C2750D4I FreeNas 9.2 Supported or Not Supported?

[cadamwil]

Hello,
I am relatively new to FreeNas and I really want to build a NAS that is as small as possible, as quiet as possible and hopefully doesn't eat power. I currently own a retired from production Dell 2900 that I was going to make into a NAS, but I have decided that it is too big, loud and power hungry. I really want to build the following. But I have concerns over the processor working with FreeBSD / FreeNAS 9.2 as I have seen several things that indicate it wasn't working in 9.1.

Case: SilverStone DS380 - 8 3.5" Hot swap bays and 3x 120mm fans, should be quiet and it is small.
Mobo: AsRock C2750D4I Why? Ram capacity in Mini-ITX
Ram: Kingston 4x 8GB DDR3 1600 Unregistered ECC KVR16E11K4/32
Power Supply: Silverstone SFX45-G
Hard Drives: 4x WD 4TB Reds

Has anyone done any testing with the C2750D4I? If not, does anyone have a Mini-ITX motherboard that will support 32GB+ of ECC Ram?

Adam

 

[Cyanon]

I can't help with the the issue of the motherboard's compatibility unfortunately, although it looks very enticing if it is.. out of curiosity why the C2750 and not ASRock C2550D4I? Looking at the specs, unless I'm missing something it seems the exact same board with 4 cores, instead of 8.. and 8 is a waste on a NAS unless you're running other processes.

 

[jgreco]

As an early adopter it'll be hard to guess that correctly. There is an argument to be made that as a less-powerful platform, there is a greater chance of hitting peak usage on four cores, in which case the faster unit is better. Also, extra cores go nicely with jails, etc.

As someone who is often making the difficult choice between less-nice A and nicer B, I usually choose B unless the cost differential is prohibitive (like the difference between G2020 and E3-1230).

When buying a board with integrated CPU, the smart money tends to be on the nicer board especially if there's a chance you might do something more with it, or if there's a possibility you would end up using the board for something else.

 

[Cyanon]

This YouTube video of a FreeNAS 9.1.1 boot shows it crashing, I believe
Here are last few lines of it at the end:

NMI ISA 30, EISA 0
NMI ... going to debugger
[ thread pid0 tid 100000]
Stopped at uma_zfree_arg+0x28: testq %rax,%rax
db>

Seems like it might not be compatible from that, but then I look at this review of the C2750 and it says FreeNAS 9.1.1 is part of their test suite. Reading through it though they don't say anything about running anything other than the the remote management software in the article though, so I'm not sure what to make of it.

 

[jgreco]

Right, we've all seen that, but Kennedy put basically no discernable effort into it. Any of us who have dealt with early adoption of a new platform are used to having to debug some problems. Since he hasn't put in any effort, that's just as useless as a Youtube cat video - except that the cat video, at least that can be entertaining.

 

[cadamwil]

I might use the C2550 based board. I just thought the octo vs quad core might give me slightly better performance. Anyway, when I check the Asrock spec page, they list FreeBSD 9.1 as supported, which I would think would mean FreeNAS would run on it. Is that not true?

 

[jgreco]

I expect it can be made to run, but it may require a little tweaking. I don't have a better answer for you at this time. Basically someone has to buy one AND maybe do some basic problem-solving, possibly involving us here, or the FreeBSD team, or AsRock support. I would be shocked if it could not be made to work, which is why I am a bit annoyed by the useless video above.

 

[vitek]

I stumbled on this this tweet: https://twitter.com/FPiednoel/status/416625169398919168
Great news?

 

[jgreco]

Seems that way to me. Now for the 16GB UDIMM's...!

 

[cadamwil]

I stumbled on this this tweet: https://twitter.com/FPiednoel/status/416625169398919168
Great news?

Woot!! Thanks for finding that. The googlefu is strong with you.

Jgreco, let me know if you find them. Asrock lists Mephis Ram, but I can't find any retailers with them. I wonder how long until Crucial/Micron or Kingston has RAM available in 16GB unregistered ECC?

 

[jgreco]

Jgreco, let me know if you find them. Asrock lists Mephis Ram, but I can't find any retailers with them. I wonder how long until Crucial/Micron or Kingston has RAM available in 16GB unregistered ECC?

I inferred that Memphis was working on them. From a recent manufacturer sock puppet appearance:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/new-16gb-dimms-bring-asrock-c2750d4i-to-64gb.16994/

I expect the trajectory is availability in a few months, at a ridiculous price, followed by a gradual decline and maybe reasonable pricing in a year. So my interpretation is: in the short term, just get 32GB and be done with it. I am blessed with having enough things to currently occupy my time without having to take on new challenges, so any excuse not to go out and buy a 2750, 64GB, and make myself the ultimate ZFS iSCSI appliance is rather welcome.

 

[engmsf]

Intel® Avoton C2750 Octa-Core Processor
DDR3 1600/1333 Dual-channel Max. 64GB
2 SATA3 6.0Gbps, 4 SATA2 3.0Gbps by C2750
4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9230, 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s by Marvell SE9172
Dual Intel® i210 Gigabit LAN ports (with Teaming function)

Does anyone know if the Marvel Se9230 and SE9172 are supported by FreeNAS?

