How do I look up hardware compatibility?

[Lucien]

Hi all,

I'm looking at jumping into putting together a FreeNAS box, and I'm thinking of using the Intel S1200KP motherboard. It has a C206 chipset, and dual onboard LAN using a 82574L and a 82579LM chipset. How would I go about checking if this board would be supported by FreeNAS?

I've been doing some reading up and have come across the FreeBSD release info, which has links to hardware notes for each release, but it doesn't seem to contain specific details about (CPU) chipsets.

Also would I be right in that FreeNAS8 supports the 82574 but not the 82579?

Thanks!

 

[jgreco]

FreeBSD compatibility is probably the best place to start, yes, because FreeNAS relies on FreeBSD for all that. However, FreeNAS supports only a subset of FreeBSD stuff. If you have an old Adaptec 1542 and some SCSI disks, I'm guessing that's not supported by FreeNAS, even if FreeBSD does.

Generally speaking, the C206 chipset compatibility is not likely to be an issue. Lots of people run FreeBSD on C20x hardware. Always good to Google the specifics if you're worried. That's a cute little board, BTW.

As for the LAN support, that *could* be a problem. FreeBSD 8 doesn't appear to support it. FreeBSD 9 has had some PR's against that chip. Intel offers drivers for it but they're listed as being for FreeBSD 7. My guess is that it'd be an unpleasant haul to make it work.

 

[ProtoSD]

There's also a sticky at the top of the NOOB thread with links to the hardware compatibility list and a thread I started that lists the hardward other people are using for FreeNAS 8.

 

[jgreco]

I don't intend to downplay the effort you've put into that, but I would note that the list you provide isn't all that useful.

This guy here, he's talking about a mini-ITX board with dual gigE. The list you have is a good starting point, but there's a really large number of potentially-compatible mainboards out there, and as the list grows, the lack of any details is going to render it more and more meaningless. Most users who come in to this may have some specific requirements ("quad gigE" or "ATX form factor") in order to be able to build their FreeNAS. In six months, when the list is 50 entries long, expecting them to Google each board for its specs is not going to be particularly useful or helpful.

What'd be helpful is to post the important specs along with each board. If we can figure out an easy way to make that happen, I'd even be happy to help fill out the existing entries. Consider the following fields for mainboards:

Form Factor:
Socket:
CPU's: (for ex. Intel i7 isn't compatible with C20x boards)
Memory slots:
Max memory:
Memory type(s):
Chipset:
SATA ports:
USB ports:
Network ports:
Expansion slots:
IPMI:
Comments:

This could be just a list, of course. In the future, it'd be real cool to be able to specify a few requirements and then have the system generate a list of matching boards. But the point is, either way, that's more generally useful than just listing out part numbers. The part numbers thing won't scale well.

 

[Lucien]

Thanks all.

FreeBSD compatibility is probably the best place to start, yes, because FreeNAS relies on FreeBSD for all that. However, FreeNAS supports only a subset of FreeBSD stuff. If you have an old Adaptec 1542 and some SCSI disks, I'm guessing that's not supported by FreeNAS, even if FreeBSD does.

Generally speaking, the C206 chipset compatibility is not likely to be an issue. Lots of people run FreeBSD on C20x hardware. Always good to Google the specifics if you're worried. That's a cute little board, BTW.

It is isn't it. :) The pro is that it'll support Pentiums (G620 at least) and provide ECC, the con is that I think it's limited to 8GB in practice.

As for the LAN support, that *could* be a problem. FreeBSD 8 doesn't appear to support it. FreeBSD 9 has had some PR's against that chip. Intel offers drivers for it but they're listed as being for FreeBSD 7. My guess is that it'd be an unpleasant haul to make it work.

Sorry, but did you mean the 82574 or 82579, or both? I think I saw the 82574 on the FreeBSD 8 HCL. (There's a FreeBSD 9?) I think I'd be happy with just one working port, but it being a mITX board + my plan of getting a M1015/H200/similar down the road means I won't have space for an add-on LAN card.

On that note I hope Intel's integrated graphics work with FreeNAS!

There's also a sticky at the top of the NOOB thread with links to the hardware compatibility list and a thread I started that lists the hardward other people are using for FreeNAS 8.

Unfortunately no mention of the S1200KP, and I've tried googling "S1200KP FreeNAS" too. Part of the problem is that it is a relatively new product, so there's little info out there.

 

[jgreco]

82579 ==> Wouldn't try it/99% positive won't-work. Yes, there's a FreeBSD 9, it's nearing its first release.

