E3C226D2I alternative?

[jonnn]

Well it seems my motherboard has failed.
I was running a E3C226D2I + 8gb ECC + pentium G3220
6x toshiba 3TB drives.

I was dismayed that the
E3C226D2I is still over $200. Are there any alternatives? Something newer?

 

[Chris Moore]

Well it seems my motherboard has failed.
I was running a E3C226D2I + 8gb ECC + pentium G3220
6x toshiba 3TB drives.

I was dismayed that the
E3C226D2I is still over $200. Are there any alternatives? Something newer?

System details? What chassis? If your chassis will only accommodate that teeny tiny system board, it limits your hardware options.

 

[jonnn]

It's a mini ITX case... :-/
I am just surprised after 5 years hardware options for NAS have not really picked up.
Buying the same 5 year old mobo...

Has freenas gotten better about putting drives to sleep in the past few years?

 

[Chris Moore]

Has freenas gotten better about putting drives to sleep in the past few years?

Probably never will. That isn't the intended function of the designers.

It's a mini ITX case... :-/
I am just surprised after 5 years hardware options for NAS have not really picked up.
Buying the same 5 year old mobo...

Plenty of options if you don't use one of those single slot, no expansion possibilities boards.

 

[DrKK]

Has freenas gotten better about putting drives to sleep in the past few years?

Just to augment what Chris has said, for the life of me, I can't ever understand the significant smattering of people out there who are committed to this idea of drives "spinning down", or "going to sleep" in a file server. What is to be gained? Let's consider a few of the common answers I hear, and dispatch them, not necessarily for this OP, but just for the record for anyone else that looks at this thread:

1. "I want to save money on my electric bill". Modern drives only burn a couple of watts (if that) while calmly spinning. The price of a coffee at Starbucks is higher (A ***LOT*** higher) than the cost you will incur for the electricity running a typical NAS hard drive, 24/7, for a few months, even in Germany, which I believe has the highest electrical prices currently on the planet. That's just math, and is incontrovertible. You'll save vastly more money by being more judicious at the grocery store one day per year than you will spinning down drives. Score: Neutral.
   
2. "It wears my drive out if I don't spin it down". No. It does not. Nothing wears your spinning drive out more than accelerating it from a dead stop to a running 5400 or 7200 rpm. Score: Strongly against wanting to spin down drives. Additionally: clearly you obviate any microbenefit on your electric bill---you saved $0.05 in electricity, and put $2 of wear on your drive.
   
3. "The drives run cooler if they spin down". This, at least, is presumably true. But, if your drives are running so hot that you need to spin them down for temperature reasons, the problem is not spinning down your drives, the problem is your build. Score: Irrelevant.
   
4. "The drives are noisy". Dude, I have nearly a dozen drives within 1 meter of my face, spinning 24/7. I don't hear anything. Actually it's 14 drives. I hear nothing. No seek noise, nothing. In 2018, if your drives are disrupting the zen calm of your home office, then you're doing it wrong, somehow. Score: Irrelevant

So one of the popular answers ("to save money on electricity") is neutral/laughable. Two of the popular answers are moot, because if those are your concerns, you have other problems. And finally, one of the answers is strongly against spinning down drives. Net result: Strongly against spinning down drives, in a proper NAS.

Now let's add to this some additional facts:

1. Drives for NAS's are specifically engineered to be, at a minimum, spinning 24/7. They consume very, very little energy when simply spinning.
2. Spinning down drives presumably would have a performance penalty when you actually went to use the drives.
3. There is not one person in this forum with over 1000 posts that spins down their drives, nor wants to spin down their drives.
4. Even if you wanted to, the chatter of FreeNAS's own internal telemetry and logging makes that a laughable idea. I don't even know why the UI gives the option for it, to be honest.

So in order for spinning down drives in a NAS to be a good idea, you'd not only have to come up with some reason that is not one of the first listed at the top, but you'd also have to be smarter than actual hard drive engineers and actual FreeNAS gurus, *AS WELL AS* having to outsmart a chattery NAS system, and then justifying, somehow, that the performance penalty you'd have to pay was recompensed somehow by something you materially gained.

So for me, I just make the Spock eyebrow, and shake my head, when people are on a jihad to spin down their drives in a NAS, particularly a FreeNAS.

:)

 

[Ericloewe]

The only situation in which spinning down might make sense is cold backups in a datacenter. You can just spin them up once a week to update and sometimes scrub. Notice that it's a fairly weird scenario, with very static data that just gets updated and very specific constraints on cooling and power distribution, where getting rid of that last drop of power consumption has a multiplicative effect (cooling is damned expensive and your facility probably pays a crapton for the next-higher electrical supply tier and your backup generators need to be sized accordingly).

