# Using Atom for server?



## GhettoBSD (Feb 10, 2010)

So, my web host and domain provider is closing down shop. I am going to host all services myself again. I have quite a few sites I need to throw up, none with a lot of traffic.

So my idea is to help my buddy save on his power bill (he'll be hosting it for me from his home) and run it on a low power cpu.

This is the most all in one package I found: SUPERMICRO SYS-5015A-H 1U Barebone Server Intel 945GC Intel Atom 330 Dual-Core 1.6GHz processor and with 2GB and 1.5TB comes out to ~$400.

What else could you recommend that is similar? I've seen the plug in computers, but they have very little ram. I've seen the embedded systems and those too don't seem like they'll have what it takes.

What I need now is the basic to just get all domains, mail apache, bind, ssh etc running. Then I'll look into adding HDDs to it. I would also like to keep it as low power as possible.

The reason I'd like to go low power is that before I used to do it all with 5 desktops converted into servers and that ended up being a little expensive. So eventually I moved them over to a co-located host. Those computers consisted of: 25, 33, 100, 133 and 500Mhz computers - now you know why it's called GhettoBSD! So this time around I'd like to do it all on 1 machine.



So, any recommendations would be appreciated!


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## nekonoko (Feb 10, 2010)

I'm currently running a D510MO motherboard with 4GB RAM to serve a moderately popular web forum, blog and photo gallery as well as various ancillary services - an IRC server, anonymous FTP, mail w/IMAP, bind, rsync, etc. 

It handles everything beautifully and actually provided a nice performance boost over the 8 processor SGI Origin 350 it replaced. The forum usually has between 10-20 people on it at any given time (plus 50 users on IRC and 5 or so on FTP) and the load on the machine rarely creeps above 0.05. I can even compile ports from source in the background without anyone noticing a performance hit.


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 10, 2010)

Thanks for the quick reply. So I checked out that mobo, i noticed it doesn't have a fan on it's heatsink, have you experienced any heat issues at all? Also, how much disk space did you pack in there? Or did you leave a slot for a cd drive?

One last thing, what case are you using and would you recommend?

Thanks!


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## nekonoko (Feb 10, 2010)

Atoms are extremely energy efficient and generally don't require any active cooling on the CPU - you shouldn't encounter any heat issues with them. The Supermicro you listed likely has a dedicated cooling fan for the 945GC chipset, but the Atom D510 doesn't require a power-hungy external north bridge solution. That's one of the really nice things about this board.

For storage, I currently have a 750GB SATA drive running in AHCI mode along with a SATA CD-ROM. The case is a Apex MI-100 which has space for one 5.25" and two 3.5" drives in the size of a shoebox. I've been extremely happy with this setup as a whole.


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 10, 2010)

Hmm ok. I am leaning toward that d510 with the mi-008 case (I already have one for my HTPC with a zotac mobo).

Thanks for your input.

Anyone else have any suggestions?


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## FBSDin20Steps (Feb 10, 2010)

If you are looking for a FreeBSD "out of the box" system. This one http://www.pointofview-online.com/showroom.php?shop_mode=product_detail&product_id=83 is the one for you.
I've installed FreeBSD 7.2 on it and every bit of hardware is supported. Here in Holland I payed 250 euro for it. Works great!


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## aragon (Feb 10, 2010)

I would go with the D510 system.  The Supermicro system you pasted is based on the older gen Atom 330 which is why it needs a fan.  The new Atoms are much more efficient.

Having said that, Supermicro do have D510 based systems in the pipeline too.


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## paean (Feb 10, 2010)

I'm currently using an older Atom + 945GC as a server. Its dirt cheap. All it needed was a decent NIC and hard drive. 

It exceeds everything I require and most of what I want. The only time I find it lacking is when SCP'ing to/from it over a gigabit network. In that case you will find your CPU to be the bottleneck. The newer dual-core Atoms may be more suitable if you will be doing similar tasks.


