Rebuilding my NAS

[Daveburt714]

My current NAS is using a BioStar E-350 (embedded mobo), with 4x WD Black 1tb drives (NAS4FREE/raid 5).
I have a little over 1tb of free space left on it even though it contains LOTS of content (100+ HD Movie rips and 1000's of songs)...
So space isn't really a problem yet. I have noticed that transfer rates seem a little slow compared to when I send files directly from one rig to another though.
In general, read/write speeds from the NAS are about 1/2 what they are when going directly from 1 machine to the other (850 Mbps vs 400 Mpbs to the NAS).
It's never been a problem. I can stream HD content from the NAS to multiple machines without hiccups...

I'm rambling a little, so let me get to the point.

I noticed today that MicroCenter has the Kabini 5350 25w quad core (2 module) for $60:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/4...oxed_Processor
No AM1 mobo's yet though (hopefully they'll show up soon)...

I'm thinking this upgrade may solve the speed bottleneck when uploading to the NAS (plus the power savings).
Waiting 2 minutes to upload an 8gb file is just too long!!!

Thoughts?
Dave

[Darakian]

Should be a bump up. If it's never been a problem I don't think you have a pressing need to upgrade, but enjoy if you do :P

[FlanK3r]

I heard good words about Kabini...And BF4 is playable with GPU in slot

[Andi64]

Nice find Daveburt,

That CPU should speed things up. Is there any AM1 board with 6 SATA, or maybe 2 LAN with a free PCIe? That way you could expand the RAID later. I'm not sure about RAID5 on NAS4FREE, but with RAIDZ1 on FreeNAS you need to save at least 20% free space if you want performance.

My FreeNAS build is similar to yours, with 4 1TB WD Blue on RAIDZ1 and 2x1Gbps LAN. On Windows with only one uplink I get ~880Mbps, and with my ESXi servers with iSCSI the bandwidth goes up to ~1600Mbps. Not ideal, but considering that it has Realtek NICs is quite good.

My NAS has a Pentium G2030, 3Ghz, with a Areca 1220, but even without the RAID card the performance was identical, so it looks like you have a bottleneck somewhere... and that E350 is not so good.

[Daveburt714]

Nice find Daveburt,

That CPU should speed things up. Is there any AM1 board with 6 SATA, or maybe 2 LAN with a free PCIe? That way you could expand the RAID later. I'm not sure about RAID5 on NAS4FREE, but with RAIDZ1 on FreeNAS you need to save at least 20% free space if you want performance.

I haven't seen any boards for sale yet, but it looks like sata ports may be a problem (again). I'm just using software raid, and the BioStar only had 3 sata ports.
I gave it a shot and bought one of these add on cards for the extra ports:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/3...PCIe_Host_Card
It works really well and was recognized by Nas4Free without any problems building the array. The end result was 2.7tb free after formatting.

So far the best looking option for me would seem to be the ASrock m-ITX board:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AM1B-ITX/
At least it has 4 sata's so I could run the raid strictly off the boards ports. This might help performance too...

Sure would be nice if there was a decent ITX for socket AM1 with 6x sata and an Intel NIC.
This seems like a nice platform for NAS builds, hopefully some board mfg will see that and build an ITX with that use in mind...

[AbortRetryFail?]

Anandtech Kabini Desktop Review

POV-Ray & CineBench
No HTPC, NAS or STB benchies .... one slide from AMD with the comment, "Like Kaveri, the integrated graphics solution in Kabini features an updated Video Codec Engine and Unified Video Decoder giving hardware support for H.264."

The level of Dumb at tech sites these days is incredible.

[Darakian]

Has anyone seen a dual nic mobo? I could use a new router. As for the HTPC stuff it should fair pretty well. Brazos got decent on linux after the open source driver team at AMD picked up vdpau. Under windows it should render any video you have. Also, I agree on the level of stupid. No one is going to run POV ray on a 25 watt chip

[FlanK3r]

next review:
http://diit.cz/clanek/amd-athlon-535...1300kc-v-testu

My 5150 for test

[Andi64]

I really like this board: http://www.biostar.com.tw/upload/Mot...20140313_8.jpg

It fits perfectly on a Bitfenix Prodigy/Phenom ITX for a nice looking NAS
You can fit a PCIe 1Gbps NIC and have room for a RAID card for 6 3.5" HDD and 2 2.5" SDD cache Lovely.

[justapost]

That anadtech review has an amd slide which says there is an maximum of 2xsata 2/3 ports. On the other hand the asrock mobo comes with four ports and does not provide separate sata drivers to download means to me that they do not use an asmedia chip or such for the additional two ports.
Update: Board uses indeed an asmedia chip for the additional two sata ports had onyl checked windows 8 drivers but it was listed on the win7 download page.

