STH's take on the new Avotons

[jgreco]

The new Avoton (4/8core Atom refresh) is coming. It is looking to be a promising platform for entry level NAS uses. Boards available supporting 32GB, Intel ethernets, and even one with lots of SATA ports (if you don't mind AsRock), in a mini-ITX form factor. Sounds near perfect to me for many purposes. Paired with something like the U-NAS chassis, it could make for a very attractive option.

ServeTheHome has posted their benchmarks.

I am as usual skeptical of benchmarks that exercise all available cores. That's great for some workloads but not so great for ZFS / NAS uses. So take it all with a grain of salt. Still, very attractive. I may finally have my N36L replacement (poor little box, you've taken such a beating!).

 

[jonnn]

There is one big problem: FreeNAS won't boot on Avoton.

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la7av4t8hSk


Any ideas if this is fixable?

My plans were to wait for an Avoton board for my FreeNAS build.

 

[Dusan]

Any ideas if this is fixable?

I can't find the board manual online, but try to look in the BIOS for something related to Watchdog and/or NMI and disable it.

 

[cyberjock]

You also should try disabling USB3 if possible. A lot of users have incompatible USB3 controllers that prevent FreeNAS from booting.

Other things to try: disable AHCI support, disable all unnecessary hardware, try 8.3.2...

 

[jgreco]

It isn't unusual for first adopters to have trouble. Please post any fixes you discover!

 

[jonnn]

Unfortunately, it's not my board. That is Patrick's (from STH) video.

I planned on this board for a ZFS server, but couldn't take the risk without knowing it will work. :(
If this board came to a vendor with a refund policy, I might try troubleshooting.
I will post a link on STH's board to this thread and perhaps he will see it.

 

[jgreco]

But yes that ought to be fixable. It boots, which is the really big thing. For whatever reason the board throws an NMI and FreeBSD catches it. More of a "why's it throwing an NMI" question I think.

 

[Z300M]

The new Avoton (4/8core Atom refresh) is coming. It is looking to be a promising platform for entry level NAS uses. Boards available supporting 32GB, Intel ethernets, and even one with lots of SATA ports (if you don't mind AsRock), in a mini-ITX form factor. Sounds near perfect to me for many purposes. Paired with something like the U-NAS chassis, it could make for a very attractive option.

ServeTheHome has posted their benchmarks.

I am as usual skeptical of benchmarks that exercise all available cores. That's great for some workloads but not so great for ZFS / NAS uses. So take it all with a grain of salt. Still, very attractive. I may finally have my N36L replacement (poor little box, you've taken such a beating!).

Isn't ECC SODIMM RAM for this board going to be expensive?

 

[jgreco]

Probably.

 

[Shroom]

Isn't ECC SODIMM RAM for this board going to be expensive?

Looking at this setup with a Supermicro A1SRi-2758F. I have heard of people successfully booting.

ECC SODIMM is actually roughly the same price as its DIMM counterparts, on Newegg at least. Both the 8GB ValueRam Kingston ECC sticks (DIMM or SODIMM) are pretty much the same price.