AMD E-350 Thread (now in new forum?)

[KingsX]

KingsX
FreeNAS Version: FreeNAS 8.0.1 RC1
Case: 2U rackmounted X-Case RM 206 LP V3
PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA 430D Green 430W
Motherboard: Asus E35M1-I Deluxe Fusion
Memory: 2x A-Data 4GB CL9 1333Mhz (8GB total)
Boot Device: A-Data N005 16GB USB 3.0
Network Card(s):Internal Realtek 8111E
Expansion Card(s): ST Lab S-ATA II PCIe 4-channels
Disk(s): 9x 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green
Configuration: RAID-Z1

Performance:
CIFS: Around 50MB/s up/down
FTP: Maxes my gigabit eth

Code:

nas# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/NAS-Storage/tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 390.461673 secs (274992886 bytes/sec)

Code:

nas# dd if=/mnt/NAS-Storage/tmp.dat of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 347.368826 secs (309107134 bytes/sec)

Issues:
Sometimes the USB3 interface doesn't start with the BIOS so I have to run my USB stick in a USB2 port. Don't know if USB3 boot is supported from ASUS but works occasionally.
Memory problem with Corsair memories and bought A-data sticks instead.
__________________________________________________ ______________________

 

[thezlog]

Hey everyone, thank you for putting all this information here. It's very helpful.

I've been looking at going with this motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131732

Asus Link: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_CPU_on_Board/E35M1I/

The main reason is that it has 6 onboard SATA ports over the Deluxe model's 5. Are there any considerations I should know about? I know I'll be losing the USB 3.0, but I honestly do not think it will get any use in this system. 100% of traffic will, of course, be through the network. I'd like to pair it with 6 2TB HDDs with the ability to later add a controller card for more drives if needed/wanted.

Link to Deluxe: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_CPU_on_Board/E35M1I_DELUXE/

EDIT: Also have a question for Bob and anyone else using the Fractal Array 2 Case - How has it been? Is it quiet? Could you have it sitting in your living room or bedroom and leave it on at all times? Thanks!

Thanks all!

 

[tropic]

I bought the Asus E35M1-I to replace the Intel DH67BL/Core i7 I was using for my FreeNAS 8 experiment. It's a well-built board, stable, and the passive cooling works fine under load even with light airflow. The BIOS is uncluttered and capable once you put it in advanced mode. That extra internal SATA 6.0 GB/s port is more vauable to me than USB 3.0, WiFi and Bluetooth on the Deluxe edition.

The only design quibble I have is that the 4-pin 12V jack is positioned flush at the edge of the board with the clip side facing outward--it can be hard or impossible to plug the 4-pin 12V cable into the jack in some computer cases. I took a hacksaw to the corner of the top 120mm fan in a Lian Li PC-A04B MicroATX case to make enough room for the power cable. The same jack on the Deluxe model is rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, so no biggie there.

A very minor complaint is that the leads for the PLED jack are adjacent, so PLED connectors with an empty middle socket will not fit natively.

So, performance... meh. The E35M1-I lasted 24 hours in my NAS box before I yanked it and put the Core i7 back in there. CIFS performance was about 35-40 MB/s slower with the E-350/8GB RAM/82572EI NIC Vs. the Core i7/16 GB RAM/82572EI NIC, and the CPU was pegged at 50% load indicating that a single thread wasn't going to get any more juice than that. Not a fair competition, but there it is.

Anyway, the Asus E35M1-I set me back 125 USD. Right now it's sitting in a Lian Li PC-Q08B and doing a credible job hosting one Win7 and a few Linux VMs. It's a great low-power board if you don't need more grunt than it can provide.

 

[thezlog]

Thanks for the information. Your results do not sound typical, though. According to other posts here you should have been getting better performance. Did you try much trouble shooting in that 24-hour period?

 

[tropic]

I dunno. I don't see many posts of E-350 systems doing sustained +70 MB/s writes, which was the ceiling for CIFS on my E35M1-I with multi-gigabyte files.

As for troubleshooting I didn't do anything other than the usual enabling Large RW / Sendfile / AIO. Speeds actually dropped when I created an LACP LAG with the onboard RTL8111E and an Intel 82572EI. I would love to see someone explain how to reliably coax +100 MB/s CIFS transfers out of an E-350 rig. I'd much prefer to use the E35M1-I as my NAS and free up the i7 for more demanding applications.