[Daveburt714]

The fun begins!

I've assembled all the parts for the build. Too bad I have to leave for works in 1/2 an hour...

Anyway, Thought I'd update real quick.

Parts list:
AMD 5350 AM1 socket CPU
ASRock AM1B-ITX Motherboard
Seasonic 300w 80+ Bronze power supply
3x WD Red (NAS) drives 3tb each
Fractal Node 304 M-ITX case
1x 4gb stick of GEIL 1866 mem (good stick from bad 8gb kit)

Here's a pic of the components:


Oh well.... Off to work...

[justapost]

That case looks goor, like the way disks are mounted. But if you plan to use FreeNas you should use an system with ECC ram, freenas uses zfs which preferes alot of memory and the deveopers of zfs always recommend ecc memory if you care about your data. Nothing beats G7 HP Micro servers (N54L) with 2x8GB ecc ram for an cheap zfs fileserver atm. ;-)

[Daveburt714]

Finally got everything together and running.
I played with ZFS a little, but the learning curve was pretty steep and as luck would have it one of my drives crashed on the old nas...
I wound up just using Nas4Free (software) Raid5 on the new box. Didn't really need anything fancy anyway. I also pulled the bad drive from the old box and put a 3tb disk in it's place and set it up as JBOD for backups. I won't leave it on all the time, I'll just use it to backup the new machine (sizes are about the same).

Anyway, I'm really happy with this new set up! Speeds are much faster and power consumption is actually a little better.
I forgot to take pics, but idle was ~24w and load was ~45w from the wall (system draw).

Here's a few pics from the build:



16oz beer can for size reference:


New nas in place with the rebuilt old one on the left:


Finally, the best part. Some speed numbers (about 2x what I was getting with the old E-350 nas):




I'm really happy with this build! The case is small and sleek, power consumption is down and transfer speeds almost doubled...
Plus there's plenty of room for expansion down the road if needed.

BTW: I swapped that 4gb kit of mem out for the single 4gb stick of Geil for the final assembly. The 5350 doesn't support dual channel memory anyway.

[justapost]

Power consumption looks good. N54L with four disks and an additional entry leve adaptec hw raid controller requires ~40W idle here. Gotta give nas4free an try on one of these three N54L's sitting here before i put them in production. I use zfs on my office fileserver, it's snapshot features are nice, you can use them to keep an backup disk in sync by transfering and applying just the differences betwenn snapshots. have you seen the comparison between old phenom I 9500 and the 5350 at phoronix, the later is usually abit faster at an quarter of the power. I need ecc and remote management for my storage and offsite office servers here so am1 is no option for me, otherwise it looks tempting. Thanks for the pictures and number davenburt!

[NKrader]

just shy of twice my speed from my main to my fileserver!
(NOraid RE4 drive)

[Daveburt714]

Power consumption looks good. N54L with four disks and an additional entry leve adaptec hw raid controller requires ~40W idle here. Gotta give nas4free an try on one of these three N54L's sitting here before i put them in production. I use zfs on my office fileserver, it's snapshot features are nice, you can use them to keep an backup disk in sync by transfering and applying just the differences betwenn snapshots. have you seen the comparison between old phenom I 9500 and the 5350 at phoronix, the later is usually abit faster at an quarter of the power. I need ecc and remote management for my storage and offsite office servers here so am1 is no option for me, otherwise it looks tempting. Thanks for the pictures and number davenburt!

Hi just,
If you have an extra N54L you should try Nas4Free. I'm not very familiar with Linux but N4F wasn't that hard to work with...
It supports the newest version of ZFS (5000?). I hear a lot of people say that ZFS is the way to go, but since I'm not a Linux guy I just didn't have the patience to learn all the skills needed for it.
Plus, for a simple home media server the software RAID5 serves my needs quite well without an add on Raid card.

I actually have the OS embedded on a bootable USB flash drive (that boots back up automatically) in case of a power failure, and I can access it from any other machine on my network via a WebGUI.
Basically the machine just sits on the network with nothing but the data drives and a USB flash for the OS (no monitor, keyboard or mouse).
Any changes to the NAS can be made from a remote machine just by entering it's IP address from a remote web browser!

I really need to take the time to understand Linux better...
For user supported (free) software it's actually very nice, fast and power efficient!
Pretty sure I'm barely scratching the surface of it's capabilities as well...

That "snapshot" feature sounds awesome, and would be really useful in my case...
I know your skilled bud! Maybe if you play with it you can teach me some new tricks.