Mini-ITX Motherboard Question

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war9200

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 9, 2010
Messages
273
Hi,

Mini-ITX motherboards and that Lian Li / other Mini-ATX seem to be all the rage lately.
Does anyone have a working one with pictures?
Do you have benchmarks on gigabit showing >= 100MiB/s?
Any of these work with a RAID or standard HBA?

See lots of great pictures/stories here but never in-depth reviews or benchmarks of Mini ITX based systems, can anyone share?
 
mini-itx has do do nothing with performance or features.
its only a lack of possibilities due to its reduced format.

what do you want to do with it?
 
It'd be nice to throw a bunch of a SATA disks in it for a cheap price & low power utilization, my only question is can it achieve ~100MIB/s
 
most itx are cheap, low power, low performnce or have other problems-
not the right thing for a performance solution.

a bunch of disks in raid-z or raid 5/6 needs performance with software raid -
even with hardware raid you will fail 100 MB/s on a low performance system.

it possible, use a micro-atx size for your performance demands
best with a i3 or better cpu and a entry level server mainboard.
 
war9200 said:
It'd be nice to throw a bunch of a SATA disks in it for a cheap price & low power utilization, my only question is can it achieve ~100MIB/s
Click to expand...

Only if you use a SSD and have a dual-core Atom or Celeron CPU installed in the board. Even then, the performance will be minimal.

Honestly, it's not worth it unless, like the others said, you go with a more powerful CPU such as an i3 or a 775 dual-core, at least.
 
Zotac has some Mini-ITX Core i3/i5 boards, but if you want ZFS + Mini-ITX the new AMD Zacate platform could be very interesting. 6x 6Gbps SATA onboard and PCI-express 2.0 x16 with just 9W idle platform power; less than half that of Atom platform.

CPU power for simple pools wouldn't be that great, but at least a dualcore would be highly recommended. I think an Atom or Zacate would be okay for a simple ZFS server. Enough memory is more important, at least on FreeBSD platform.
 
MY offsite backup WHS is an E5200 on a mini-ITX board in a Chenbro ES34069 case. I notice no differences in storage performance compared to my Q9300 on-line WHS. I also have an intel Core i3 mini-ITX desktop that is damn near silent and you could easily put a RAID HBA in that system if you wanted to.

I guess the key thing I'm getting at is that you do have some performance options in the mini-ITX family these days. Mini-ITX and the Atom processor are not synonymous like they used to be. Also, if you want server grade mini-ITX, the Supermicro systems are at the top of my list.
 
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