The integrated graphics shouldn't be an issue. It's tremendously difficult to mess that up.

I think protosd's intent was to steer you to a different product. My followup to that was meant to say that it's a good start, but it's kind of deficient when pointing someone like you at it. You seem to have some idea of the qualities you are looking for in a mainboard, and as time passes, it's going to be more and more unreasonable just to list some part numbers without also listing some of the specs of the boards. I don't really know why you're looking at mini-ITX, though it seems reasonable to assume that it's because you either already have a chassis or you have a vision of a high performance, small footprint NAS for yourself. But it's hard to tell if maybe you really needed dual gigE or some other feature that the board provides.

 

[ProtoSD]

I think protosd's intent was to steer you to a different product.

That wasn't my intention at all, I was simply pointing out that that hardware compatibility thread had hardware listed that was working with FreeNAS, AND there is also a link to the Official FreeBSD hardware compatibility page. If a person has certain specs in mind they can use the list as a reference to look up boards that meet their specs. A lot of people post asking if such and such board will work with FreeNAS like @Lucien:

I'm thinking of using the Intel S1200KP motherboard. It has a C206 chipset, and dual onboard LAN using a 82574L and a 82579LM chipset. How would I go about checking if this board would be supported by FreeNAS?

So looking at that list he could have seen if anyone here has used it. It's only pointless because I've tried multiple times to get people to contribute to the list to make it better for everyone and so far have just ended up scouring peoples signatures and being told it's pointless ;-) So again, if anyone wants to contribute, there are 2 threads, one that is open for people to list their working specs and 'the list' I mentioned above.

• Hardware-Compatability-List-Tell-us-what-you-have
  
• What-hardware-should-I-Buy-Get-Use-or-is-recommended

Lucien, sorry to you didn't find any info in the list and your thread got hijacked.

 

[Lucien]

You seem to have some idea of the qualities you are looking for in a mainboard, and as time passes, it's going to be more and more unreasonable just to list some part numbers without also listing some of the specs of the boards. I don't really know why you're looking at mini-ITX, though it seems reasonable to assume that it's because you either already have a chassis or you have a vision of a high performance, small footprint NAS for yourself. But it's hard to tell if maybe you really needed dual gigE or some other feature that the board provides.

Guess it would help if I described my plan then. :) I'm thinking of a small NAS - overall space is a consideration. So I had in mind a 6x 2 or 3 TB array in RAIDZ-2, small chassis and mini-ITX board. I was intending to use a HBA (SATA expansion card?) to hook up the drives since most mITX boards only have 4 ports, and wanted an Intel NIC and ECC. All that meant I'd need a board with integrated video and LAN, which the S1200KP appeared to match.

Sorry if I haven't supplied much info on the motherboard. Beyond the chipset and NICs, I figured there really wasn't much else on it to mention.

Given HD prices I was going to start with 3 old 750 GB drives I had, then maybe put in the HBA and my intended drives next year.

Compatibility with FreeNAS is the outstanding question though. For example, the 82579 isn't listed on the (existing, haven't looked at v9) HCLs, and jgreco says it isn't, but I only just came across this post that suggests it might be recognised. Of course he may not have tested the connection out fully (yet), or updated the thread.

Similarly I've been looking at a IBM M1015 reflashed to a 9420. But I think I've seen a post that says FreeNAS doesn't support it and another that said he dropped it in and it worked fine... Since I'm not looking at getting that now I can leave that question for later.



PS: No, dual gigabit isn't a need in my case. I just wanted a single gigabit Intel port. :)

 

[Lucien]

One other thing I forgot: The CPU. I was thinking of using a G620. Apparently it does support ECC, and I figured if an E-350 was enough for FreeNAS then the G620 would definitely have enough power. Not to mention it's a nice low power CPU and cheap.

I could create a new "critique my build" thread if that helped...

 

[jgreco]

My best guess is that the primary port on your S1200KP will work; as long as you don't need more than that now, you can almost certainly look forward to a treat, probably within the next year, as driver support for the '579 makes it into FreeNAS and you "gain" another gigE. The Intel stuff is generally solid, but their use of their latest chipsets on their products can cause these sorts of issues.

It wouldn't shock me to see the driver maybe recognize the second port and see it, but seeing it and making it work are two very different things. So, that post notwithstanding, I don't see support in 8.2R for it, so it is unlikely to work.

