# Via Nano fileserver mobo recommendations (NAS, ZFS etc)



## sim (Jan 8, 2010)

Hi all

I seek advice!

I want to rebuild my FreeBSD 8 home file server using a more modern, ultra-low power platform.  I like the idea of the VIA Nano, but am struggling to find a mobo with the right combination of features. Most of the offerings seem to be obsessed with miniscule form factors at the expense of connectivity and expansion. Plus I don't want to waste money/electricity on accelerated graphics - my system runs headless with occasional old-skool VGA console only. Ideally, something like:


VIA Nano CPU or something similar (64bit)
2GB RAM
integrated VGA, but lowest of the low spec
Plenty of SATA connections
At least one PATA connection, two would be ideal
gigabit lan,  x2 would be a bonus
PS/2 keyboard connector would be welcome
at least one PCI-e, pref more
no HDMI, no serial, no parallel, no multimedia guff!

I'm hoping this CPU/RAM combo can cope with ZFS, is that realistic?

I'm not too familiar with this part of the market - any suggestions?

All advice welcome!

Thanks

sim


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## sim (Jan 8, 2010)

Apologies, I meant to post this in Off-Topic as it's not strictly FreeBSD related. If someone could move it...:r


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## p5ycho (Jan 8, 2010)

when i purchased one of the first via boards with a nano cpu, freebsd wouldn't work in 64bit mode. Had to patch bootloader, and things were unstable. Went for a low-power AMD solution instead.

Please doublecheck if a Nano CPU works in 64bit mode before you buy one.
Edit: and if you want to use ZFS, stuff in some more ram. more ram never hurts.
edit2: some awful typo's.


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## DutchDaemon (Jan 8, 2010)

The System Hardware forum looked/looks like a better place to me .. unless you're not planning on running FreeBSD on it.


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## mav@ (Jan 9, 2010)

When choosing motherboard, look carefully on chipset capabilities. Not all embedded VIA chipsets support SATA natively (some use PATA->SATA bridges) and not all of supporting SATA, support AHCI. AHCI support could allow you to significantly improve disk performance under high load by using NCQ.


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## sim (Jan 9, 2010)

DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> The System Hardware forum looked/looks like a better place to me .. unless you're not planning on running FreeBSD on it.



No that's fine - I am planning to run FreeBSD on it.  I just thought as it was more to do with the hardware market rather than specific FreeBSD issues...


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## sim (Jan 9, 2010)

Thanks for the notes of caution guys... The last thing I want is to end up with a (relatively expensive, for the power) mobo that's not going to do the business.

Further investigation has brought the AMD Neo series to light, although info seems pretty scarce at the moment.  Atoms seem just a bit too underpowered for a non-mobile system, just to gain another couple of watts energy saving.

The search continues!

sim


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## tingo (Jan 10, 2010)

You probably shouldn't run zfs unless you have more than 4 GB RAM available. zfs wants 4GB, and the other things you server will do (serving files, samba?) will also require RAM.


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## phoenix (Jan 11, 2010)

While ZFS works better the more RAM you can put into the system, it will run just fine with less than 4 GB.  It'd be nice if people would stop with the "you can't use it with less than 4 GB" crud.

I use it at home on a 32-bit system with only 2 GB of RAM, serving media files via Samba and NFS, while running ktorrent 24/7, and the system is rock solid.  Running FreeBSD 8.0.

Many others on the FreeBSD mailing lists run it on systems with as little as 512 MB of RAM.

Yes, the sweet spot is 4 GB, but that's not a hard requirement.


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## sim (Jan 11, 2010)

Thanks - I'd hope that 2GB would be enough. It's only a home server for mp3s etc. The current incarnation - AMD Sempron 1GHz, 512MB, UFS, never skips a beat.

sim


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## oliver@ (Jan 12, 2010)

sim said:
			
		

> Atoms seem just a bit too underpowered for a non-mobile system, just to gain another couple of watts energy saving.



