The perfect ZFS home server motherboard.

TeeJayHoward said:
What about in a more realistic scenario? When your Avoton is running at 25-50% utilization, is it drawing more power than an E3 would performing the same tasks? Seems to me that the E3 would be idling while the SoC would be hard at work. Since an E3 idles at around 20W, and the Avoton runs full-bore at the same, is it safe to say that there's about a 10W difference between the two?
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I would guess differently; that is exactly where Avoton shines, under load. Check the power consumption comparisons on STH
 
TeeJayHoward said:
What about in a more realistic scenario? When your Avoton is running at 25-50% utilization, is it drawing more power than an E3 would performing the same tasks? Seems to me that the E3 would be idling while the SoC would be hard at work. Since an E3 idles at around 20W, and the Avoton runs full-bore at the same, is it safe to say that there's about a 10W difference between the two?
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There was a site that did an actual power usage comparison against the Atom and whatever flavor CPU at the time--I think it was a Core 2 series, but maybe newer. Anyway, despite the low power of the Atom, it did exactly as you suggest--even though the desktop chip consumed more power at load, it was at load for so much a shorter period that for many tasks it actually used less power than the Atom.

However, the Avoton is a different beast and I suspect the differences would be much less. It would be interesting to see a comparison when it is more mainstream.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
What about in a more realistic scenario? When your Avoton is running at 25-50% utilization, is it drawing more power than an E3 would performing the same tasks? Seems to me that the E3 would be idling while the SoC would be hard at work. Since an E3 idles at around 20W, and the Avoton runs full-bore at the same, is it safe to say that there's about a 10W difference between the two?
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I don't know enough to answer that question as far as power usage versus CPU utilization versus relative processing power. Any guesses about real world numbers would be conjecture on my part, though given that the 20W Avoton is an 8 core model, I'd suspect it's pretty sprightly. It'll be extremely interesting to see how the Avoton SoCs stack up against E3 based servers from a variety of angles. Initial cost, size, power use, processing power, etc.

Edit: Just looked up some benchmarks on STH as mentioned a few posts above, looks like the Avoton ranges from about the same speed to the E3 1220V3 being 85% faster, depending on benchmark, though the average seemed to show the E3 1220V3 being roughly 50% faster. Infer from that what you will.
 
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Bobalias_LeShay said:
Edit: Just looked up some benchmarks on STH as mentioned a few posts above, looks like the Avoton ranges from about the same speed to the E3 1220V3 being 85% faster, depending on benchmark, though the average seemed to show the E3 1220V3 being roughly 50% faster. Infer from that what you will.
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Wow. That actually makes it one heck of a worthy chip. I had it in my head that it's a "lolNetbook" chip. Anyone know about official support for it from Oracle/VMWare/etc?
 
As far as Asrock site says, it's on ESX 5.1 whitelist...

OS supported:
Microsoft Windows
- Server 2008 R2 (x64)
- Server 2012 (x64)
Linux
- RedHat Enterprise Linux Server 5.5/6.4 (x32 and x64)
- CentOS 5.5 / 6.4 (x32 and x64)
- SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 11 SP1 (x32 and x64)
- FreeBSD 9.1 (x32/x64)
- Fedora core 18 (x64)
- UBuntu 12.04/12.10 (x64)
Virtual
- VMWare ESXi 5.1

Matej
 
Hm, then it is really SOHO NAS dream board! I'm seriously considering to get one to get some upgrade of my oldest home NAS.
 
Yawn. Still no information on pricing. I want to get this thing (my NAS) built already.
 
UhClem said:
(many of) You appear to be content with a max of ~100 MB/s (ie, Gbit) of data "bandwidth" to/from your array, as is suggested by an Atom processor being sufficient.

Question: Doesn't that imply a drive rebuild time of 30-40+ hours when you have a drive failure (based on a 6-7 [x2TB] drive array)? Isn't that a bit risky?

(Not to mention the extended time for scheduled maintenance/data-verification runs.)

It is important to keep the quest for low power consumption in proper perspective. One watt of 24/7 electric usage will cost most of us US$1-2 per year. Extrapolate that, in the context of your total server investment, and decide whether severely limiting your CPU power available is truly wise.
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Why does the network speed have anything to do with scrub/resilver/rebuild time?
 