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## hansivers (Feb 10, 2010)

I've used a couple of times a small device called "kill-a-watt" (about 25$ on Ebay) to measure actual energy consumption of servers, desktops, router, switch, etc. Very interesting. 

For example, I've replaced an old rackmount 24 ports switch (70 watts) with a smaller 16 ports one (only 5 watts) since it was using more power than my Pentium III server (63 watts). My router is a Sunfire V100 box with OpenBSD (43 watts) and my main server is an AMD Opteron with 4 disks in RAID (100 watts). 

The other thing is that, knowing the actual consumption of your server, you could estimate precisely the monthly or annual overhead of energy on your friend's electricity bill.


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## paean (Feb 10, 2010)

I use a similar device to ensure my UPS can handle the load I put on it for my desired duration. It also lets me input the cost of electricty, displaying how much I've "spent".

My atom box costs me ~$6 per year in electricity. ( =


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 11, 2010)

Thank you for all your input gang. I will definitely go over all and compare to what I can get.

Have a great one!


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 11, 2010)

Thanks for the great input everyone.

This is what I've ended up ordering:

- Intel BOXD510MO Intel Atom D510 Intel NM10 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
- 2GB of DDR2 800
- 750GB WDB HDD
- Scythe S-FLEX SFF21D 120mm
- Samsung cd/dvd burner
- APEX MI-008 Black Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case

All in all it comes out to about $305.20 shipped. I got everything that had free shipping except for the case (shipping was $13.99 but worth it because I know the case well now). Could have gotten cheaper RAM, HDD, 120mm case fan and optical drive but it will work out for me in the long run.

If I would have gotten the cheapest products available it would have come out to $258.24. So a few extra bucks was worth it.

I'm using the same case and 120mm fan as my HTPC, so I know It'll be even more quiet than that (which is practically inaudible) and will be cool.

got a cheap optical drive because it'll only really be used for installing the system, plus it'll be useful in the future for any odd reason.

I was bummed out because I found a jetway mobo that had the same specs but with a cooler fan for the cpu heatsink and 2 more sata ports. That would have worked out great as I could have built it up to have 4 HDD's for storage BUT it required an external power supply (I have no idea why they did that). So that was the deal breaker.

So now I'll have a tiny, quite and low power BSD box to throw everything on and that'll do the job for now until I get the main boxes back up or stop being cheap and buy a server. But then again, that wouldn't be GhettoBSD!


Thanks again everyone.


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## nekonoko (Feb 11, 2010)

Sounds like a great setup!

Another option is to move your optical drive to a USB-based external case and reclaim the SATA port for a second drive. An acquaintance of mine did that for his D510MO build and said it worked nicely for him.


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 12, 2010)

That could work, I have plenty of external enclosures. I could throw it up in the bay but would need one of those brackets. Might be worth it.

Thanks for the idea!


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## ckester (Feb 13, 2010)

I've toyed with the idea of building a farm with these little cuties:

http://www.mini-box.com/Mini-Box-M350-Barebone-System


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 15, 2010)

that's pretty cool dude. thanks for the link!


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## cracauer@ (Feb 16, 2010)

I considered Atom for my latest non-head build, but it fell through. Apart from lacking hardware virtualization support it also lacks ECC support, and that's where I draw the line.


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## chess (Feb 17, 2010)

GhettoBSD said:
			
		

> Thanks for the great input everyone.
> 
> This is what I've ended up ordering:
> 
> ...



Funny... I had not seen this post and I just ordered almost the same items from newegg.  Well, same mobo, case, and ram at least.    I look forward to putting FreeBSD on it.

I wonder how slow the D510 will be to compile ports and/or make buildworld?


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## ckester (Feb 18, 2010)

chess said:
			
		

> I wonder how slow the D510 will be to compile ports and/or make buildworld?



It's not too bad.  I haven't timed it, but buildworld certainly doesn't take all day, the way rebuilding the KDE or Gnome stuff does.  

Maybe a couple of hours tops. 

The D510 is dual-core (seen as four CPU's) so building ports can take advantage of the recent work to support parallel make jobs.