Hm... why do you think so? I recently bought an ATOM 330 system (dual core 1.6GHz) and I think it's fine. I must say, that I don't use ZFS on it, I'm still using my old 3ware 9500 with four 1TB WD-green attached to it running in a RAID-5 configuration. But overall I'm happy with the performance.

System info:
http://olli.homeip.net/LAN-Configuration/systems/nudel.salatschuessel.net.html

The power consumption of it might be a bit high but I've not checked it if this is because of the number of hdd's or the 3ware eats much power....


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## tingo (Jan 12, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> While ZFS works better the more RAM you can put into the system, it will run just fine with less than 4 GB.  It'd be nice if people would stop with the "you can't use it with less than 4 GB" crud.


My understanding is that if you have less than 4 GB you will have to manually tune zfs. Is that not correct?


> I use it at home on a 32-bit system with only 2 GB of RAM, serving media files via Samba and NFS, while running ktorrent 24/7, and the system is rock solid.  Running FreeBSD 8.0.


Without tuning?
Or with trial and error to tune it?

The point is that zfs is so new, it is very hard to find simple setups / configurations that will work for any size system, without a lot of trial and error (at least for us who aren't zfs experts).

Compare it to old ufs, which I have used for more than ten years now, and never had any need to configure anything, just install and go (ok, there was the time when softupdates came out).


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## phoenix (Jan 13, 2010)

tingo said:
			
		

> My understanding is that if you have less than 4 GB you will have to manually tune zfs. Is that not correct?



On i386, you have to manually tune kmem and arc sizes, no matter how much RAM you have.  The less RAM you have, the more you have to tune, and the more trial and error it takes to find the perfect settings for your workloads.

On amd64, you don't have to tune anything.  Depending on your workload, though, you may need to tune the arc size.



> Without tuning?
> Or with trial and error to tune it?



With trial and error.  But it's not like it's rocket science.  You set the amount of kmem based on the amount of RAM you have and the version of FreeBSD you have (up to 7.1 has a max of 1956 MB, 7.2 and above has a max of 5 GB), and set the arc to around 1/2 of that.  If it locks up, you reduce the arc size.  Repeat until it doesn't crash anymore.



> The point is that zfs is so new, it is very hard to find simple setups / configurations that will work for any size system, without a lot of trial and error (at least for us who aren't zfs experts).



There's no such thing as "a simple setup that works for any size system".  You have to know how you will use it, how much RAM it has, and how much caching you want to do.  And then you tune it to work for your specific setup.



> Compare it to old ufs, which I have used for more than ten years now, and never had any need to configure anything, just install and go (ok, there was the time when softupdates came out).



If you've never tuned a UFS filesystem, then you've probably never (really) taxed a UFS filesystem.    There's a reason there's a bunch of flags for use with newfs(), and a bunch of options to mount(8), and kernel options for UFS_DIRHASH, and add-ons like geom_journal().    Or, you've never had the awe-inspiring task of waiting to fsck a multi-TB (or even multi-100s-of-MB) filesystem.

UFS is good, UFS works, but it's nowhere near as fun and exciting as ZFS, nor as capable.

Neither is perfect for every situation.  You pick the right tools for the job.  Afterall, no one is going to put ZFS onto a 2 GB USB stick to transfer files around.


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## sim (Jan 13, 2010)

oliver@ said:
			
		

> Hm... why do you think so? I recently bought an ATOM 330 system (dual core 1.6GHz) and I think it's fine. I must say, that I don't use ZFS on it, I'm still using my old 3ware 9500 with four 1TB WD-green attached to it running in a RAID-5 configuration. But overall I'm happy with the performance.



