Supermicro A1SAi-2750F vs ASRock C2750D4I

[FNSeeker]

Tomasz,

Much appreciated for your time and effort given in your reply. The English gal certainly knows her stuff. I'd say. Have downloaded the app from Supermicro. I will try connect via IPMI during the next few days.

Having seen the 5 disks in a separate unit which was inserted from the front, I think my next build will have these. It would allow me to utilize old PC cases. Learn a new thing everyday!

BTW, while UNAS only has an office in the US, their products were shifted from China where most of these things come from nowadays. I bought many components online from the US for my NAS with no issue.

_________________
As a separate note to posting by Cyberjock (#14), I want to say that staff at Supermicro were very helpful with my enquiries about their company's products althoug it was the first time I dealt with server!

Cheers

 

[FNSeeker]

Dear Tomasz,

Thanks to your pointer and after a lot of perseverance today, I have succeeded in upgrading FreeNAS via Supermicro Console Redirection. With Java 7.

I feel great being able to learn something new. I was able to upgrade FreeNAS remotely via CDROM and an ISO image on my PC. No more need for physical CDROM hookup. Or CD burning for that matter.

I notice that there are two apps by Supermicro. One is stand-alone IPMI View (V2.9) which I could not get it to work. IPMI device is NOT recognised for some reason. Even after I allowed the app in my firewall. But I had no problem with connecting and upgrading via web browser (SMT IPMI V2.1c).

This brings me to the next question.

- Wasn't Java supposed not to be secure?

Many thanks.

 

[jgreco]

Java's "not secure" because Oracle is unable or unwilling to throw the resources at the problem to solve the issues. At one point people thought it was a good idea to put Java stuff on the web or HTML in e-mail or any number of other bad things. These bad ideas have typically turned out to be insecure and evil. You do not want random websites running random Java stuff on your computer.

However, you should in theory trust your IPMI web server to give you a trustworthy Java app that isn't going to try to exploit your computer. In that context Java is about as safe as Java can be.

It is like the difference between running a .exe from a USB thumb drive you found in a parking lot versus running an .exe on a USB thumb drive that was included with your PC by the manufacturer. Both things might theoretically be insecure but you have reason to trust the latter.

 

[FNSeeker]

Thanks for the explanation.

I like the metaphor. Very apt.

Have a good weekend.

 

[Ryan Beall]

I just finished my Supermicro A1SAi build. So far it seems like a really decent piece of gear and am really happy with my first FreeNAS build/implementation. I seem to be having slow write speeds however. My router is picking the interface up at 1000T full duplex and I have it manually set at 1000T on my interface in FreeNAS. I haven't touched any of my tunables but it sure seems to be running at 100mbps speeds beings I'm typically seeing 9-14MB/s write speeds over wifi ac (CIFS and AFP) I'd expect at least like 40MB/s or better? It seems like it is utilizing the ram but I don't really know what "normal" looks like. When it's up and running with a file queued up it uses about 10GB of the 16GB of ram. Maybe I could use a little bit more but it sure doesn't seem like a coincidence that I'm getting something close to 100mbps speeds instead of 1000mbps speeds. I don't have any CAT6 cables or CAT5e cables on me but the router is showing the connection as 1000 so I'm sort of at a loss? Any advice?

Supermicro A1SAi - 2750F
16GB DDR3 ECC
4 x 4TB WD Reds
RaidZ2
stock tunables
no ecryption
no compression (was slower turned on)
Netgear R36000 router

I have run a couple iperf tests and it's getting 150-200 mbps. But I'm not seeing that at all for normal file transfers (1.5GB) etc.

 

[FNSeeker]

Would love to give some feedback to your issue but unable at this stage.

As I am still awaiting for the WD30EFRX to arrive from the US to complete my build. But interested to know the outcome of your issue.

The more people use the same Supermicro A1SAi-2750F, the more collective knowledge I gain. There is 'safety in number' as the saying goes....

Cheers

 

[FNSeeker]

This may be a rather dumb question.
- I solved it!

Is there a way to access FreeNAS webserver from inside Supermicro IPMI webserver? You see, I managed to get IPMI to work but I am now unable to access FreeNAS.

