Can you get S.M.A.R.T info ?

[Black Ninja]

I think I'd rather use one of my older machines over buying a new machine. I know even a cheap machine will still cost a lot.

That's true. You can do that to. It's just that the newer hardware is the most power efficient. Otherwise you can get very cheap Poweredge 2950 but will burn 200W on a light load, you know what I mean. But if you have something low power, then sure. You don't need to burn more that 30W for nice router.

I got it down to 22W in server chassis Atom C2758 with 16 RAM and single ssd. I feel that's as low as possible for 8 core machine that can handle probably 3-4 Gbit of Internet traffic. I really put the efficiency as very very important goal.

 

[joeschmuck]

I have my test rig, it's a bit overkill for a firewall though but it's energy efficient. I have several other machines that would be fine too but I think I'm going to need to test out performance and power consumption. Maybe something to do today?

 

[Black Ninja]

It will be interesting to see. Share the hardware and the power consumption of the final system.


P.S. Ooo I almost forgot. After long consideration I end up with the best choice for your raid controller: LSI 9271 or LSI9270 . If anyone has a better choice either speak now or keep quiet forever

 

[joeschmuck]

Well I'm having one heck of a time using one of my old systems. It has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with 2GB RAM and I'd think it's perfect except it doesn't like to play. I am thinking the AMD CPU or Motherboard is what's causing it to crash. It appears to crash when trying to access the hard drive and I've tried a SSD and laptop hard drive, same problem each time. MemTest86 had zero failures after 2 passes (I know, that isn't much but I'm going to run it over the night to see what happens). I'm going to try to load the 32 bit version of Sophos to see if that makes any difference but I'm not holding my breath, and it will have to wait until tomorrow. Power consumption would have been close to 70 watts with the power supply I have running it but that was not an official measurement by no means. Maybe I should check the required hardware specs for the UTM.

Say, did you ever figure out how to read that SMART data?

 

[Black Ninja]

When you say "it's perfect except it doesn't like to play" you realize that make it useless. I have no AMD experience since may 20 years ago, but it this will burn 70W , it doesn't matter if you'll make it work , cause it uses too much power. I have some very reliable dell poweredge 860's that run super stable with everything but don't use them cause they idle at 106W. ( unless is temporary usage for maintenance like this few months)
By the way you can still visualize the sophos on the spare machine. You can install ESXI on old machine , then visualized drivers and hardware can make you sophos happier and mora compatible compared to bare metal on bare metal is no so good. But still if hardware is power guzzler then is temporary solution.

It all comes down to opening this wallet of yours you are squeezing so hard


I have not figure the smart yet. That is the last piece of the puzzle , but everything else is already set and running beautiful. I have 8 VM's running on the SSD datastore on the raid card, and it couldn't be better. All new raid drivers installed , I can monitor health from esxi, also can run the windows storage software in VM to gain full control GUI of the raid card. I think after long days and night I figure almost everything , but the SMART. All I need to be able to pull is how much writes on the disk are made and eventually relocation sectors. I know that with drive endurance 8TB a day for 5 years I shouldn't worry about it , but still I don't like being on a dark.

Speaking of endurance I even consider to run my surveillance DVR (VM) on this SSD datastore.

 

[joeschmuck]

By the way you can still visualize the sophos on the spare machine. You can install ESXI on old machine , then visualized drivers and hardware can make you sophos happier and mora compatible compared to bare metal on bare metal is no so good. But still if hardware is power guzzler then is temporary solution.

Agreed. I pulled out my ESXi CD-R and was getting ready to install it yesterday when I just tossed in the towel. I did run MemTest86 all night long and it passed 9 additional times without error. I will give ESXi a test. Also, I think I will look into ordering a new power supply, the one I'm using is a very old 450 watt beast. But the north bridge chip gets up to 178F, the hottest component on the board so I know where that 70 watts of power is doing, it's acting like it's winter and trying to heat up my house.

P.S. Ooo I almost forgot. After long consideration I end up with the best choice for your raid controller: LSI 9271 or LSI9270 .

I'm going to look at that again.

 

[Black Ninja]

But the north bridge chip gets up to 178F, the hottest component on the board so I know where that 70 watts of power is doing, it's acting like it's winter and trying to heat up my house.

I don't know why would you use F for Comp stuff , or any science for that fact , but it seems this is over 80 C. Well this I think is problem. This is way too hot , I think I have my MB thermal shutdown limit to be 80 C. Put a small fan of bigger heat-sink. I wouldn't leave it to be that hot. I have a problem like that with dell small desktop, I put a heatsink on it , but ultimately solve the problem by speeding up fans with software( which I do as last resort, cause when software crashes, overheating is guaranteed)

I'm going to look at that again.

It's comes with "fasthpath" license so you may not need a battery backed cache. But that's a long story.

 

[joeschmuck]

That northbridge chip has always been hot and it does have a heatsink on it. When it's mounted in a case it would have a fan blowing air across it. I may not have time until this weekend to play with the system again, work is very busy and my brain hurts. Most times I don't mind being the answer man but this time I'm not but the answer man. Of course it is my project so they need to come and ask me for answers but OMG, it's only 2 days into it and they have worn me out, but we should be finished by March 2017.

It's comes with "fasthpath" license so you may not need a battery backed cache. But that's a long story.

Not sure what that is, guess I'll have to look it up.