That is interesting. I just got the impression that, compared to some of the other low-power rivals, Atoms (quite legitimately, considering their anticipated use case) sacrificed a bit more performance to bring the consumption down a few more watts, which in the context of a home server with disks and stuff would not be significant.  Still, I take your point, and also accept that even the lowest Atom is probably significantly more powerful than my current 5yr old Sempron (1.3Ghz, underclocked to 1GHz  )

It also seemed that Atom-based mobos tend to be quite limited with their expansion options. Whether that's a side-effect of the architecture, or just the manufacturers targeting a specific market (ultra-compact, ultra-low power) I can't be sure. If you know of any 330 systems with reasonable drive expansion options, do tell 

sim


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## phoenix (Jan 13, 2010)

The Atom CPU isn't completely horrible.  The Intel chipsets that come with Atom CPUs, are.  Especially the graphics.  Pair an Atom with a good chipset, like the nVidia ION, and you have a decent, low-power-using system.  For example, the Acer Revo (dual-core Atom + ION) can do full-screen 1080p H.264 decoding.

The VIA Nano CPU has more CPU power than the Atom, and uses less power due to its better chipsets, but isn't as readily available.  Once ION2 is released, with support for Nano, then things should get really interesting.


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## oliver@ (Jan 13, 2010)

sim said:
			
		

> Still, I take your point, and also accept that even the lowest Atom is probably significantly more powerful than my current 5yr old Sempron (1.3Ghz, underclocked to 1GHz  )


It also was much faster than my previous used Dual PIII-850 




			
				sim said:
			
		

> It also seemed that Atom-based mobos tend to be quite limited with their expansion options.



I'm using an ASUS AT3N7A-I. It is "important" to get a board with an nVidia ION (9400) chipset because they save significant more power and have more features (4 SATA ports instead of 2 and so on). Look at mine
http://pics.pofo.de/gallery/v/misc/fileserver/
I've 7 harddisks connected to it (6 internal, one eSATA) and still have one SATA port free. For more PCI-Slots: There are flexible Riser-Cards existing who will give you two PCI slots out of one. With flexible I mean Riser Card with flexible cable so you could place it next to your board. It is also important to get the "right" of those two-slot Riser board because there are different implementations and some of them are mainboard-specific. I always planned to try one of those but never did so far. I'll do when I need a second slot but right now the board has everything I need. My old board needed an USB 2.0 Controller, a SATA Controller, a Soundcard (musicpd) - the new one got everything on-board - except my 3ware RAID but thats what the PCI slot is for  PCIe solutions also available.


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## c_geier (Jan 16, 2010)

I'm currently running a recent FreeBSD7 snapshot on a Jetway mobo with a Via C7 with only 1 Gb RAM and 3 1TB HDs in a Raid-Z running netatalk, transmission and some other services without any problems at all. I'm getting up to 25MB/s through netatalk.

But in the last weeks I've been looking for a new motherboard, too. I want 64 bit, a bit more power, more RAM and pref more SATA ports ( I have 6 at the moment).

I'm not yet shure if I prefer Atom (dual core) oder Nano (Padlock).

I like the Jetway boards because they normally have one (the old ones two) IDE ports, two SATA ports and the possibility to plug in a daughter card (one is 4 SATA ports is available, should be supported by the current FreeBSD 8 Stable Branch, but I ordered one last week and will test it) and of course a PCI(express) card. And you can get them with VIA Nano or Intel Atom.


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 16, 2010)

When searching for a low power server board, this was the best I could find a few months ago:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/atom.cfm

I have two X7SLA-H boards, both work excellent, I like them because they are server oriented, not desktop oriented like most other Atom boards. Accessing the BIOS thought serial cable is i infinity more useful then a HDMI interface with full HD Support when your server is in a data center 

The new X7SPA series also look very interesting, the chipsets are a lot newer (ICH9 vs ICH7), and the NIC's are also better (intel vs realtek), but I have no direct experience with these boards yet ...
The D510 does seem to use more power, 13W TDP vs 8W TDP for the 330, I wonder what the chipset uses...

Annyway, my server in a datacenter with two 2.5" hard disks uses about 30W average: http://mrtg.coloclue.net/power-watt/dcg-rpb-4a/dcg-rpb-4a_kwh_5.html

As a sidenote, Soekris will also be releasing Atom boards in the next few months ...