 

[forfiter]

I just received my motherboard yesterday, assembled it with 4 x 8GB Kingston 1600Mhz RAM, connected 6 Segate 4TB NAS drives to sata3 ports spreaded between two controllers and I can confirm that FreeNAS 9.2 booted from iso attached via iKVM and installed on a USB stick without any issues. The network was up on igb devices, the disks were visible and the system installed just fine and booted afterwards.

It is a bit slow, given the lack of usb 3.0 on the mother board, but initial tests are showing write speeds of 50Mb/s over the network to the raidz2 setup. Any questions?

 

[jgreco]

That's an AWESOME first post. Thanks for the info, welcome to the forum, and please let us know about any further observations you have!

 

[Cyanon]

That's great to hear you had no installations issues, I plan on getting one soon myself.
I'm surprised the network speeds are so low though, I get 90-110 MBPS copying to/from my desktop via a CIFS share
with my current NAS setup (amd chip, 16gb ram 6 HDD - 4x2 4TB-WDRed raidz2, and no FreeNAS tweaks.

Bad network cord maybe? I found during my tests my ethernet cable was faulty, although I was only getting ~11 MBPS (was in 100mbitps mode).

edit:

You might want to test the hard drive copy speed on the server, just to make sure the hard drives speeds are alright. I was getting 400MB per second with dd to my zfs pool if I remember right.

Do you have the dual nics set up as a team?

 

[forfiter]

Thanks, and yeah, hi ;)

Here are some other random thoughts:

* the iKVM/IPMI feature is awesome, allowed me to make installation without owning a monitor and keyboard for years, although there are some issues with Java with it (at least on Mac) - it works under Firefox, fails under Safari and Chrome, is clumsy, requires number of confirmation (YES, I want to run this app!) but then works ideally for remote iso mounting

* I dont have any active cooling on the CPU radiator, it is installed as it came, and the idle CPU temperature in quite tightly packed Fractal Design Node 304 case is ~50C for CPU and ~45C for the motherboard

* there is hardware AES-NI support and GELI seems to be seeing it without any issues

* kldload vmm worked just fine, and I was able to launch FreeBSD 10-R guest when I was playing with FreeBSD 10-R host before installing FreeNAS 9.2 on it, so hopefully we'll get to play with bhyve when FreeNAS 10 is out

* the motherboard is easily updateable (both BIOS and BMC) via the iKVM - mine came quite outdated, but the update for both went just fine

 

[forfiter]

That's great to hear you had no installations issues, I plan on getting one soon myself.
I'm surprised the network speeds are so low though, I get 90-110 MBPS copying to/from my desktop via a CIFS share
with my current NAS setup (amd chip, 16gb ram 6 HDD - 4x2 4TB-WDRed raidz2, and no FreeNAS tweaks.

Bad network cord maybe? I found during my tests my ethernet cable was faulty, although I was only getting ~11 MBPS (was in 100mbitps mode).

edit:

You might want to test the hard drive copy speed on the server, just to make sure the hard drives speeds are alright. I was getting 400MB per second with dd to my zfs pool if I remember right.

Do you have the dual nics set up as a team?

That was just a random quick test done over AFP share - I will test that further, including GELI encryption on raidz2 with 6 disks, raidz2 on 7 disks (yes, I think I can squeese 7th drive inside!) and raidz3 on 7 disks. I will also make the test connected directly to the NAS without any switches/routers between, and no, I do not have network aggregation set up - yet.

 

[forfiter]

Here are some dd benchmarks from pure 10.0-R. As you can see, they're quite random when it comes to the results, something I will have to look into that closely:

root@nas:~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/test bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 22.975814 secs (373868563 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/test2 bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 15.624966 secs (549757005 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/test3 bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 13.415991 secs (640275825 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/test4 bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 22.009503 secs (390282990 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/test5 bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 11.390747 secs (754115120 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # dd if=/storage/test2 of=/storage/test6 bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 42.744357 secs (200960669 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # dd if=/storage/test2 of=/storage/test7 bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 37.776800 secs (227386507 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/test8 bs=1M count=8192
8192+0 records in
8192+0 records out
8589934592 bytes transferred in 16.890414 secs (508568623 bytes/sec)
root@nas:~ # zpool status storage
pool: storage
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
storage ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada3 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada4 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada5 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors
root@nas:~ #

 

[Cyanon]

That was just a random quick test done over AFP share - I will test that further, including GELI encryption on raidz2 with 6 disks, raidz2 on 7 disks (yes, I think I can squeese 7th drive inside!) and raidz3 on 7 disks. I will also make the test connected directly to the NAS without any switches/routers between, and no, I do not have network aggregation set up - yet.

Ah, ok seems good then.. and yea, the shorter tests tend to vary a bit.

 

[jgreco]

You want to make sure all compression is off too.