 

[joeschmuck]

Dang, I forgot how much a used LSI 9270-8i cost. Ouch! Since the main reason was to ensure I had the ESXi server boot and bring up the firewall, it may be cheaper for me to buy a dedicated Sophos firewall. If ESXi running my FreeNAS server dies, well I have automated backups for that and none of my stored data would be at risk.

I need to think about this some more. I may end up back to running FreeNAS on my Test Rig and Sophos on a hardware appliance. Then I'd have my ESXi server all freed up to be sold. Hum, I could re-purpose that server as my main computer, things would run nice and fast!

Hey, it's free to dream. Odds are I won't change a thing for a while. My main computer is very good right now so I don't see replacing it anytime soon.

 

[Black Ninja]

Well how much you think it cost on ebay ? I paid $700 for a new one but on ebay you can find for low $200.
And it's not just the backup of the data. See ... you setup you ESXI setup configure t, then you sett your 12 VMs ruining for various purposes (file server, router, firewal, etc.) and all that is sitting on a single datastore. If you have redundancy with the raid card, you just swap the bad disk with new one. You don't have to even reboot, all VM's will keep running as nothing happens, and hot swapping disk is literally what it take, unlike freenas, there is no need to do "replace disk from inside" or anything , raid rad will start rebuild as soon as it detect new disk on the slot where bad one was. Isn't that nice ? No downtime at all.

Hey, it's free to dream. Odds are I won't change a thing for a while. My main computer is very good right now so I don't see replacing it anytime soon.

Do you know what you want ? :)

 

[joeschmuck]

Well how much you think it cost on ebay ? I paid $700 for a new one but on ebay you can find for low $200.

Ouch, $700! Was this for a home/hobby system or work? I could never justify that kind of money for a simple home system. The $200 might leap out of my pocket soon.

Do you have any benchmark tests for the RAID drives? Bootstrap speeds? Right now my system is very slow using the PERC 310H card. The only reason I'd upgrade would be to get a substantial speed increase, and be able to monitor the SSD's for failure and get an email notification.

 

[Black Ninja]

Ouch, $700! Was this for a home/hobby system or work? I could never justify that kind of money for a simple home system. The $200 might leap out of my pocket soon.

Well it depend how you look at it: Would you justify spending thousand of $$ for a car ? If it's not a car that is a taxi cab , meaning you don't directly make money of it , but to get you around to make money ? I use it at home , but it also runs VM's that host files we use for work. So I don't know where it qualify for "work" or "pleasure", but it will safe to say BOTH :)

Do you have any benchmark tests for the RAID drives?

Here they are. I always save my benchmarks and I am glad you ask , cause I wanted to show them off.:)

 

[Black Ninja]

These benchmarks are made from inside a Windows VM. Datastore in on LSI 9271 with 2x Intel DC S3700 800GB in raid1.


P.S. I couldn't ask for better , could I ?

 

[Huib]

You know that moment when you are checking over your shoulder if nobody saw that you tried to close the picture by pressing the X on the screenshot instead of the X of the overlay screen?
Nhaa... It's probably just me....

 

[Black Ninja]

You know that moment when you are checking over your shoulder if nobody saw that you tried to close the picture by pressing the X on the screenshot instead of the X of the overlay screen?
Nhaa... It's probably just me....

And how many clicks did you do before you gave up ?

 

[Huib]

And how many clicks did you do before you gave up ?:)

"just" Once :)
still one time to many though.

 

[joeschmuck]

So I tried both ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 on that old machine, of course 2GB or RAM were not enough and the CPU wasn't good enough. Maybe it's time to scrap that motherboard and CPU. That leaves me with only my test rig which is a bit overkill for Sophos but it will work for now. I don't see me testing out FreeNAS 10 for a few more months anyway so I guess I could put ESXi on it and then move over my Sophos VM. Yea, maybe this weekend.

Thanks for posting the benchmarks. I moved a Windows 7 VM over to the boot mirror SSDs and here is my lousy benchmark listed as Capture.JPG. Capture1.JPG is the same VM running on the FreeNAS iSCSI.

 

[Black Ninja]

Second benchmark is So.. So.., but first is very bad. I'll try to find my benchmark from VM that is on mechanical HDD directly connected to MB. This is on 1TB WD Blue.

P.S. So if your first benchmark is on SSD, that's very bad performance. Not all SSD are equal, as you know. In fact many SSDs are slower than mechanical HDD. Perhaps you'll need better (enterprise) SSD to begin with. I hate to be a bad new bearer to you I really do.

 

[Black Ninja]

I want to show you another benchmark on Enterprise mechanical 15K sas drive. This one is connected to the LSI 9271, because I don't have SAS on my MB, but look at the results from inside the VM. Keep in mind this is mechanical HDD.

 

[joeschmuck]

P.S. So if your first benchmark is on SSD, that's very bad performance. Not all SSD are equal, as you know. In fact many SSDs are slower than mechanical HDD. Perhaps you'll need better (enterprise) SSD to begin with. I hate to be a bad new bearer to you I really do.

It's not the SSD's, it's the PERC H310 card causing the issues. These drives fly when not configured in this manner. It's a pair of Crucial M4 drives. While they may not be state of the art, they are fast. Now I do want to buy that new RAID card. The LSI 9271-8i looks like the right fit, with a BBU of course. I can't believe how much more they want for a BBU. I'm trying to search for a pinout of the BBU because I'm in the RC Airplane hobby and we use LiPo and other various batteries. These are not very expensive and I might be able to adapt one to the LSI card.