 

[jonnn]

Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
I wouldn't call it a "function," rather, a feature.
For some reason the freenas community has always been infested with this pointless defeating attitude. It's terrible shame.
It's such a basic feature. Just give people the choice.

Personally, I don't spend money at starbucks. I pay about $0.25 per cup of coffee. And mine is much better To each their own. (well, if you think the freenas way, to each freenas's way, or the highway.) sheesh.

Just to augment what Chris has said, for the life of me, I can't ever understand the significant smattering of people out there who are committed to this idea of drives "spinning down", or "going to sleep" in a file server. What is to be gained? Let's consider a few of the common answers I hear, and dispatch them, not necessarily for this OP, but just for the record for anyone else that looks at this thread:

1. "I want to save money on my electric bill". Modern drives only burn a couple of watts (if that) while calmly spinning. The price of a coffee at Starbucks is higher (A ***LOT*** higher) than the cost you will incur for the electricity running a typical NAS hard drive, 24/7, for a few months, even in Germany, which I believe has the highest electrical prices currently on the planet. That's just math, and is incontrovertible. You'll save vastly more money by being more judicious at the grocery store one day per year than you will spinning down drives. Score: Neutral.
   
2. "It wears my drive out if I don't spin it down". No. It does not. Nothing wears your spinning drive out more than accelerating it from a dead stop to a running 5400 or 7200 rpm. Score: Strongly against wanting to spin down drives. Additionally: clearly you obviate any microbenefit on your electric bill---you saved $0.05 in electricity, and put $2 of wear on your drive.
   
3. "The drives run cooler if they spin down". This, at least, is presumably true. But, if your drives are running so hot that you need to spin them down for temperature reasons, the problem is not spinning down your drives, the problem is your build. Score: Irrelevant.
   
4. "The drives are noisy". Dude, I have nearly a dozen drives within 1 meter of my face, spinning 24/7. I don't hear anything. Actually it's 14 drives. I hear nothing. No seek noise, nothing. In 2018, if your drives are disrupting the zen calm of your home office, then you're doing it wrong, somehow. Score: Irrelevant

So one of the popular answers ("to save money on electricity") is neutral/laughable. Two of the popular answers are moot, because if those are your concerns, you have other problems. And finally, one of the answers is strongly against spinning down drives. Net result: Strongly against spinning down drives, in a proper NAS.

Now let's add to this some additional facts:

1. Drives for NAS's are specifically engineered to be, at a minimum, spinning 24/7. They consume very, very little energy when simply spinning.
2. Spinning down drives presumably would have a performance penalty when you actually went to use the drives.
3. There is not one person in this forum with over 1000 posts that spins down their drives, nor wants to spin down their drives.
4. Even if you wanted to, the chatter of FreeNAS's own internal telemetry and logging makes that a laughable idea. I don't even know why the UI gives the option for it, to be honest.

So in order for spinning down drives in a NAS to be a good idea, you'd not only have to come up with some reason that is not one of the first listed at the top, but you'd also have to be smarter than actual hard drive engineers and actual FreeNAS gurus, *AS WELL AS* having to outsmart a chattery NAS system, and then justifying, somehow, that the performance penalty you'd have to pay was recompensed somehow by something you materially gained.

So for me, I just make the Spock eyebrow, and shake my head, when people are on a jihad to spin down their drives in a NAS, particularly a FreeNAS.

:)

 

[Chris Moore]

It's such a basic feature. Just give people the choice.

It is possible, with many configuration changes, to enable the drives to spin down. There was a guide at one point, but it would probably need to be rewritten now because of all the changes to FreeNAS over the last couple revisions. It is really an arcane concoction for a server, not a basic feature, despite what you think. If you want it, you will need to figure out how to do it. I did it for a backup server at one point, but the problem is, every time you update the OS, certain changes need to be made again because they are set back to the default. The power savings isn't significant unless the server is just not being used and why would you have a server and not use it?

 

[DrKK]

Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

Well, help me understand then, sir.

What is your reason for desiring to spin down the drives? What is it that you are expecting to gain? Maybe you can educate me.

 

[Stux]

Meanwhile there are new atom mini ITX boards which have lots of SATA ports...

 

[Chris Moore]

Well it seems my motherboard has failed.

There are several excellent options like this from Supermicro:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-8C-HLN4F.cfm
or
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-H-TF.cfm
and many others.
This one is so new that it isn't actually available yet:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SCV-L.cfm

 

[Ericloewe]

This one is so new that it isn't actually available yet:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SCV-L.cfm

Despite the name, that one doesn't support ECC (H97 chipset).