Vogon said:
Why does the network speed have anything to do with scrub/resilver/rebuild time?
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Dang, Let-Down-Bump.


Anyway AceMicro has the Supermicro Octo-core boards
(the boards with no less then 5 (five) ethernet ports) and 8-core and 4 so-dimm slots for $375. Lower then expected.

http://www.acmemicro.com/Product/13...ini-ITX-Retail-MBD-A1SRi-2758F-O?pager_index=


That's the rangely model too aimed at enterprise router type applications. With 4 ports, a wifi chipset (pcie to mini pcie?) it could replace your router with pfsense further reducing power.

Just wish it had a mini pcie slot :-(
 
Sorry.

Oops. I did it again!

Looks like a whole bunch o' discussion regarding chips and boards that have yet to see any real world testing/reviews.

I've seen a few benchmarks, but nothing coming close to the detail level I would like. Those marks will come and we will see. I think Intel may have a winner here, but for a very specific market segment.
 
okashira said:
Dang, Let-Down-Bump.


Anyway AceMicro has the Supermicro Octo-core boards
(the boards with no less then 5 (five) ethernet ports) and 8-core and 4 so-dimm slots for $375. Lower then expected.

http://www.acmemicro.com/Product/13...ini-ITX-Retail-MBD-A1SRi-2758F-O?pager_index=


That's the rangely model too aimed at enterprise router type applications. With 4 ports, a wifi chipset (pcie to mini pcie?) it could replace your router with pfsense further reducing power.

Just wish it had a mini pcie slot :-(
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I'm really confused by this pricing, the Supermicro Avoton model is selling for $600, and from my reading of the Intel marketing materials, is strictly less featured than the Rangely. (As in they're the same except for the networking accelerator in the Rangely models). Any idea what's going on here? If the Supermicro octo-core model is only $375, that bodes well for the price of the ASRock being a good deal lower still. (Assuming the $600 boards are just gouging while supply is low.)

Edit: Hellooooo, benchmarks! http://www.servethehome.com/Server-...8-core-avoton-rangeley-benchmarks-fast-power/
 
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Yes the $600 was just inflated because they were the first selling it. AcmeMicro has the Avoton model for the same price http://www.acmemicro.com/Product/13...CI-Mini-ITX-Retail-MBD-A1SAi-2750F-O?c_id=272

If you're not using the Intel QuickAssist on the Rangeley you get Turbo Boost on the Avoton. I can't recall off the top of my head if there were any other differences though.

Also, FreeBSD wifi support is a bit lacking (i.e. no wireless N) so you're better off just using a separate access point for wifi.
 
vegaman said:
Yes the $600 was just inflated because they were the first selling it. AcmeMicro has the Avoton model for the same price http://www.acmemicro.com/Product/13...CI-Mini-ITX-Retail-MBD-A1SAi-2750F-O?c_id=272

If you're not using the Intel QuickAssist on the Rangeley you get Turbo Boost on the Avoton. I can't recall off the top of my head if there were any other differences though.

Also, FreeBSD wifi support is a bit lacking (i.e. no wireless N) so you're better off just using a separate access point for wifi.
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Thanks for the info on lacking turboboost on the Rangeley and FreeBSD wifi support. That's sad.

You say there is no N support, I was looking into a 3x3 802.11ac atheros card, lol!
 
what am I missing? 8 cores is cool, but for $375 you can get a Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O and Intel Xeon E3-1220 V2

edit: I see this point was already brought up
 
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EnderW said:
what am I missing? 8 cores is cool, but for $375 you can get a Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O and Intel Xeon E3-1220 V2

edit: I see this point was already brought up
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I've not seen any benches of the 8-core Avoton head-to-head with an E3-1220 v2, but it stands up much better against the E3-1220 v3 than you might expect - actually beating it in a couple of benchmarks, performing especially well in the multi-threaded integer benchmarks that are so important in NAS and Network-IO applications. See here.

Add mini-ITX form factor and significantly lower power/cooling and its a much better story than you imply in your post.
 