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## aragon (Jan 16, 2010)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> The new X7SPA series also look very interesting, the chipsets are a lot newer (ICH9 vs ICH7), and the NIC's are also better (intel vs realtek), but I have no direct experience with these boards yet ...
> The D510 does seem to use more power, 13W TDP vs 8W TDP for the 330, I wonder what the chipset uses...


These look very nice.  ICH9 means AHCI support, and that old realtek NIC is really cr*p, so good riddance.  D510 is slightly faster than older 330 from what I've read, and altho the CPU is more power hungry, it includes the memory controller and VGA controller on a 45 nm process.  The older Atoms loose a lot of efficiency from the (old, dated) external memory and graphics controller (chipset has the biggest heatsink there, ironically).  Overall that D510 board should be less power hungry than an Atom 330 board, and faster.

This new atom arch is what the first Atom arch should have been IMHO.


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## vermaden (Jan 17, 2010)

@sim

This VIA has even official support for FreeBSD:
http://via.com.tw/en/products/embedded/mserv/s2100/

Some more info here:
http://techpowerup.com/112666/VIA_S2100.html


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## oliver@ (Jan 18, 2010)

that the old intel 945GC chipset is a power killer should be well known. Thats why I've chosen the nVidia ION chipset (SATA is AHCI there as well ). Comparing it's power usage to the new ICH9R would be interesting. The 945GC is old and bad anyway. (The only good thing about the old 945GC board from Supermicro is that it has more than one slot...)
And then comparing the power saving of the new board with it's higher prices would be interesting also. Saving 10W but paying 100EUR more - most times this does not match. This is e.g. why I still use my old PSU for my Atom instead of getting a Pico-PSU. The power saving would just not justify it's cost


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## vermaden (Jan 18, 2010)

oliver@ said:
			
		

> Thats why I've chosen the nVidia ION chipset (SATA is AHCI there as well ).



While ION was a chipset with integrated Geforce graphics, ION2 is just an additional discreate graphics card addon to current Intel chipset, to be precise, its G218 nVidia GPU, stay away from this as far as possible if you want to have low power consumption, its a lot better to connect some ATI Radeon 4670 to save power (and have superior to G218 performance at the same time).

http://semiaccurate.com/2009/12/31/nvidia-ion2-g218-gpu-not-chipset/



			
				&quot said:
			
		

> Now comes the funny part. Nvidia is claiming that Ion2 is a chipset, not just a G218 with a few bits added to it. If you look at the part name, it is GT218-xxx-A3, not MCPxx like Nvidia GPUs. On top of that, wait for it, it is connected to the Intel Tigerpoint chipset, not to the CPU. To make matters more laughable, it is connected over a 1x PCIe2 link.
> 
> When was the last time a chipset was defined as a GPU connected over PCIe to a real chipset again? Do you sense that some company is taking liberties with the truth here? Me too. Furthermore, that PCIe2 1x link has 'Nvidia bandwidth optimizations', Nvidia's term for overclocking the link. No, really, it is claiming that jacking up the PCIe2 link clock beyond its recommended specs is a technology. Then again, Nvidia still tries to claim driver blacklisting to be advanced 'SLI technology', and this 'technology' isn't nearly that egregious. But whatever it wants to label this, overclocking will burn more power.
> 
> So, in the end, Ion2 is G218, also known as G210 or G310 on the desktop, nothing more. It uses a clock-jacked PCIe2 1x link and has some pretty curious power claims on top of that. I guess the surprises Nvidia keeps talking about will be seen on purchasers' faces when they realize what happened to their battery life.



Generally, nVidia is making shame of itself with lots of rebranding, talking bullshit, etc, just not making new graphics cards ...


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## aragon (Jan 19, 2010)

Well, there's not much room for nVidia to do anything useful with the new Atom CPUs.  For one thing, the important chipset bits are now embedded in the CPU, and ICH9 is pretty decent if you ask me.  The new Atoms don't have an FSB exposed to the outside world for nVidia to use as an interface... only the DMI bus linking to the I/O bridge is exposed, and nVidia don't have rights to make chipsets that connect via DMI.  Their only legal option is pciE... and Intel know this.