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## ckester (Feb 18, 2010)

cracauer@ said:
			
		

> I considered Atom for my latest non-head build, but it fell through. Apart from lacking hardware virtualization support it also lacks ECC support, and that's where I draw the line.



Yeah, I agree, the lack of ECC support definitely rules out the Atoms for anything except casual home use.

But that's how I use them.  :e


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 19, 2010)

The systems only support 2 or 4GB of memory max.
My two systems in fact both use about 1GB with typical use.

ECC is nice for systems with 16GB of memory (And also USE that memory) and which are also critical systems. For casual 2-4GB RAM non-absolute-critical servers ECC is a bit overkill IMO.



> I would go with the D510 system. The Supermicro system you pasted is based on the older gen Atom 330 which is why it needs a fan. The new Atoms are much more efficient.



It's not that much more effecient, maybe 5W in casual use. 10W if you're very lucky. That'll save you a few dimes or maybe a euro/month ...
With two 2.5" hard disks in RAID-1 my 5015-H uses 30W avg...

Also, the new mainboard uses SO-DIMM's, and doesn't have a PCI slot...

You can probably remove the chipset fan on the supermicro board, I did so on mine. I did put it in a normal ATX case with two Nexus 120mm fans on 7V though. I would not recommend doing it in the 5015 rackmount case since there is almost no airflow what-so-ever.


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 19, 2010)

So far it's working great. It's super silent, I attached the 120mm fan to the mobo fan port, so it's not running at full power although I did specify it to run at 100% in the bios. Will plug it direct to molex for more air flow (it'll still run silent as in my HTPC).

The only complaint I have so far is that the system won't boot without a monitor. I haven't had a chance to check out the manual (might be a setting somewhere) but other than that it's working great.

Have compiled basic things like apache and samba both without issue. I f'd up on perl (made some bad selections) so I undid that and started again without issues the second time around. Seems well enough to me. Comparing it to my 3 Ghz P4 with 2GB ram it's a tad bit slower, but it does seem that the dual cores with HT is working the best it can. Definitely boots up faster.

Using kill-a-watt these are the readings I have so far:
2 watts turned off
49 watts max during boot
37 watts idle 

Most I've seen during operation is 39 watts. Will start moving files around and will keep an eye on it.

Oh and the reason I skipped the 4GB option is because it really doesn't need it. When I build the main box up again and host it from home it'll need more drives (something the d510 mobo's just can't provide easily at the moment).

But all in all, it's pretty awesome (space) and quick.


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## paean (Feb 19, 2010)

GhettoBSD said:
			
		

> The only complain I have so far is that the system won't boot without a monitor. I haven't had a chance to check out the manual (might be a setting somewhere) but other than that it's working great.



I've not seen a machine that won't start without a monitor. Is it possible you removed your keyboard and mouse when you removed the monitor? Check your BIOS to see if you have option to bypass errors when there's no keyboard or mouse.


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## ckester (Feb 21, 2010)

ckester said:
			
		

> It's not too bad.  I haven't timed it, but buildworld certainly doesn't take all day, the way rebuilding the KDE or Gnome stuff does.
> 
> Maybe a couple of hours tops.



Today I ran make buildworld for 8.0-STABLE.  The total runtime for the build was two hours and 52 minutes.  A little longer than my estimate, but still not too bad.

This was on a D510MO motherboard with 1GB of RAM.  Your mileage might vary, depending on the speed of your hard drive, the amount of RAM, and the system load.  (I was listening to podcasts in Amarok while the build was runnning.)


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## chess (Feb 25, 2010)

Thanks for the additional info.  I got my Intel D510MO board, case, and ram and put it all together.  After lots of hassle, I finally got 8-RELEASE installed (i386).  The problem I was having is that no matter what I tried, I could not get anything to boot from a USB CD/DVD drive.  I tried FreeBSD first, then Debian (stable and testing), then various others.  I tried both i386 and amd64/x86_64 versions.  The boot would appear to start, but then I'd all kinds of weird disk errors.  I tried swapping out the hard drive, changing SATA cables, switching around BIOS settings, updating the BIOS ... nothing worked.