Sorry I don't have any screenshots of the E35M1-I in action, but I've attached one from the Core i7 build for reference. Please don't think I'm insulting the E-350 APUs. They're just don't have (in my brief experience) enough kick for my needs.

 

[thezlog]

Even if you were insulting them, that's fine by me :) Might I talk you into posting the system build you have? If it is the difference from 70MB/s to 100MB/s or higher than I might consider going with an i3 or something. It'd be nice to save power, but I live in a rural area and even with 3 computers running all the time we don't go over the "minimum" bill for our utilities so I won't be heartbroken if the configuration i got with uses more power.

Ahh, I wrote that forgetting that you included the information in your post above. Thanks again for the feedback!

 

[rupshall]

Hey everyone, thank you for putting all this information here. It's very helpful.

I've been looking at going with this motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131732

Asus Link: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_CPU_on_Board/E35M1I/

The main reason is that it has 6 onboard SATA ports over the Deluxe model's 5. Are there any considerations I should know about? I know I'll be losing the USB 3.0, but I honestly do not think it will get any use in this system. 100% of traffic will, of course, be through the network. I'd like to pair it with 6 2TB HDDs with the ability to later add a controller card for more drives if needed/wanted.

Link to Deluxe: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_CPU_on_Board/E35M1I_DELUXE/

EDIT: Also have a question for Bob and anyone else using the Fractal Array 2 Case - How has it been? Is it quiet? Could you have it sitting in your living room or bedroom and leave it on at all times? Thanks!

Thanks all!

I have been flip flopping between the same 2 boards for my build, from reading this thread it seems that most people seem to be going with the DELUXE, I have been leaning towards the non DELUXE myself.

I see the 6xSATA > USB 3.0 ... I think???

My question is regarding the boot device ... I was planning to use a USB boot device, can anybody comment on the speed/benifets of a USB 2.0 boot device vs. USB 3.0 boot device?

Thanks!

p.s. this thread has been very informative :)

 

[thezlog]

I understand that 6 drives is better for ZRAID2, right? thats my thought. However I may decide to go with ZRAID1 for better performance, and 5 drives i think is optimal for that.... not sure :\

 

[golemcito]

Hi

Another interesting MOBO

What cpu would you use? A high I3 or a low I5?

I´m lost because my test machine is an AMD Phenom 1090T, 8Gb RAM and under CIFS I can´t get speeds over 30MB/sec under the last FreeNAS RC release :-(

 

[thezlog]

That might be due to your network adapter... which are you using?

EDIT I'd likely go with an i3-2120 or entry-level i5.

 

[golemcito]

That might be due to your network adapter... which are you using?

EDIT I'd likely go with an i3-2120 or entry-level i5.

It is an Intel Pro 1000PT. And i don´t know what to do or to check...

 

[thezlog]

I bought the Asus E35M1-I to replace the Intel DH67BL/Core i7 I was using for my FreeNAS 8 experiment......

Hey Tropic, one last question for you when you have a moment: Which i7 chip are you running? The more I think about it, the more I want to ensure that I obtain some speeds like you're getting :P lol

 

[tropic]

My rig wasn't supposed to be a NAS. It was originally a hypervisor in my home lab. I took out the RAID controller and threw in some HDDs to give FreeNAS 8 a try. One thing it has in its favor is a lack of Realtek NICs.

Intel Core i7-2600K CPU
Intel DH67BL MicroATX MB
16 GB Kingston DDR3-1333 RAM
5 x Samsung HD204UI HDDs in RAID-z
Intel 82579V (onboard) & Intel 82572EI (PCI-e) NICs
Corsair HX620 PSU
Lian Li PC-A04B MicroATX Mini-tower

 

[creepwood]

without tweaking

creepwood
FreeNAS Version: FreeNAS 8.0.1 RC1
Case: Fractal Design Array R3
PSU: Corsair CX430
Motherboard: ASUS E35M1-M
Memory: 2x Corsair Memory — 4GB DDR3 1333MHz (8GB total)
Boot Device: Kingston Datatraveler 100 G2 4GB
Network Card(s):Internal Realtek 8111E
Disk(s): 4x 2TB WD Green (WD20EARS)
Configuration: RAID-Z1

Performance:
CIFS: Around 75MB/s read, around 52MB/s write

Code:

nas#  dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/panda/testfile bs=2M count=25000
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
52428800000 bytes transferred in 322.167523 secs (162737695 bytes/sec)

 

[thezlog]

Tropic, do you ping the CPU very high during reads/writes? I'd imagine that a 2600k is a little over the top and that you are probably bottlenecking on the gigabit's cap throughput with those specs. I'm wondering where the line in the sand is so to speak before performance would start being affected by lower-end/lower power CPUs. I may buy all my parts online but get the processor locally so that I can experiment (aka easy returns if it's not fast enough). I might start with an i3-2120 and see how that goes.