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## vermaden (Jan 19, 2010)

@aragon

Its not wrong that nVidia adds a graphic card to to chipset (if there is no other way), its fsckued that they tell you that ION2 is a chipset! While its definitely not even close. Same for rebranding, while AMD/ATI create new graphics cards, nVidia lately only take an old card, put new name on it and release as a new graphic card, that is unforgivable.


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## aragon (Jan 19, 2010)

vermaden said:
			
		

> its fsckued that they tell you that ION2 is a chipset! While its definitely not even close.


Agreed.  I haven't seen them doing that, but I guess just the Ion namesake suggests it.


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## sim (Jan 19, 2010)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> The new X7SPA series also look very interesting



Hmm these do look nice.  I like that they're aimed at the server market rather than the home entertainment market. I take it they're very new, I can't find any outlets for them in the UK at the moment.

Thanks for the heads up!

sim


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 19, 2010)

Yeah, the X7SPA are very new, they weren't on the website a week ago.


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## phoenix (Jan 20, 2010)

vermaden said:
			
		

> @aragon
> 
> Its not wrong that nVidia adds a graphic card to to chipset (if there is no other way), its fsckued that they tell you that ION2 is a chipset! While its definitely not even close. Same for rebranding, while AMD/ATI create new graphics cards, nVidia lately only take an old card, put new name on it and release as a new graphic card, that is unforgivable.



What about the ION2 version that supports the Via Nano?


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## vermaden (Jan 20, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> What about the ION2 version that supports the Via Nano?



I havent heard/seen anything more then speculations about ION2 to support VIA Nano, was it released already?


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## phoenix (Jan 20, 2010)

Not that I've been able to find.  There's just press releases on the nVidia site saying that ION2 will support Intel Atom, Via Nano, and AMD something or other.

And lots of previews from Feb 2009 with initial details on ION2 that say the same.

However, ION1 with the original Intel Atom is a full chipset and not just a video card, providing audio, SATA, RAM, etc.  For the new Atom, which is more of a SoC than a CPU, there's nothing for ION1 to do except video.


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 20, 2010)

Well, the new Atom incorporates some features from the Nehalem cores such as integrated memory controller and GPU.

It doesn't integrate the NIC, (S)ATA, Sound for example ... I wouldn't really call it a SoC ...


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## Deleted member 2077 (Jan 21, 2010)

Look at this, it doesn't seem like the Atoms are that bad.  They should work fine for a low load file server and/or firewall/webserver, etc.


http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+D510+@+1.66GHz
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php


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## vermaden (Jan 21, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> Not that I've been able to find.  There's just press releases on the nVidia site saying that ION2 will support Intel Atom, Via Nano, and AMD something or other.
> 
> And lots of previews from Feb 2009 with initial details on ION2 that say the same.


I also tried to goole that out, but have found same results as you, propably all this ION for VIA/AMD ended up by speculations only.



			
				phoenix said:
			
		

> However, ION1 with the original Intel Atom is a full chipset and not just a video card, providing audio, SATA, RAM, etc.  For the new Atom, which is more of a SoC than a CPU, there's nothing for ION1 to do except video.


Yes, but that does not justify nVidia from talking bullshit about ION2 (or many of their rebranded cards).



			
				feralape said:
			
		

> Look at this, it doesn't seem like the Atoms are that bad.  They should work fine for a low load file server and/or firewall/webserver, etc.
> 
> http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+D510+@+1.66GHz
> http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php



Atom CPUs/systems are not that superior if you compare them to low power Core 2 sollutions:
http://tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-efficiency,2069-12.html
http://tomshardware.com/reviews/Athlon-Atom-Nano-power,2036-13.html?xtcr=2
http://tomshardware.com/reviews/dual-core-atom-330,2141-10.html?xtcr=1

Newest Atoms are little more powerfull, but not very much.