Finally, I found a post in the Intel forums from a user with similar issues who discovered that this board had trouble booting from USB CD/DVD drives.  He used a USB stick to install instead.

So, I grabbed the FreeBSD 8 memstick, dd'd it onto a USB stick, and voila, perfect boot and install.

Hopefully, this helps someone else who may be pulling their hair out


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## GhettoBSD (Feb 26, 2010)

paean said:
			
		

> I've not seen a machine that won't start without a monitor. Is it possible you removed your keyboard and mouse when you removed the monitor? Check your BIOS to see if you have option to bypass errors when there's no keyboard or mouse.



I don't have anything connected to it, because that's how it'll end up. I went through the BIOS and couldn't find settings for halt on error, but I did make few changes for other things and all is well. I think it was user error (impatience?), but I've rebooted it a few times since and all is great!



			
				chess said:
			
		

> ... I got my Intel D510MO board, case, and ram and put it all together.  After lots of hassle, I finally got 8-RELEASE installed (i386).  The problem I was having is that no matter what I tried, I could not get anything to boot from a USB CD/DVD drive.  I tried FreeBSD first, then Debian (stable and testing), then various others.  I tried both i386 and amd64/x86_64 versions.  The boot would appear to start, but then I'd all kinds of weird disk errors.  I tried swapping out the hard drive, changing SATA cables, switching around BIOS settings, updating the BIOS ... nothing worked.
> 
> Finally, I found a post in the Intel forums from a user with similar issues who discovered that this board had trouble booting from USB CD/DVD drives.  He used a USB stick to install instead.
> 
> ...



What mobo did you get? I guess I was lucky in that I had 0 issues with getting FBSD to boot. But then again that's why I opted for a sata drive, I didn't want to have any problems (learned from past experience) and $20 or $25 that I pay for an extra drive is worth it.


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## chess (Feb 27, 2010)

GhettoBSD said:
			
		

> What mobo did you get? I guess I was lucky in that I had 0 issues with getting FBSD to boot. But then again that's why I opted for a sata drive, I didn't want to have any problems (learned from past experience) and $20 or $25 that I pay for an extra drive is worth it.



I got the Intel BOXD510MO, which is the same board discussed in that Intel forums thread I linked to previously.

Now that FreeBSD is installed, this board is working beautifully, and is much, much quicker than I thought it would be.  My experience with an Atom-based eeepc was that the single core Atom was pretty slow, but this new D510 CPU is fantastic, for what it is.  Never thought I would see a tiny, fanless server like this.  I have a couple of jails going on this box, one with nginx and one an ftp server (neither with high loads) and the machine is working great.  Buildworld took about 2-2.5 hours as previously reported with 2GB RAM.


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## Jago (Feb 28, 2010)

I just got my Supermicro X7SPA-H to replace my previous Atom system which had a ZFS mirror configuration that was severely bottlenecked by a PCI SIL3124 controller card.


```
Atom 330 / 2gb ram / Intel D945GCLF + PCI SIL3124

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
         8192 21041 53.5 22644 19.4 13724 12.8 25321 48.5 43110 14.0 143.2 3.3

dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test1 bs=1M count=4096
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
4294967296 bytes transferred in 143.878615 secs (29851325 bytes/sec) (28,4 mb/s)
```

Since then, I switched the exact same disks to a different system:
Atom D510 / 4gb ram / Supermicro X7SPA-H / ICH9R controller (native).
Here are the updated results:

```
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
         8192 30057 68.7 50965 36.4 27236 21.3 33317 58.0 53051 14.3 172.4  3.2

dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test1 bs=1M count=4096
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
4294967296 bytes transferred in 54.977978 secs (78121594 bytes/sec) (74,5 mb/s)
```

Write performance now seems to have increased by a factor of 2 to 3 and is now definately in line with the expected performance of the disks in question (cheap 2TB WD20EADS with 32mb cache). Users of highend systems might no doubt laugh at a 78mb/s throughput, but mind you: these are disks that cost 170eur per a 2tb disk, so you only need 340eur to get 2 of them for a mirror, while getting 2 x 2tb RE4 discs would've costed ~640eur.