- Having a closer look again at the User Manual, I realised that I had mistaken LAN #3 for LAN #2 and hence I could not connect using the wrong port in the first place. LAN 1 and IPMI port shared the same MAC address, which explains the automatic redirection. Still in setting up phase and only used one RJ45 cable and hence the costly error. It took me more than a day to realise my error.

As I can see, access through IPMI allows specific tasks on the MOBO itself. But surely I don't want that everytime. But no matter what, I can't access FreeNAS webserver at all now with IPMI acting like a 'dictator' of a time past. I can't go past it!

Edit: I should add that I realised the IPMI feature available inside FreeNAS only after I ran Supermicro-supplied IPMI. I have reinstalled FreeNAS several times as a workaround to access its GUI without going pass IPMI but to no avail. Steep learning curve for me here or .. is it a bug. Anybody? Red face!

Thank you.

 

[cyberjock]

As we've had to remind people, that's theoretical best-case in-a-lab speed. You'll only get a very small fraction of that as total bandwidth. Frankly, the 9-14MB/sec is better than the other 2 people using 802.11ac. Unless you plug into your server with wired Gb, you can expect speeds to always suck. Wireless networking is a convenience technology, not a performance one. Nobody here is even going to consider spending time troubleshooting a complaint that involves wireless. We know it's just a waste of our time, and you should realize it's a waste of yours too. ;)

 

[Ryan Beall]

Well that's good to know that I'm getting decent wifi performance. I'll still have to try gigabit here soon but it will probably be adequate. So far I'm impressed with the setup and am impressed with Freenas. It is somewhat inconvenient that you can't add drives to vdevs after creation but I guess that's not to make or break for my project. I really like the node 304 case I got. A little bigger than I expected but I guess not too bad for holding 6 harddrives.

 

[FNSeeker]

Further to the collective body of knowledge of A1Sai-2750F. Me hope.

I tried invoking IPMI from inside FreeNAS, as alternative to Supermicro's-supplied IPMI View (?), but it came into conflict somehow and slowed down FreeNAS's previous smooth response time. An example: the much slower redrawing of the left-pane navigator . I was able to kick off IPMI once but it refused to play ball afterwards. Every time.

Luckily, I can use Supermicro IPMIView (v.2.9.28). It works beautifully as intended. Although I do come across some comments about earlier versions of IPMIView. But my experience so far has been positive.

I am especially impressed with the administrator's ability to remotely manage MANY servers, say, in a data center.... using this tool. I am sure that it's not the only one available in the trade.

 

[Ryan Beall]

I use the java client because I'm on a mac. It is pretty decent.

 

[Ryan Beall]

OK so here is something interesting. I have a WD MyBook Live and I've been trying to track down a performance issue with it. Long story short I figured out what it was and am writing at 27-28MB/s via afs. So now I know that my cables/modem/router/wifi is at least capable of 28MB/s (which is a lot closer to what I expected from my setup ~ 30MB/s). So that being said? With my FreeNAS running WAYYYY better hardware than the WD MyBook Live, why am I getting max write speeds of 12-14MB/s? (encryption and compression off)??

Thanks for any help?

 

[Ryan Beall]

Another interesting piece of info: I'm running rsync from the Mybook live directly to FreeNAS and it's transferring at 1.73MB/s consistently for large 2GB files? Man that's Slow. I can get stuff faster using BTsync?

 

[Ryan Beall]

Interesting: I'm getting 101MB/s Read from Freenas and 54MB/s write connected to Mybook Live using iperf. That's more along the performance I was expecting! I guess rsync just sucks over ssh. What is used typically to transfer all of your data (in large quantities) onto your new FreeNAS setup dd?

 

[Erik Stam]

@Ryan Beall Don't know if Secure Copy is available in FreeNAS but you can try to scp a large file to FreeNAS and back.

Use the -c arcfour option for the fastest transfer rate:

scp -c arcfour username@freenas_ip_address:/directory/file.txt /local/directory/on/mac

Check Google for more examples of scp (keywords: "scp copy")

 

[Adam Lipstadt]

FWIW, and in brief because Android just killed a longish post. My LAN has 4 Supermicros, 3 ASRocks, and one 2xL5639 Lenovo D20 board in a Norco chassis, plus I built for temporary media playback, a B85M-ITX+G3320. In fact, I would say positive experience on that board which I bought because it was cheapest and not ECS - like VT-d support, and pulling NTP servers and offset from DHCP (why Windows 8.*/2012* insists on GMT-8 when my BIOS can figure it out and the DHCP server is a WS2012r2 machine is ridiculous) helped get me over my reluctance, and I'm glad for it.