If you take low power Core 2 chipset/motherboard (Q35/Q33/G33) twith low TDP CPU at 45nm process (e5200/e8200/q9400s), then you will get far more better Performance per Watt with similar idle power consumption.







There is also other sollution, get some Mini-ITX motherboard taht incorporates mobile GM45 chipset and attach P8400 CPU to it, it will comsume even less power while being a lot faster then any Atom based system.


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 21, 2010)

That's true, but there is also the matter of price, a p8400 will be significantly more expensive 

For my atom 330 server (Which runs daemonforums.org among other things) I payed a total of about 250 euro. This system is powerful enough for my needs, so why spend 200 euro more for a more powerful system?
Also, total power consumption is much lower (30W avg total), a P8400 CPU alone will use 25W ...

For my Atom 330 machine at home the hard drives are actually the biggest power consumers by far ... (I haven't completed this system yet, so no exact figures yet).


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## vermaden (Jan 21, 2010)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> That's true, but there is also the matter of price, a p8400 will be significantly more expensive



But Q35/Q33/G33 can be bought for less then $30 and e5200 for about $65, which should eng up even cheaper then Atom.



			
				Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> Also, total power consumption is much lower (30W avg total), a P8400 CPU alone will use 25W ...


Intel TDP are calculated over the actual TDP, for example e5200 does not cosume spread more then 35W TDP ever, you can even lower that with undervolting, but official sticker is 65W, same for p8400 (and yes these can be more pricey, but will definitely has best performance per watt here).



			
				Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> For my Atom 330 machine at home the hard drives are actually the biggest power consumers by far ... (I haven't completed this system yet, so no exact figures yet).



For such system I would use mirror of 2.5" driver or mirror of 3.5" WD10EADS whose also consume very small amount of power:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/1tb-2tb-hdds_16.html


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 21, 2010)

> But Q35/Q33/G33 can be bought for less then $30 and e5200 for about $65, which should eng up even cheaper then Atom.



If you get the cheapest of the cheapest MSI board, yeah sure. But this is not the same as a SuperMicro board by a long shot IMO.



> For such system I would use mirror of 2.5" driver or mirror of 3.5" WD10EADS whose also consume very small amount of power:



See the thread  @ Daemonforums for opinions of GP drives. In short, they suck. I have WD RE drives because quality and reliability is also important, not just power consumption.


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## Deleted member 2077 (Jan 22, 2010)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> See the thread  @ Daemonforums for opinions of GP drives. In short, they suck. I have WD RE drives because quality and reliability is also important, not just power consumption.



Do you have a link?  the only thread I could find was just a bunch of anecdotal evidence based on really small sample sizes.


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## Deleted member 2077 (Jan 22, 2010)

vermaden said:
			
		

> I
> Atom CPUs/systems are not that superior if you compare them to low power Core 2 sollutions:
> http://tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-efficiency,2069-12.html
> http://tomshardware.com/reviews/Athlon-Atom-Nano-power,2036-13.html?xtcr=2
> ...



Thanks for the links, that is helpful; but don't know if I completely understand this.

For something like a file server or low load firewall/webserver; the CPU is going to be idle for a vast majority of that time.  

So, I agree, if you are using lots of CPU it'd best to go to Core2s - but something low load, you probably want something that uses least watts while idle - which Atom would win hands down.

90% of the time my home fileServer/firewall/webserver is idle.


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## vermaden (Jan 22, 2010)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> If you get the cheapest of the cheapest MSI board, yeah sure. But this is not the same as a SuperMicro board by a long shot IMO.


Maybe not Supoermicro, but I was able to get Intel boards with these chipsets for such money.




			
				Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> See the thread  @ Daemonforums for opinions of GP drives. In short, they suck.


Havent been able to found that thread, link?



			
				Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> I have WD RE drives because quality and reliability is also important, not just power consumption.


