only sucks about 7 watts under load. the whole pc is run on a 250w power supply. unfortunately i have no idea where my killawatt went, but i would guesstimate its sub-100 watts under normal usage, most of which is probably sucked up by the chipset.

which is the exact reason i didnt just build another cheap server out of spare parts i have laying around. i even have an old compaq server collecting dust that would have worked, but its three 275w power supplies are more then i want to pay for. and that kind of power (and noise) for only lite file/web serving is unnecessary.

also the name biostar isnt exactly a brand i would regularly buy without question, but i ended up taking a gamble and so far have not been disappointed.

Headcase_Fargone said:
I've been considering building an Atom-based DIY NAS but debating which board to use.
Click to expand...

if you dont specifically need dual gigE controlers on board, there are other atom-based boards that have more SATA connections on them, and better expansion slot choices. i like this thing because any other retail NAS boxes you can buy for $300-400 wouldnt come with a dual core 1.6ghz processor and upgradable RAM.

for instance the QNAP TS 239P has a similar processor, only 1GB of ram and costs $600 empty.
the TS209, which is similar in price to mine, only has a 500 or 800 mhz single core marvel processor and 128 or 256mb ram (depending on where you buy). and none of which have dual GigE ports.
 
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