Fastest (IO) micro ATX motherboard

Discussion:

(too old to reply)

Dan Carroll

2012-12-03 06:56:46 UTC

Hello,

I'm thinking of putting together a couple of custom built NAS boxes (4
drive) to use up a plethora of SATA drives I've accumulated.
I'll be running ZFS probably in mirrored or raidz arrangements.

I'd like to be able to get good enough performance so that things like
iSCSI are viable over my home-office lan (gigabit lan with less than 20
devices).

Does anyone have any suggestions on what chipset / motherboard might
have reasonable IO performance? I'd prefer not to go into this
endeavour only to find out my disk access grinds to a halt when the
motherboard needs to talk to the network.

Things like WOL, low power usage and small form factor are also
important. Hopefully I'm not asking too much of the micro ATX form factor.

Any ideas?

-Dan

Jacek Sobczak

2012-12-03 08:02:29 UTC

Permalink

Hi,
I'm using microITX with Atom D330 with 4SATA disk at home
i recommend you to use graid5 port instead of zfs. For fast ZFS pool u need
lot of ram and fast SSD for ZIL log. In other case RAID5 will be much
faster.

Configuration depends of yours needs. U need to choose if you want to
store/copy lot of small files or big like a video files.
If you will store big files and write it and read sequentially I recommend
to create RAID5 with large stripes like 256K. Create a FS with big blocks.
Also I thing its better to use partition on disks rather than using whole
RAW disk space because you can set proper alignment. Check if yours disks
have 4K sectors or 512B.

For me that configuration is doing 40-50MB/sec with reads and ~35MB/sec
writes using Samba.

Best regards

Post by Dan Carroll
Hello,
I'm thinking of putting together a couple of custom built NAS boxes (4
drive) to use up a plethora of SATA drives I've accumulated.
I'll be running ZFS probably in mirrored or raidz arrangements.
I'd like to be able to get good enough performance so that things like
iSCSI are viable over my home-office lan (gigabit lan with less than 20
devices).
Does anyone have any suggestions on what chipset / motherboard might have
reasonable IO performance? I'd prefer not to go into this endeavour only
to find out my disk access grinds to a halt when the motherboard needs to
talk to the network.
Things like WOL, low power usage and small form factor are also important.
Hopefully I'm not asking too much of the micro ATX form factor.
Any ideas?
-Dan
______________________________**_________________
http://lists.freebsd.org/**mailman/listinfo/freebsd-**hardware<http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware>

Patrick Heinson

2012-12-04 14:29:17 UTC

Permalink

Hi Dan,

currently we are using an Intel s1200kp

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/server-motherboards/server-board-s1200kp.html

with 8-16GB of Ram.

Performance is with 2x2TB mirror 80-85mb/sec write and 100+mb/sec read.

All the thinks you ask for are supported like WOL and stuff.

cheers
patrick

Post by Dan Carroll
Hello,
I'm thinking of putting together a couple of custom built NAS boxes (4
drive) to use up a plethora of SATA drives I've accumulated.
I'll be running ZFS probably in mirrored or raidz arrangements.
I'd like to be able to get good enough performance so that things like
iSCSI are viable over my home-office lan (gigabit lan with less than 20
devices).
Does anyone have any suggestions on what chipset / motherboard might
have reasonable IO performance? I'd prefer not to go into this
endeavour only to find out my disk access grinds to a halt when the
motherboard needs to talk to the network.
Things like WOL, low power usage and small form factor are also
important. Hopefully I'm not asking too much of the micro ATX form factor.
Any ideas?
-Dan
_______________________________________________
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware

Dan Carroll

2012-12-05 02:01:41 UTC

Permalink

Post by Patrick Heinson
currently we are using an Intel s1200kp
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/server-motherboards/server-board-s1200kp.html
with 8-16GB of Ram.
Performance is with 2x2TB mirror 80-85mb/sec write and 100+mb/sec read.
All the thinks you ask for are supported like WOL and stuff.

Thanks Patrick, this one does look interesting. Could you tell me what
you think of the C206 chipset? Does it seem well supported in FreeBSD?

-D

Patrick Heinson

2012-12-06 11:38:32 UTC

Permalink

Hey Dan,

i am using it for small NAS boxes, Freebsd 8.3 and ZFS, networking works
perfectly and stability is so far good. I like this chipset because i
can use cheap i3 CPUs for my systems. The only bad thing are the 4x Sata
on Board. Would be nice if there were more. The "embedded" features are
kinda cool.

r

Post by Dan Carroll

Thanks Patrick, this one does look interesting. Could you tell me what
you think of the C206 chipset? Does it seem well supported in FreeBSD?
-D
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Dan Carroll

2012-12-06 14:18:11 UTC

Permalink

Hey,

It looks like you could get a basic HBA in there with the PCI Express slot.

-D

Post by Patrick Heinson
Hey Dan,
i am using it for small NAS boxes, Freebsd 8.3 and ZFS, networking works
perfectly and stability is so far good. I like this chipset because i
can use cheap i3 CPUs for my systems. The only bad thing are the 4x Sata
on Board. Would be nice if there were more. The "embedded" features are
kinda cool.
r

Post by Dan Carroll

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http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware