Anyone using C3xxx atom yet?

[southwow]

Anyone have any feedback positive or negative? They're no longer new, so I'd expect all of the bugs like we saw with the C2000 series are worked out?

I'd be going for one of the 16-core/thread boards with lots of registered memory and 2.5" drives and SSD's for a few virtual hosts.

 

[Chris Moore]

If 2.5 inch drives, which model were you thinking? Some drives are unsuitable for ZFS.


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[warllo]

@Chris Moore

What characteristics, if any would make a 2.5" SAS enterprise drive unsuitable for use with ZFS?

Just trying to educate myself here.

Thanks!

 

[Chris Moore]

What characteristics, if any would make a 2.5" SAS enterprise drive unsuitable for use with ZFS?

The OP did not say SAS and they did not say Enterprise. Either of those would modify the statement such that it was wholly different in character.
The typical request, when referencing a low power board such as the OP inquired about, is considering laptop style drives, not enterprise server drives.
In the laptop 2.5" drive category, most vendors are using some SMR (shingled magnetic recording) technology to increase density. This works well enough, I suppose, when it is in a laptop. The drives I have tested, Seagate ST1000LM048 (1 TB) and ST2000LM015 (2 TB) had absolutely abysmal performance which only got worse when attempting to use them in an ARRAY.
This abysmal performance is also true of the 3.5" drives that are using SMR. Seagate is also not clearly stating when they are using SMR in their drives. Sometimes, on some drives, they say it clearly, on other drives, they use the technology and don't say, and hope nobody notices.

The only brand of laptop drives that are not using SMR (yet) is Toshiba. If you are trying to build small, low power, and quiet, that would be the way to go. Enterprise SAS drives tend to be louder and take more power, but that is just my observation.

 

[Chris Moore]

Anyone have any feedback positive or negative? They're no longer new, so I'd expect all of the bugs like we saw with the C2000 series are worked out?

I'd be going for one of the 16-core/thread boards with lots of registered memory and 2.5" drives and SSD's for a few virtual hosts.

I think I saw a build thread about one of those a few months back. I don't recall there being any problems with the board except possibly with getting the network driver, but we have a new version of BSD since then, if I recall correctly, so you might be good to go.
Still, I would stick to version FreeNAS-11.1-U6 because the 11.2 is a "Release Candidate" and still has some bugs.

 

[southwow]

If 2.5 inch drives, which model were you thinking? Some drives are unsuitable for ZFS.


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

@Chris Moore I already have several of these seagate spinpoint drives (believe I have 5 or 6 laying around):
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152290

There are probably several 500gig to 750gig toshiba, wd, and fujitsu drives laying around as well.

I had several in a car pc's a few years ago for media.

I'll probably stick with seagate 5400 RPM unless I can find something enterprise class that is affordable.

I'd be running 11.1 for sure, not messing with pre-release builds. I've always wanted to build something with 2.5's and possibly migrate to SSD's eventually. Like, literally since the late 90's before SAS existed and 2.5" drives were in datacenters.

I think I read the thread you're talking about, but don't recall the OP actually pulling the trigger and buying the board. I'd be onboard for buying a mini from IX if they end up using the higher end denverton boards.

I see that the 8 core c3000 boards are actually cheaper from the c2750 and c2758 depending on where you're shopping. I've been perfectly happy with my c2750, but I wish it could handle 64GB or more and had more cores. The VM's are relatively small, but need a lot of RAM and tax the system when they're running (teamcity, and other development tools).