WD RE* are meant for performance, not for power saving (and they do consume a lot more power then Green), while Green series were created to save power while providing lot of space for not very heavily used storage.


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## phoenix (Jan 24, 2010)

feralape said:
			
		

> Do you have a link?  the only thread I could find was just a bunch of anecdotal evidence based on really small sample sizes.



There's also a long thread on the -stable or -current mailing list where pretty much everyone who has used the Caviar Green drives is ready to chuck them out the window.

The biggest issue with them is the 8 second idle timeout.  If the drive is idle for more than that, the heads are parked and the electronics turned off, requiring 30s or more to spin it back up.  Which is noted as a Load Cycle.  Most drives are rated for 300,000-ish Load Cycles.  These drives can go through 20,000 LCs in a month of normal desktop use.  Which means, they won't last very long.

In a laptop, these drives would make sense.  In a desktop?  Not really.

The other features of the drive like the variable spindle speed are nice.  But the whole park-the-heads-when-idle thing is stupid in a desktop drive (at least with an 8s timeout ... 5 minutes would be a better default for desktop drives).


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## phoenix (Jan 24, 2010)

vermaden said:
			
		

> WD RE* are meant for performance, not for power saving (and they do consume a lot more power then Green), while Green series were created to save power while providing lot of space for not very heavily used storage.



WD RE2 and RE4 (1 TB+) come in -GP (Green Power) variations, which use the same electronics and featureset as the Caviar Green drives.  With two major exceptions:  older drives are firmware-upgradeable to have a 5 minute idle timeout for parking the heads and the newer drives come with the updated firmware; and they support Time-Limited Error Reporting (super-short timeouts for use with RAID controllers).

What sucks is that you have to spend almost $100 CDN more for the RE version (compared to the Caviar), and all that's different is the firmware (the Caviar isn't firmware upgradable).


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## Deleted member 2077 (Jan 24, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> There's also a long thread on the -stable or -current mailing list where pretty much everyone who has used the Caviar Green drives is ready to chuck them out the window.
> 
> The biggest issue with them is the 8 second idle timeout.  If the drive is idle for more than that, the heads are parked and the electronics turned off, requiring 30s or more to spin it back up.  Which is noted as a Load Cycle.  Most drives are rated for 300,000-ish Load Cycles.  These drives can go through 20,000 LCs in a month of normal desktop use.  Which means, they won't last very long.
> 
> ...



hrm, there is no way to modify the idle time out?

Why not have a script that touches and deletes a file every 7.5 seconds?


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## vermaden (Jan 24, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> There's also a long thread on the -stable or -current mailing list where pretty much everyone who has used the Caviar Green drives is ready to chuck them out the window.
> 
> The biggest issue with them is the 8 second idle timeout.  If the drive is idle for more than that, the heads are parked and the electronics turned off, requiring 30s or more to spin it back up.  Which is noted as a Load Cycle.  Most drives are rated for 300,000-ish Load Cycles.  These drives can go through 20,000 LCs in a month of normal desktop use.  Which means, they won't last very long.
> 
> ...



Nice :/

You got any links to these threads on lists@, or even maybe a name of the thread/mailing list name where it was discussed?

I havent heard before about RE GP drives, just checked again *wdc.com* site and they are really there, thanks for info mate.


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## phoenix (Jan 24, 2010)

freebsd-stable mailing list, subject "immense delayed write to file system (ZFS and UFS2), performance issues", started by O. Hartmaan on Jan 18, 2010.


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## vermaden (Jan 24, 2010)

@phoenix

Thanks you, going to read it right away ...


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## knarf (Feb 3, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> On amd64, you don't have to tune anything.  Depending on your workload, though, you may need to tune the arc size.



I had to tune kmem_size/kmem_size_max to 1.5 GiB on 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 with 3 GiB RAM, because it was crashing because of 1 GiB kmem_size not being enough (3 zpools, 67 zfs', thousands of snapshots, 12 local disks + 1 iSCSI, ~10 TiB total).