As for CPU, yeah, you probably can't go wrong with a little extra CPU. Look at it this way. All these little NAS appliances sold by the various vendors all have teeny CPU's and teeny memory, and correspondingly teeny performance. I've been playing with a quadcore Xeon system (Xeon!) on carefully picked hardware, and have a system with 16GB of RAM that's idling at 45W - no drives included in that number. It's not cheap, but it's also not THAT expensive. Also it's interesting to note, there are really low power chips like the i3-2100T (35W) and i5-2500T (45W) available. In the Intel Pentium Desktop processors...

gah.

And there's why I hate Intel's scattered naming scheme. There's a G620 and a G620T, that you'd think would be different variations of the same part/speed, but the 620T, a low power part, is also slower. What's the damn point, Intel...

 

[Lucien]

It wouldn't shock me to see the driver maybe recognize the second port and see it, but seeing it and making it work are two very different things. So, that post notwithstanding, I don't see support in 8.2R for it, so it is unlikely to work.

Yes, that was my thinking too.

As for CPU, yeah, you probably can't go wrong with a little extra CPU. Look at it this way. All these little NAS appliances sold by the various vendors all have teeny CPU's and teeny memory, and correspondingly teeny performance. I've been playing with a quadcore Xeon system (Xeon!) on carefully picked hardware, and have a system with 16GB of RAM that's idling at 45W - no drives included in that number. It's not cheap, but it's also not THAT expensive. Also it's interesting to note, there are really low power chips like the i3-2100T (35W) and i5-2500T (45W) available. In the Intel Pentium Desktop processors...

gah.

And there's why I hate Intel's scattered naming scheme. There's a G620 and a G620T, that you'd think would be different variations of the same part/speed, but the 620T, a low power part, is also slower. What's the damn point, Intel...

Actually, you would be a good person to ask then... for a small system like mine, would a Pentium class chip be good enough? I do have the options of I3s or E3s, including the low power Xeon E3-1260L. But I'm not sure what would cross the line from comfortably sufficient to overkill. (Bearing in mind my current plan is that the box will just be a NAS.)

And yeah, Intel's naming scheme is a pain. I was considering the G620T, then remembered to check clock speed and turbo boost (there isn't any). The plain G620 is faster and ~10% cheaper. And from what I've gathered about the internet, power consumption is effectively the same, unless maybe I run it flat out.

What kind of setup do you have to achieve 45W? I'm also interested in keeping power consumption low... Also, do you know if 2 x 8GB unbuffered ECC kits exist? All I've seen are 2 x 4 GB kits

 

[jgreco]

You ask too many questions, so I can't cheat and just point you at the previous message.

As for your question.. for a small system, I really don't think you'll be able to buy a new part that you'll be truly UNhappy with. It's going to work and it's going to work faster than one of those "home NAS" offerings sold by many companies. At that point, this really becomes an exercise in weighing variables, such as "do I pay 10% less for 20% slower" or "it's worth the electric savings to me to make this compromise."

My hardware compatibility requirements are doubly constrained; I've been optimizing for a dual-use case of FreeNAS and VMware ESXi. My old Opteron 240EE storage servers (30W TDP CPU, 2005 vintage) are still great boxes, but the single-core CPU has turned into an awful bottleneck with FreeNAS and ZFS. The platform also eats 100-120W total with four drives, and without adding a second CPU (unobtanium), is limited to 8GB RAM. So I've got the budget this year to replace them, and I'm building them with a mind towards oversizing them, so that I can run ESXi on them, and use the spare CPU and memory for some lightweight VM's. So you need to be aware that my choices are not necessarily completely rational from a purely FreeNAS point of view, they're aimed at this more complex use scenario.

I haven't messed with the storage servers yet. What I've been playing with is one of the two (or possibly three) ESXi nodes I'm adding, which are trivial to play with since they're in generic 4U rack enclosures. We're going to be getting rid of at least a rack of older gear and so space isn't a problem. The 4U chassis allow me to select from a wide range of components, rather than being constrained to "rack optimized" 1U and 2U parts.

For example, I went and spent an insane amount on Kingwin Stryker 500 power supplies. It's REALLY tricky finding appropriate power supplies with high efficiency for a low power project like this. The ones available on the market are all aimed at the high power gaming rigs - and I find it shocking that you can put together a PC that requires a 1000W power supply. ;-) The Stryker 500 looked like it had a fair likelihood of a flatter efficiency rating across the spectrum, plus the airflow considerations in the 4U chassis made it a better choice than whatever the next best choice was. Anyways, these supplies ran about $150. Using these instead of a random supply we had in stock dropped my idle usage from 59W to 44W. Wow, what a difference an efficient supply makes! That's more than 25%...