PigLover said:
I've not seen any benches of the 8-core Avoton head-to-head with an E3-1220 v2, but it stands up much better against the E3-1220 v3 than you might expect - actually beating it in a couple of benchmarks, performing especially well in the multi-threaded integer benchmarks that are so important in NAS and Network-IO applications. See here.

Add mini-ITX form factor and significantly lower power/cooling and its a much better story than you imply in your post.
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there isn't much difference between a E3-1220 V2 and E3-1220 V3
at current pricing, I'd rather have the Xeon which will be significantly faster in most tasks
you can get it in an ITX form factor as well and power consumption cost differences for a single system would only add up to a few dollars per year

the C2750 is an interesting platform, I just don't see much of a reason for home users to buy in
like your link says it's aimed at "low end web hosting market"
 
Not sure if it's so perfect, well i guess it is if you want to use windows server, otherwise most of those ports i'm assuming won't work as passthrough in esxi or on solaris for example, then again maybe all will fully compatible under ubuntu or something.

Depends on the use one wants to give it i guess, then again it would be nice with a nice case to set up for some friends of relatives since they wouldn't care about all the nitpicky things.
 
EnderW said:
there isn't much difference between a E3-1220 V2 and E3-1220 V3
at current pricing, I'd rather have the Xeon which will be significantly faster in most tasks
you can get it in an ITX form factor as well and power consumption cost differences for a single system would only add up to a few dollars per year
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I won't address the power comments, as it's been discussed a few pages back (Summary: It's more than a few dollars a year, but hard to say how much more.), but as far as form factor and cost, the mini-ITX boards I've seen for socket 1155 have only 2 DIMM slots and a maximum 16GB RAM. These Avoton boards support 32GB in the same form factor. For some tasks 16GB is more than sufficient, but more cache space is always nice as an option for a NAS. I also haven't seen any other boards with this many onboard SATA ports.
EnderW said:
the C2750 is an interesting platform, I just don't see much of a reason for home users to buy in
like your link says it's aimed at "low end web hosting market"
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The ASRock especially, with its 12 SATA ports onboard, makes a fantastic alternative to buying a Synology/QNAP for >$1000 that only supports 8 drives. Though to be fair, you're not likely to find a mini-ITX case that supports more than 8 drives. (8 being what the Lian Li PC-Q25B and U-NAS NSC-800 top out at)

Just so I'm clear, I agree with you that for most tasks, you're better off with the full on Xeon. The argument I'm making is that for a physically small, low power, mid drive count home NAS, this motherboard is almost perfect.
 
Bobalias_LeShay said:
Though to be fair, you're not likely to find a mini-ITX case that supports more than 8 drives. (8 being what the Lian Li PC-Q25B and U-NAS NSC-800 top out at)
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The NSC-800 does support 10 drives, possibly 11, but only the front 8 are hot swappable.
 
AFAIK you can only fit 2.5" drives above the drive cage though. So I'd likely use that space for an SSD or two if I made a build in one.
The ASRock board and U-NAS chassis would make a nice backup NAS I think.

I'd end up wanting to mod it a little with an LCD for status/IP information and LEDs for easy identification of drives.
 
Wow, that U-Nas case looks perfect.

But... I paid $80 for my PC - Q25, can't justify almost three times that. :-(

8 hot swap would be sweet, but then Id want to buy extra swap trays to use on back up hard disks. Yeah not worth it.
 
vegaman said:
AFAIK you can only fit 2.5" drives above the drive cage though. So I'd likely use that space for an SSD or two if I made a build in one.
The ASRock board and U-NAS chassis would make a nice backup NAS I think.

I'd end up wanting to mod it a little with an LCD for status/IP information and LEDs for easy identification of drives.
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Yup, 2.5" drives that are stackable. I have the case now and am waiting for my powersupply to show up.
 
okashira said:
Wow, that U-Nas case looks perfect.

But... I paid $80 for my PC - Q25, can't justify almost three times that. :-(
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Those were my thoughts. I picked up a PC-Q25B when Newegg had a sale a few weeks back for $88, $225 (~$135 difference) to add hot swap capability and a few more drives isn't worth it to me, especially when you need a pricey/loud 1U PSU instead of normal ATX. Hell, it's not like I'd actually keep extra drives on hand to swap in anyway. If something get's borked, I can turn it off and wait for the $4 overnight shipping from Amazon. My bedroom isn't exactly a high reliability production environment.
 
