Mini-ITX Motherboard Recommendation Help

[Doosh]

I looking to building my first NAS server and require help in choosing a Mini-ITX Motherboard.

I would like to buy a motherboard which has a built in CPU.

The following ASUS page has 7 boards listed, and I am lost to how to choose the right board:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_CPU_on_Board

I note someone has mentioned the E35M1-I board on the forum, elsewhere I have noticed the C60M1-I board. Then there are other types of boards listed on the above link.

I note that the boards mention the on the storage specification:

6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), white
OR
6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), gray

Is there a difference between gray and white?

Please help recommend a board....

I also not there is a wi-fi board available on the link above (Deluxe versions). Is this a good option to have, as I am thinking of building a wi-fi NAS unit...

I look forward to your help / recommendations.

Thank you.

D.

 

[Child]

Hey Doosh,

I'm kinda in the same sport right. Thinking about building a new FreeNAS since my old one is running out of space. I wanna do a mITX-System with the Lian-Li Q25 Case (maybe thats interesting for you too).

So I stumbled across the two Asus Boards: E35M1-I and C60M1-I with the AMD E-350 and the AMD C-60. The plan is to run 5 SATA Drives as a ZRAID-1 (RAID 5). Only question: Is the C-60 powerful enough for that task? And: What PSU would you guys recommend? PicoPSU 120 with a 100W Adapter?

EDIT: The color of the sata-ports is of no importance. Both boards feature the same speeds.

 

[Stephens]

I'm pretty convinced the E35M1-I isn't sold anymore as I don't see it in stock anywhere. I almost broke down and bought one on eBay. It's more powerful than the C60M1-I and has 6 ports. "Powerful enough" depends on several things, not the least of which is, "What's powerful enough for you?" I can tell you right now it isn't going to saturate a Gigabit connection. Most people using the E35M1-I in a RAIDZ are getting more along the lines of 35-50MB/s using CIFS. Apparently CIFS is single threaded so only uses one core of the CPU, which means higher Ghz is more important than multiple cores for that aspect of CPU usage. The on-board RealTek 8111E NIC also isn't the best (and the PCIe slot is finicky).

Make sure your HDD's are in ACHI mode.

Many people are doing just fine with PicoPSU's. I have regular desktop active PFC power supplies (backed up by PFC-compatible UPS) because I wanted to make sure my 6 HDD's have more than adaquate power during power up. I don't think I've ever seen it pull more than 100W but I didn't want to screw around with it on a first build (lack of sufficient clean power causes so many difficult to diagnose issues with computers). Personally I'm giving it a little more time to see if Asus comes out with (or at least announces) a E35M1-I replacement. If you get the C60M1-I, let us know how it goes.

 

[Child]

Hm ... I didn't realize, that the E35M1-I isn't continued anymore. Hm ... I really liked the 6 SATA-ports + mITX package. As performace is concerned I don't need top-notch performance but the 35-50 seem a little low.
Currently I'm running freenas with a Athlon 64 X2 3800+ EE SFF, 4 GB RAM (mATX Board) and I'm able to pretty much use the whole 1 Gbit Connection - its just a bit messy because I put in HDs that were lying around unused.

 

[Stephens]

I don't know if you're into overclocking, but there's at least one guy here who said he was able to saturate his gigabit connection using the E35M1-I by overclocking it. You don't mention if you're planning to use CIFS. That seems to be the performance killer. I believe other protocols perform better.

 

[Child]

Since I'm running Windows7 pro on my main desktop I will be stuck with CIFS since NFS-Support is only included in Ultimate and - I think - Enterprise. And like u said - the E35M1-I is not really available ... I don't know.
As an alternative I'm thinking about going with an Intel G630T (or the 2.2 Ghz Version) & ASUS P8H77-I combo. I wonder how big the difference in power consumption would be compared to the AMD E-350 solution ...

... TDP is 18W vs 35W. But thats only a design value.

... mITX with 6x SATA. That's what I'm looking for ;)

 

[tropic]

Hey Doosh,

... I stumbled across the two Asus Boards: E35M1-I and C60M1-I with the AMD E-350 and the AMD C-60. The plan is to run 5 SATA Drives as a ZRAID-1 (RAID 5). Only question: Is the C-60 powerful enough for that task?....

I'd like to say the Asus C60M1-I would make a nifty low-power NAS, but it's just too feeble. Right now mine's a hypervisor for set-and-forget tasks, but I feel bad watching the CPU utilization hit 100% just to transfer large files at 20MB/s.

 

[frosted]

I'd like to say the Asus C60M1-I would make a nifty low-power NAS, but it's just too feeble. Right now mine's a hypervisor for set-and-forget tasks, but I feel bad watching the CPU utilization hit 100% just to transfer large files at 20MB/s.

You own the C60? Could you please give more details on the hardware+software configuration you're running that give you 20MB/s?
Thanks!

 

[Ian M]

I'm running the C60M1-I in my Keg-Server project. Actually dual boards. Just got FreeNAS 8 installed and configured with the added if_re.ko x64 driver installed for the NIC. Took about 2 minutes to install, reboot, and obtain a good address.
I will post utilization as soon as I get everything configured and run a couple tests. First test is to transfer over 80GB of data to a single 1TB hdd. So far utilization of CPU is 12% and RAM is 21%.

Switching back to the last Legacy edition since the current one only allows me to access a single path using FTP rather than all volumes in the /mnt directory.

 

[frosted]

Just letting you know, I'm reaching 58MB/s average with the C60M1-I using CIFS and Freenas 8.3.

 

[tropic]

Good! That was the ceiling for me transfering single large files via CIFS on the C60M1-I with FreeNAS 8.3.0. Most of them would settle in the 45-50 MB/s range, though.

Kind of curious, but does enabling Autotune bork your FreeNAS install on your C60M1-I?

 

[frosted]

Never tried it but tried it out of curiosity. I'm still testing my setup so I don't mind getting into troubles.
After enabling it and rebooting, the web interface became unresponsive.
I've been able to log in with the admin account, but I'm getting serious loading issues. (Read, nothing works in the GUI!)

 

[frosted]

Ok, it finally loaded properly after maybe 5 minutes. The autotune script probably took a while to run and made the GUI unresponsive. I'm wondering if the script will have to run upon every boot?
At least now I'm aware of the behavior and I'm not planing to reboot often so it's not really a concern.

I tried copying the same 7GB file I used before to benchmark and I gained maybe 1-2MB/s?
I tried to copy a picture folder (619 items, 1.2GB) and averaged 26MB/s, which is probably around the same as I was achieving before.

All in all, no major boost from enabling it, but I'm still only testing the platform, I have less than 10GB on it and I'm the only user on it.

 

[tropic]

Maybe I wasn't patient enough with the C60M1-I when I had it at home--it kept throwing out USB file system errors after enabling autotune, but perhaps that was just a failing flash drive.

I still think the C60 is slow as molasses, but it's currently doing a good job as a "black box" mini-NAS hidden above the hanging ceiling of a local law firm. They were burgled last Christmas and lost every computer in the office, and it took days to restore them from their offsite backups. The little C60M1-I does a few rsync pulls from their BDR each day--about 450GB of server VMs, Exchange databases and network flat files. It gets the job done.