The throughput will also improve later on when I expand (stripe) the storage pool with a second and a third mirror pair


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 28, 2010)

The performance seems to have less to do with the CPU and more with the SATA controller, on my Atom 330:


```
[~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/test1 bs=1M count=4096
4096+0 records in
4096+0 records out
4294967296 bytes transferred in 71.472958 secs (60092200 bytes/sec) (57.3 MB/s)
```

Disks used? Two 250GB 2.5" WD drives with ataraid ...


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## Jago (Mar 20, 2010)

Some updated benchmarks below, this is Atom D510 / Supermicro X75SPA-H / 4Gb Ram with 2 x slow 2tb WD Green (WD20EADS) disks with 32mb cache in a ZFS mirror:

```
bonnie -s 8192

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
         8192 29065 68.9 52027 39.8 39636 33.3 54057 95.4 105335 34.6 174.1 7.9
```
DD write:

```
dd if=/dev/zero of=test1 bs=1M count=8192
8589934592 bytes transferred in 111.300481 secs (77177875 bytes/sec) (73,6mb/s)
```
DD read:

```
dd if=/dev/urandom of=test2 bs=1M count=8192
dd if=test2 of=/dev/zero bs=1M
8589934592 bytes transferred in 76.031399 secs (112978779 bytes/sec) (107,74mb/s)
```


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## ckester (Mar 22, 2010)

ckester said:
			
		

> Today I ran make buildworld for 8.0-STABLE.  The total runtime for the build was two hours and 52 minutes.  A little longer than my estimate, but still not too bad.
> 
> This was on a D510MO motherboard with 1GB of RAM.  Your mileage might vary, depending on the speed of your hard drive, the amount of RAM, and the system load.  (I was listening to podcasts in Amarok while the build was runnning.)



This time can be substantially improved by adding RAM and taking advantage of the second core and hyperthreading.  

Since the previous run, I upgraded the RAM to 3GB.
I also added WITHOUT_GAMES=yes to /etc/src.conf.

Today I ran make -j 4 buildworld on the same machine, and it finished in 1 hour and 17 minutes.  
System load was very light, no music playing this time.


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## oliverh (Mar 23, 2010)

```
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /tmp
```
 (or in etc/fstab)

Using tmpfs speed ups compiling a lot, especially while using lots of memory. But beware, this is an experimental feature. Another speed-up would be ccache, see vermaden's howto.


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## Sylgeist (Mar 27, 2010)

Question for those running the BOXD510MO or similar. I noticed that it has a mini-pci express slot. Is that something you could put an SSD in to boot from? I would love one of these with a cheap SSD boot drive for a super low power, low moving parts server. I couldn't find any documentation that said whether you could boot from that slot or not.


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## oliverh (Mar 27, 2010)

Sylgeist said:
			
		

> Question for those running the BOXD510MO or similar. I noticed that it has a mini-pci express slot. Is that something you could put an SSD in to boot from? I would love one of these with a cheap SSD boot drive for a super low power, low moving parts server. I couldn't find any documentation that said whether you could boot from that slot or not.



Yes should be possible, I'm using a Wifi-adaptor in it. But I don't know if it is possible to boot from this slot, I didn't see any option in the BIOS. Apart from that, the BIOS is a major pain in the backside, never saw such a buggy peace of code. Be sure to update to the latest files to get bugfixes for USB-boot etc.

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/highlights/dsktpboards/d510mo


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## GhettoBSD (Mar 28, 2010)

Sylgeist said:
			
		

> Question for those running the BOXD510MO or similar. I noticed that it has a mini-pci express slot. Is that something you could put an SSD in to boot from? I would love one of these with a cheap SSD boot drive for a super low power, low moving parts server. I couldn't find any documentation that said whether you could boot from that slot or not.