The truth of it is that this is not necessarily a rational choice. The 15W difference, at 13c/kWh, ... 131kWh/year, it saves about $17/year. I will only come close to recovering the price premium for these supplies if these systems last more than half a decade, which they might very well.

Anyways, the chassis has been built with some carefully selected fans and cooling gear that's designed to keep the fans running at low speeds at all times, even under full CPU load. Working well so far.

You're obviously aware of the ins and outs of the specifics of different processors, so I won't get too much into talking about the pros and cons of various features. I do think, however, that it's illuminating to look at some benchmark numbers and prices. I find it annoying to look at cost and performance separately, so I usually divide cost by benchmark results to give me more comparable "bang for your buck" numbers.

Xeon E3-1230

Cost: $220
CPUmark: 8393 ($26 per 1000)
Geekbench: 6500 ($34 per 1000)​

Pentium G620

Cost: $60
CPUmark: 2462 ($24 per 1000)
Geekbench: 4500 ($13 per 1000)​

Pentium G620T

Cost: $70
CPUmark: 2200 ($32 per 1000)
Geekbench: 4500 ($16 per 1000)​

Intel i3-2100T

Cost: $110
CPUmark: 3282 ($34 per 1000)
Geekbench: 5500 ($20 per 1000)​

HP N36L

CPUmark: 801
Geekbench: 2000​

What's interesting to me is that, at least for CPUmark, the Xeon part has a similar cost to the G620 - just a lot more headroom, performance-wise.

What should be meaningful to you is that most of the folks here would agree that FreeNAS on a MicroServer N36L is acceptable for general home NAS use ... we're actually using one as an iSCSI target for backing up a lot of virtual machines. The CPU's we're discussing are all several times faster. I think it'd have to be difficult to build a NAS that truly sucked out of any of these CPU's. So my advice is to find your favorite and go with it.

 

[jgreco]

Oh, also, yes, 2x8GB exists. It'll just cost you an arm and a leg, as in expect to pay $400 a stick. It's a "buy the 4GB for now and then plan to replace it next year when prices are sane" sort of thing.

Mmm, prices have dropped a bit. Look for M391B1G73AH0-CH9 ... hm.

I do see http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?1106294_g10e at $280 (/stick). Considering that 2x4GB kits are only $60, that's about a 5X price premium. Ick. But that's better than the last time I looked.

 

[Lucien]

OUCH! Yeah, that is a whole lot more than I'd want to shell out for a simple box... 8 GB is fine. ;)

You ask too many questions, so I can't cheat and just point you at the previous message.

Interesting.. Thanks for the link.

For example, I went and spent an insane amount on Kingwin Stryker 500 power supplies. It's REALLY tricky finding appropriate power supplies with high efficiency for a low power project like this. The ones available on the market are all aimed at the high power gaming rigs - and I find it shocking that you can put together a PC that requires a 1000W power supply. ;-) The Stryker 500 looked like it had a fair likelihood of a flatter efficiency rating across the spectrum, plus the airflow considerations in the 4U chassis made it a better choice than whatever the next best choice was. Anyways, these supplies ran about $150. Using these instead of a random supply we had in stock dropped my idle usage from 59W to 44W. Wow, what a difference an efficient supply makes! That's more than 25%...

Yeah, I have my eye on a 80+ rated FSP 400W unit. But that's for later when I have that many drives. Right now I have an old box with a 150W that I'll try out for a 3 drive system.

And 1kW *is* insane. And they do go up from there. I think the guys on the Silent PC Review forums have figured out that one would almost never need that much power, even for a high end gaming rig. Reviews from there have also pegged PSUs at hitting max efficiency at ~50% load.

The truth of it is that this is not necessarily a rational choice. The 15W difference, at 13c/kWh, ... 131kWh/year, it saves about $17/year. I will only come close to recovering the price premium for these supplies if these systems last more than half a decade, which they might very well.

True. And it's why I'm happy to settle for a 80+ Gold unit and not an 80+ Platinum. The good is when we can get a reasonably efficient PSU at a low price. :D


Will go with a G620. Be a while before it gets in, and hopefully I'll be able to bring news of how it goes.

 

[jgreco]

It's amazing to look back at power supply efficiency over the years. I remember when 70% was considered average-to-good. These new systems are so much more powerful... and use so much less power.