I am coming to the conclusion that it was a waste of money to buy more memory (fortunately used, on eBay) for this A8N-E board to run FreeNAS.
1. The max of 4GB is the bare minimum for ZFS and doesn't allow prefetch.
2. As has already been reported and verified, it is impossible to get the networking running at Gigabit speeds.
3. Now that I have already ordered an Intel PCIe NIC for it, I have noticed that it reports only 1.5Gb/s disk transfer speeds (SATA 1.x ). I know that I saw SATA II transfer speeds when I had Windows running on this board, because the speed jumped up when I removed the speed-limiting jumpers from the drive I was using at the time. The new drives I bought are SATA III, and I realized that I could expect only SATA II speeds until I upgraded the other hardware later on (and I bought them as much for the longer warranty as for the greater speed), but to see only SATA I speeds is extremely disappointing.
1. The max of 4GB is the bare minimum for ZFS and doesn't allow prefetch.
2. As has already been reported and verified, it is impossible to get the networking running at Gigabit speeds.
3. Now that I have already ordered an Intel PCIe NIC for it, I have noticed that it reports only 1.5Gb/s disk transfer speeds (SATA 1.x ). I know that I saw SATA II transfer speeds when I had Windows running on this board, because the speed jumped up when I removed the speed-limiting jumpers from the drive I was using at the time. The new drives I bought are SATA III, and I realized that I could expect only SATA II speeds until I upgraded the other hardware later on (and I bought them as much for the longer warranty as for the greater speed), but to see only SATA I speeds is extremely disappointing.