I think I saw it mention it being able to be used with an SSD, but needing an attachment/riser or something. But I could also be confusing it with a different mobo. Take a look at the manual and it should mention it somewhere.


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## oliverh (Mar 28, 2010)

http://communities.intel.com/message/87681#87681

... maybe this topic in Intel support forum will answer your question.


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## Sylgeist (Mar 28, 2010)

Thanks Oliverh, I just found that after I posted! Looks like a no go without the Intel USB SSD module. Oh well, I'm going to get one of these boards anyway after hearing from others on the thread.


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## Sylgeist (Apr 4, 2010)

Let me know if this should go in a different thread, but I wanted to post my experience setting up my D510 with ZFS and GPT just in case others run into the same issue. Apparently this motherboard will not recognize a pure GPT scheme on the hard drive. I spent many hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. 

I used these guides:
http://web.mr-happy.com/hackstuff/FreeBSD-ZFS.php
http://blogs.freebsdish.org/lulf/2008/12/16/setting-up-a-zfs-only-system/

and of course a few in the how-to section. 

I was able to get all the ZFS config done and base install, but it would never boot off the hard drive. After searching around I was able to use fdisk to set the GPT partition active, (flags=80) I believe, and now it's working great!


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## oliverh (Apr 4, 2010)

You need an active partition aka "bootable".


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## a129878 (Apr 8, 2010)

I am using the EEE from ebay as very cheap computing.
I try and keep to the SSD ones as there is no hard drive, but not many about using the Atom.
One advantage is that most ebay buyers want big HDD, so small SSD seem to be a premium.
So a change in tactics, now trying the eee 701s, as they come in at rediculous prices.
I would like to use a motor bike battery hooked to a small wind turbine to get the no electric needed option.


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## GhettoBSD (Apr 9, 2010)

a129878 said:
			
		

> I am using the EEE from ebay as very cheap computing.
> I try and keep to the SSD ones as there is no hard drive, but not many about using the Atom.
> One advantage is that most ebay buyers want big HDD, so small SSD seem to be a premium.
> So a change in tactics, now trying the eee 701s, as they come in at rediculous prices.
> I would like to use a motor bike battery hooked to a small wind turbine to get the no electric needed option.



Just a guess but I'm sure a fairly small solar panel could keep that battery charged. But then again, that is in Sunny California.

When I worked in a garbage can, we ran Palm Pilots attached to a small printer (for reports and receipts/checks). They had a pretty cool set up: 1 palm pilot connected to it's dock, that plugged into am inverter, plugged into a car battery, hooked up to a solar panel. I wouldn't run out of juice because of the battery and the panel was more than enough for the battery. Even during very cloudy periods (a pair of weeks at most) I would be ok, no problem. 

I just found out recently that P3 makes a LOT of cool things (the Kill A Watt people). They have a weather station that also includes a wind meter! Might help you out.

Let us know how it turns out.


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## mattski (Aug 1, 2010)

*D510 power consumption*

On the topic of power consumption, I have a D510 motherboard with 2 x SATA drives which runs at 49Watts. But I've just plonked it all in a very old PC case, where I think the power supply (case) itself is using more power than any other component.


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## jem (Aug 2, 2010)

My new D510MO system is inside an Antec ISK 300-65 enclosure and has a pair of Seagate 2.5" disks connected.

It uses about 30W.


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## GhettoBSD (Aug 2, 2010)

comedy, b0rkenbsd... makes me think of brokenbsd...


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## FreeAtLast (Aug 9, 2010)

*Atom D510 based file server*

I just finished putting together a tower to use as a file server:

Intel BOXD510MO
Wintec AMPX 2 GB DDR2 800
Asus DRW-24B1ST DVD RW
SAMSUNG HD103SJ 1 TB HD
ANTEC NEO ECO 400C 400W PSU
Cooler Master RC-692-KKN3 CM690 II mid tower (with 6 internal 3.5" bays, 1 internal 5.25" and 3 external 5.25" and supports mini-itx mobos)
Adonis ADST114 4 port SATA PCI card

I was about to install Ubuntu Server when a friend told me to try FreeBSD because the ZFS file system is very good. Was ZFS used as the FS for the performance numbers posted? Any performance numbers using RAIDZ?  Is it realistic for a newbie Linux user to jump ship and try FreeBSD and ZFS (using RAIDZ)?
Thanks!