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## vermaden (Feb 23, 2010)

vermaden said:
			
		

> While ION was a chipset with integrated Geforce graphics, ION2 is just an additional discreate graphics card addon to current Intel chipset, to be precise, its G218 nVidia GPU, stay away from this as far as possible if you want to have low power consumption, its a lot better to connect some ATI Radeon 4670 to save power (and have superior to G218 performance at the same time). (...)



... to continue, IOS2 is *15% SLOWER* then original ION:
http://www.netbooknews.de/13698/ben...2-zusatzgrafik-enttauscht-noch/#comment-41383


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## aragon (Mar 24, 2010)

Hey.  On a slight tangent, I was wondering what miniITX cases there are out there for building a small, cube style NAS with custom components?  Something with 4-6 hotswap bays that can fit an Atom board.  I'd dig to build a custom NAS in a similar form factor to those QNAP devices.

All I've found so far is this mod and this beauty (a bit on large side).


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## sim (Jul 19, 2010)

Hi again

Well I finally bit the bullet and went for a Zotac D510 / NM-10 board (DTX form factor). It's a bit pricier than most of the Atom boards (although a lot cheaper than the impossible-to-find Supermicro board) and ticked most of my boxes, insofar as it has 6 sata ports, no fan, modern chipset (NM10), crap graphics, 2 PCIe slots (1x, 16x),  bigger form factor (but still small) and a few bonus items such as mini-pci based wifi (could use the slot for something else) and an e-sata port. An old-skool IDE port would make the transition easier, but I won't miss it once I'm up and running.

The main downside of this particular boards is that it's DOA, so I can't tell you how well it works   Still, after *much* faffing about I connected the two 2.5" 640GB SATA drives to another machine and got them set up  - one as system boot & root on ZFS, and the other as ZFS-on-GELI full disk encryption.  I just wish I had a board to run them on!

sim


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## Deleted member 2077 (Jul 20, 2010)

the new D5xx Atom CPUs are nice.

64-bit. 
2 cores + hyper threading = 4 threads.

Some come with dual Intel nics and 6x sata ports.

13w TDP and heard that you can idle them down really well.

The only downside is it's limited to only 4 gigs of ram and I also tend to like ECC memory in my home servers (not sure how much difference that really makes though).

Most only come with 1 expansion slot (plus maybe a 'mini' port). 

Also not a lot of selection when it comes to cases.

this board seems to be a winner: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPE.cfm?typ=H&IPMI=Y

With this case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811123128


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## fronclynne (Jul 20, 2010)

feralape said:
			
		

> Why not have a script that touches and deletes a file every 7.5 seconds?



They'll still time out at least once every two minutes even while downloading multi-gigabyte files.  I think the on-board drive cache in conjunction with the kernel's filesystem cache allows it.

In other words, I'm pretty sure a simple [cmd=""]touch foo; rm foo[/cmd] won't ever make it to the platter.


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## Carpetsmoker (Jul 20, 2010)

fronclynne said:
			
		

> They'll still time out at least once every two minutes even while downloading multi-gigabyte files.  I think the on-board drive cache in conjunction with the kernel's filesystem cache allows it.
> 
> In other words, I'm pretty sure a simple [cmd=""]touch foo; rm foo[/cmd] won't ever make it to the platter.



Actually, such a solution did work for me a couple of years ago with a similar problem.


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## Sylgeist (Jul 20, 2010)

If you are open to something other than a VIA, I would look at the D510 Intel combo that there are a few threads about here. It runs 64-bit FreeBSD and supports a decent amount of RAM while still being low power. I set one up as a fileserver + misc services and it's performed impressively.


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## Deleted member 2077 (Jul 20, 2010)

The D525 *should* be out any time soon.  I'm wanting for the Super Micro board.

It'll have DDR3 and slightly faster clock speed (1.8 instead of 1.6).  Same power usage.

Super Micro has nice boards.  The D510 ones has dual intel giga-nics and 6 sata ports.


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