 

[tropic]

I dunno. It looks like one of the cores is maxing out. I wonder whether a high-GHz i3 can do a comparable job. Sadly, I have no i3 or i5 to test with. I have a few different flavors of i7; then it's a step down to an E6600.

I'll try the Core 2 Duo this weekend and shotgun a couple of Intel CT adapters to see what it can do (only 8GB RAM, though).

This should probably be done in another thread. :)

 

[golemcito]

Wow, thank you for your tests.

But if we need an I7 to maximize a Gigabit Lan under FreeNAS...this is not a good business

 

[Durkatlon]

Two systems here on FreeNAS8, slightly different motherboards.

System 1:
Board: Asus E35M1-I Deluxe
Memory: Kingston KVR1333D3N9K2/8G DIMM (total 8GB)
Drives: 2x1.5TB Seagate Barracuda Green (ST1500DL003-9VT16L) in ZFS mirror config.

System 2:
Board: Asus E35M1-I
Memory: Kingston KVR1333D3N9K2/8G Low-Profile DIMM (total 8GB)
Drives: 2x1.5 TB Western Digital Caviar Green in ZFS mirror config. One is a WD15EARS-00MVWB0 and one is a WD15EADS-00R6B0. I have the ZFS volume set up to use 4096 byte sector size.

Both systems:
Boot Device: Maxell Onyx 4GB USB stick
Case: Chenbro ES34069-BK-180
OS: FreeNAS-8.0.1-BETA4-amd64

The low-profile RAM is nice because the DIMMs are only as tall as the clips that hold them in, so it's easier to maneuver the board in a tight case. I ordered the same RAM in bother orders to NewEgg but got the low-profile in one case and full-height in the other. It looks like perhaps Kingston went to a different form-factor for this model number?

In retrospect I wouldn't have bought the "Deluxe" motherboard if I'd known of the existence of the non-Deluxe version earlier (I was aware of the "Pro" but that's not a mini-ITX). I don't need all the extra outputs because this is a storage box, not a media PC. I have no use for HDMI or even DVI, nor Wifi and Bluetooth. The non-Deluxe board is $50 cheaper and it comes with a VGA port which means easy setup with old monitor I just have sitting around. The Deluxe board looks cooler with the massive heatsink and heatpipes all over the place though :D.

 

[Heire]

I recently bought also my own new Freenas system based on the AMD platform.

Heire
FreeNAS Version: FreeNAS 8.0.1 RC1
Case: Antec Two Hundred V2
PSU: be quiet! Pure Power 350W
Motherboard: ASUS E35M1-M
Memory: Kingston ValueRAM 8 GB DDR3-1333 Kit (2x4GB)
Boot Device: Kingston Datatraveler 100 G2 4GB
Network Card(s):Internal Realtek 8111E
Disk(s): 3x Western Digital WD20EARX
Configuration: RAID-Z1

Performance:
CIFS: around 60-70MB/s write, didn't tested the read as my main pc is not directly wired to my nas anymore.

[nas@freenas ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/Bigdisk/testfile bs=2M count=25000
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
52428800000 bytes transferred in 303.399765 secs (172804353 bytes/sec)

Overall so far I can't complain, most things work out of the box :)

 

[thezlog]

Wow, thank you for your tests.

But if we need an I7 to maximize a Gigabit Lan under FreeNAS...this is not a good business

That's why we're chattering about trying some stuff out. It'd be great to know the "budget line", as in the cheapest route one can take to take full advantage of gigabit. The system (before drives) I'm looking at prices out at $439 (without any rebates or deals). I'm confident it could be had for $400 or less (before drives).

I'll start another post for this actually. Sorry we went OT.

Thread here: http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?2261-The-Quest-Cheapest-route-to-full-gigabit-utilization