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## jem (Aug 10, 2010)

The main question is whether your chosen PCI SATA controller is supported by FreeBSD.  My brief Googling didn't reveal which chipset that controller is based on.  Also, the PCI bus won't provide anywhere near enough bandwidth for four disks being accessed simultaneously.

To get best performance, it's usually advisable to use the on-motherboard SATA ports, but that board only has two.  They're fine for a mirrored pool, which is what I have on mine.

Some of the other mini-ITX board vendors pair the Atom CPU with one of the older Intel ICH chipsets, providing more on-board SATA ports.  You might want to consider one of those instead.


As for numbers, I built a fileserver last year based on an Intel desktop board with six onboard SATA-300 ports.  I attached two 640GB disks for the mirrored OS pool, and four 1.5TB disks for the raidz content pool.  Under FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, I was getting around 150MB/sec read and write speeds to the raidz pool with no additional tuning.  The ZFS version in 8.1-RELEASE is newer and probably better performing.


If you're new to Linux then it's not too late to see the light and switch to FreeBSD instead   You may even find it a bit more intuitive and "tidy" for lack of a better term.  Documentation is excellent, as is community support (these forums for example).


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## Deleted member 2077 (Aug 11, 2010)

jem said:
			
		

> The main question is whether your chosen PCI SATA controller is supported by FreeBSD.  My brief Googling didn't reveal which chipset that controller is based on.  Also, the PCI bus won't provide anywhere near enough bandwidth for four disks being accessed simultaneously.
> 
> To get best performance, it's usually advisable to use the on-motherboard SATA ports, but that board only has two.  They're fine for a mirrored pool, which is what I have on mine.
> 
> Some of the other mini-ITX board vendors pair the Atom CPU with one of the older Intel ICH chipsets, providing more on-board SATA ports.  You might want to consider one of those instead.



These boards have 6 and 4 ports: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/

Also dual nics + IPMI + up to 4 gigs of ram.

This quarter, they are suppose to release a D525 board.  Same as above, but 1.8Ghz CPU and DDR3.  That is what I've been patiently holding out for.

As far as Linux/FreeBSD - I would say they have about the same learning curve; if you can learn one, you can learn the other.  In terms of performance, I also think they were better pretty in line with each other; specially for a small home server like this.  As long as you can stream video and copy files over in a reasonable time; that should be good enough.  5 or even 10% performance gain on one OS or the other probably won't be that noticeable for light loads.  

I'd look more at easy of maintenance, software availability, driver support, etc (again, probably about the same) and things like that.


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## FreeAtLast (Aug 11, 2010)

jem said:
			
		

> The main question is whether your chosen PCI SATA controller is supported by FreeBSD.  My brief Googling didn't reveal which chipset that controller is based on.  Also, the PCI bus won't provide anywhere near enough bandwidth for four disks being accessed simultaneously.



I think the main bottleneck is going to be the GigE port. I read that you can get up to 80MB/sec sustained read/write. 



> To get best performance, it's usually advisable to use the on-motherboard SATA ports, but that board only has two.  They're fine for a mirrored pool, which is what I have on mine.



That is how I want to start and then grow as needed. That is why ZFS looks attractive (or LVM over RAID in Linux).



> Some of the other mini-ITX board vendors pair the Atom CPU with one of the older Intel ICH chipsets, providing more on-board SATA ports.  You might want to consider one of those instead.



I would also consider a laptop CPU, they are getting good at low power idle mode (and throttling operating freq based on workload). 