I want to have a ZFS Server for home usage and experiment a bit with virtual machines.

After googling a bit about OSs with native ZFS support, I found omnios.
First I wanted to use nas4free but they I don't have kvm support. I could use ESXi but it makes the setup more complicated.
Omnios has ZFS and kvm in one neat package.

So the ASROCK C2550D4I, seemed to be perfect for this use case.
But than I found out that the C2750 doesn't has EPT only the xeon models have it. Omnios requires EPT support for kvm.

So for total flexibility off the host os it seems the xeon route is still the route to go :-(.
No I'm more looking into a xeon 1220 v3 or better 1230L v3 (but this are hard to get).
Like some people already did suggest in this forum.
So my atom pipe dream ended now :-(
 
I will have to say that concerns about the Marvell SATA chips might make me shy away from this one. Otherwise it looks nice and unlike Supermicro they have resisted the temptation to go S0DIMM. Intel should really offer their SATA chips as controllers, even if they limit licensing to board with their own chipsets.

Plus ZFS grinds up all kinds of resources, so what was said before is very real, a more powerful CPU might do it quicker and the power advantage of the Atom might melt away with throughput.

Finally, 4 RAM slots aren't that great. ZFS wants lots of RAM and you are quickly driven into expensive module sizes. Myself I was partial to a Sandy Bridge E board with 8 RAM slots and quad-channel RAM, but not SMP and not NUMA. That should be a proper fileserver.
 
Patrick at Serve the home is testing this board and was not able to get it to boot with FreeNAS.

Turns out FreeNAS will also not boot on any haswell system?!?

I'm starting to rethink using FreeNAS....


Back on topic, this is for a HOME SERVER

Do you really need more then 4 DIMM slots on a HOME server?!? then this thread doesn't apply to you....

It's a mini-itx board for Christ's sake.
 
okashira said:
Back on topic, this is for a HOME SERVER

Do you really need more then 4 DIMM slots on a HOME server?!? then this thread doesn't apply to you....

It's a mini-itx board for Christ's sake.
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Need? No. My point was that a bigger board with more slots might be cheaper if you need good amounts of RAM because you aren't forced to buy large modules that cost more per GB. 4 slots will usually be OK of course, but ZFS can wipe out large amounts of RAM and it is unlikely to get better anytime soon.

If you serve things with NFS and samba both it gets even worse because ZFS's buffer cache is not integrated with the VM cache.
 
okashira said:
He didn't test power consumption,
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Lower in the comments he wrote:
Patrick Kennedy
October 28, 2013 at 7:53 pm

We generally do not publish exact figures for pre-production parts. With that said, using the board plus an 800rpm 120mm PWM controlled fan utilized just over 39w with all disks running on a different power supply.
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Just found out about this board, though the product page now says it supports 64GB. Does this mean it supports registered/dual-rank modules (none of the articles I've seen so far actually provide details of the RAM support besides ECC)? Or are there unbuffered 16GB DIMMs out now?
 
Since I am the OP, I guess I should announce that I ended up buying a mobo for my NAS Server.

I ordered the ASRock C226 Mini ITX board. Only 6 SATA ports, however some people have measured idle power at ~21 W, so it would not be much more then the ATOM.

Side benefit is that it may work as an HTPC as well via virtualization, unfortunately no HDMI so I have to get a dedicated graphics card for that. :-(

I just didn't want to wait any longer for this ASRock avoton board... but after typing this up I am rethinking again. If I am going to virtualize, then the avoton board should work just fine on FreeNAS.

I still understand VT-d. Would I need this to run FreeNAS/NAS4Free and windows 8 virtualized for HTPC use (I would have a virtual netowkr between the two) ?
 
jwcalla said:
Do you really need Windows 8 for an HTPC?
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Need is such a strong word, I don't even need an HTPC, or a NAS, hell even a computer at all.

But I would like the option to run WMC, with Shark007's codec setup, or perhaps XBMC if I find that superior. Also Karaoke software would be nice to run as well. with USB sound.
 
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