I have had silly design problems with Supermicro - not usually reliability ones, barring one stupid EFI shell text overflow - and fewer with ASRock. As far as just working/reliability, in a whitebox/self supported environment, I don't really care much one way or the other, though I think that ASRock certainly is making an effort in white box/lab building, which is just plain smart. I also distinctly prefer ASRock IPMI, both web and Java interfaces, and despise Super Doctor.

On point, though not stress tested (just learning FreeNAS, also I'm waiting on a 4th Travelstar 1.5TB 2" to go RAIDZ2) I did buy the ASRock C2750 for NAS use, maybe also as a low power Windows LAN client with a mirror/data store dual use. Install was done by IPMI with remote ISO mounting with no issues.

Also, I think 204 vs 240 pin matters, or it certainly does to me: if/when 16GB UDIMMs become available, I can pull whatever UDIMMs are in the C2750 now, step back, and look at all my DDR3 machines (except the 2011s which are already on 16GB sticks) and figure out how best to distribute them. I would say there's a lot more reuse value in an 8GB ECC UDIMM when in a 240 pin format than 204.

 

[CrasyCat]

First of all thanks for all this nice information. Are the Intelligent Memory RAM expensive? :)
I recently red an issue about ASRock C2750D4I in a computer magazine and was curious about it and then I also found the Supermicro Motherboard A1SAi-2750F. 20 Watt as a max. TDP is quite a score, isn't it?
At the moment I am running a home server with 16 GB RAM and an i7-3770T and it consumes around 40 Watt TDP. At the time, when I assembled my server, I had to choose the combination Windows 7 + ZPanel, once the NAS OS have somehow some limitations and I need to host several homepages on it. However, it works perfectly and I hope it is not an easy target, if you know what I mean.

I have a question for you: what is better? An Intel Atom Prozessor 2750 with 8 cores/ 8 threads and 2,4 Ghz or an Intel i7-3770T with 4 cores/8 threads and 2,5 Ghz?
Is it also better to use ECC RAM than the non-ECC? I will consider to use one of the above mentioned mainboards in the future, but perhaps it is better to wait a while.
One or two more years, and I think there will be better products on the market.

 

[Ericloewe]

First of all thanks for all this nice information. Are the Intelligent Memory RAM expensive? :)
I recently red an issue about ASRock C2750D4I in a computer magazine and was curious about it and then I also found the Supermicro Motherboard A1SAi-2750F. 20 Watt as a max. TDP is quite a score, isn't it?
At the moment I am running a home server with 16 GB RAM and an i7-3770T and it consumes around 40 Watt TDP. At the time, when I assembled my server, I had to choose the combination Windows 7 + ZPanel, once the NAS OS have somehow some limitations and I need to host several homepages on it. However, it works perfectly and I hope it is not an easy target, if you know what I mean.

I have a question for you: what is better? An Intel Atom Prozessor 2750 with 8 cores/ 8 threads and 2,4 Ghz or an Intel i7-3770T with 4 cores/8 threads and 2,5 Ghz?
Is it also better to use ECC RAM than the non-ECC? I will consider to use one of the above mentioned mainboards in the future, but perhaps it is better to wait a while.
One or two more years, and I think there will be better products on the market.

1. ECC is absolutely essential if you value your data
2. Forget about any i5s or i7s, they don't support ECC. Only a few Celerons and i3, plus the Xeons do. (The i7 is definitely faster than the Atom, though. No contest, really)
3. 16GB DIMMs seem to carry a ~100% price premium over 2*8GB DIMMs

 

[cyberjock]

And your definition of "better" is totally vague and unproductive. For me an electric car might be "better". For you anything less than a full size double duty pickup truck might be unacceptable. Determining what is "better" is something you have to figure out for yourself.

 

[CrasyCat]

Oh yeah, Cyberjock...

I now realise I used the word "better" three times... Sorry.
As you might imagine, I'm looking for flexibility, rapidity and "unexpensive perfection"
And I cannot have a float of trucks in front of my apartment... ;)