> ...As for numbers, I built a fileserver last year based on an Intel desktop board with six onboard SATA-300 ports.  I attached two 640GB disks for the mirrored OS pool, and four 1.5TB disks for the raidz content pool.  Under FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, I was getting around 150MB/sec read and write speeds to the raidz pool with no additional tuning.  The ZFS version in 8.1-RELEASE is newer and probably better performing.



That's great performance. You must be using more than one GigE port...




> If you're new to Linux then it's not too late to see the light and switch to FreeBSD instead   You may even find it a bit more intuitive and "tidy" for lack of a better term.  Documentation is excellent, as is community support (these forums for example).



I noticed. Thanks for your prompt answer!


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## FreeAtLast (Aug 11, 2010)

*Atom D510 based file server*

Forgot to mention: the SATA controller is the Silicon Image Sil 3114.


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## aragon (Aug 11, 2010)

Guys, if you want killer performance then you should consider an H55 based mini-itx board such as the Zotac H55-ITX-WiFi.  Although it's not an Atom, these boards have been tested to idle at 30 watts.


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## Deleted member 2077 (Aug 11, 2010)

aragon said:
			
		

> Guys, if you want killer performance then you should consider an H55 based mini-itx board such as the Zotac H55-ITX-WiFi.  Although it's not an Atom, these boards have been tested to idle at 30 watts.



I'd love to go with an i5 over an Atom and > 4 gigs would be awesome.

This board unfortunately only has 1 Gig interface and 5 sata ports. At min I could see the need for 6.  4 for RaidZ, 1 for ssd and 1 for CD Rom.

Also no need for wifi/audio.


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## Jago (Aug 11, 2010)

feralape said:
			
		

> I'd love to go with an i5 over an Atom and > 4 gigs would be awesome.
> 
> This board unfortunately only has 1 Gig interface and 5 sata ports. At min I could see the need for 6.  4 for RaidZ, 1 for ssd and 1 for CD Rom.
> 
> Also no need for wifi/audio.


There is little sense (in a lot of cases) in having an internal CD/DVD-drive these days. I share a single external USB DVD-drive between 3 computers and it sees use maybe once a year.


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## aragon (Aug 11, 2010)

FWIW the Zotac does have a sixth SATA port - eSATA.

Actually, judging on the photos it does have 6 SATA ports onboard, AND an eSATA port.  Not sure why its specs says otherwise.

Gigabyte have an H55 board too with DDR3 support upto 8 GB and USB3, but fewer SATA ports.


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## kpa (Aug 16, 2010)

Anyone if the secondary SATA controller on this Gigabyte board is supported by FreeBSD?
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3343#ov
The specification page and the manual do not really reveal the manufacturer of the controller chip, they only say "GIGABYTE SATA2 chip".

Edit: The controller is most likely a JMicron JMB366 which is not listed at the hardware compatibility page of 8.1


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## aragon (Aug 16, 2010)

Apparently it's a JMicron JMB363.  According to ata(4), JMB363 and JMB366 are supported.


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## kpa (Aug 16, 2010)

Thanks for that, I forgot that ata(4) manual page has it's own list of supported controllers.


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## GhettoBSD (Aug 17, 2010)

*zotac intel HTPC*

This is what I put together for my HTPC a few years ago:

1 x APEX MI-008 Black Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case 250W Power Supply
1 x ZOTAC GF9300-D-E LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 9300 HDMI Wi-Fi Mini ITX Intel Motherboard
1 x Intel Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor BX80571E5200
1 x A-DATA 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model AD2U800B1G5-DRH
1 x LG 22X DVDÂ±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model GH22NS30 - OEM
1 x Scythe S-FLEX SFF21D 120mm Case Fan
1 x SILVERSTONE NT07-775 90mm CPU Cooler

The idle of this PC is less than 40 watts. It's been a while since I've checked it but I believe it was ~32watts, not much more than my BSD server AT IDLE. Just thought you'd like to know.


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## Deleted member 2077 (Aug 19, 2010)

32 watts is nice.  No HDDs though?


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## GhettoBSD (Aug 22, 2010)

both my bsd and htpc have 1 1TB hdd each. htpc is a green western digital, and bsd is a black WD


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