Atom based WHS build....

N

nexusalt

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 6, 2004
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So I've been playing around with what all I'll need to put a decent low power Intel Atom based storage server running WHS together. Here's what I've got so far...

Motherboard\Processor: Supermico MBD-X7SLA-H-O - $139.52
RAM: Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) - $23.99
Controller Card(x2): Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 $198.94
Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650W - $87.84
Case: NORCO RPC-4220 -$269.98
Cables(x4): 3Ware 0.6m SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 Cable - $47.96

I'm undecided on drives at this point, but I'll probably go with WD Greens or the Samsung F2's. I'm not too sure if the 650W PSU is needed as well, considering the board sips power. I like the 52A on the 12 line for drive spinup and whatnot though. Also, I doubt I'll buy all this at once (ie. only one SAS card to start off with). I'll most likely just add drives and the second controller as needed. It also helps to trick myself into thinking this whole thing costs less than it really does.

Any suggestions on where to save money\power or anything I'm missing?
 
my next build will be very similar to yours, a few comments, take as you see fit

consider a single ram module ... if the mobo supports
consider corsair rather than crucial
consider the PCI version of the SM controller card ... saves the PCIe slots for future use and uses standard SATA cables
is the PSU modular?
my PSU is corsair ... whilst i have no complaints the modular cables are not available for purchase, though corsair are apparently sending me some cables FOC
do you need such a big case? ... clearly depends how many drives you foresee

i'd be interested to hear your experience of the mobo.
 
Asposium said:
consider the PCI version of the SM controller card ... saves the PCIe slots for future use and uses standard SATA cables
Click to expand...

If he uses the Norco 4220, then the SAS version will be a lot more cable friendly since it has a MiniSAS back plane on it. I also plan on uses the sas version when I get around to building mine...


I always keep an eye on these threads, learn so much and helps me plan mine that I haven't gotten the pleasure to build... when I do, I want to get my foot into that stickied thread up top there :-P
 
i agree the miniSAS cables are tidy, but discrete SATA cables are cheaper

the OP did ask for suggestions to save money

so long as the cables don't affect air flow too much, the look isn't important once the lid is on.
 
I don't know the best place to buy cables... are the reverse breakout cables (4x SATAII -> SAS) cheaper then SAS -> SAS cables?

With that case he can't connect the SATAII cables directly can he? I thought it was only SAS.

of course not even thinking of $$ I was thinking of Airflow since most say the 4220 lacks in flow as is with loud fans n all... I figured it needs all the help it can get.
 
The Norco 4220 has MiniSAS (SFF8087) backplanes. The SASLP is the logical choice. First, the X7SLA-H mobo only has one PCI slot. Anything past 12 drives would require a PCIe card anyway, and that's not counting an optical drive. Second, MiniSAS-MiniSAS cables would be much better than MiniSAS-SATA cables, and easier to find. If you use the breakout SATA cables, you have to find the reverse version.

Edit: The 4220 and (2) SASLP cards would make a nice, clean, eco-friendly WHS build. Hmm...I might look at converting my WHS to this.
 
I wouldn't go for this atom heart of the system... that board is chipset 945 based and the whole thing doesn't consume a little as you could expect. Check out the reviews done on nettops using this. And the CPU is to slow IMO... it will be noticeable.

I would go for a downclocked 5200 and a good gigabyte g43,g41 mobo so that you can underclock voltages on it.
 
XS ... is your opinion from experience or presumption?

my WHS uses the same CPU and chipset as the supermicro mobo, albeit on an intel mobo and for 90% of the time the performance is fine.

for the other 10%, when the server is taking a hammering performance does suffer, but i don't know if this is down to my old adaptec SATA card or the mobo.

when i remote desktop login to the server and watch task manager the cpu isn't doing too much, so i presume it is the hard drives.
----

i did a test

i copied a ~ 7gig folder of jpgs from my WHS to my desktop. (i'm a photographer and use my WHS as an archive)
this is the screen capture of my server during this copy
whs5e.jpg

full res
------
once the copy had finished the server started doing this ... not sure what it's doing
disks 4 and 5 were jumping about in their activity
whs8e.jpg

full res
 
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That SM atom board is plenty for a WHS
I ran a WHS on a PIII 733mhz without issue.
 
I remember when I upgraded from a slow Athlon cpu to a underclocked E5200, that my general usability went up, noticeably. I remember even doing stuff like coping stuff around the network, that it was dog slow. When I overclcoked the athlon a bit things picked up... so I ended up with a undervolted 5200 and gigia G41 mobo and <50W consumption for the basic system.
 
AreEss said:
I actually recommend strongly against the Supermicro Atom board. Use the MSI IM-945-GSE. It costs a touch more, but it has dual Intel PCIe GigE instead of RealTrash.
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/ms_9830
Click to expand...

Yea but the part that sux about the mini-itx ones is they only come with 2 Sata ports, and one expansion slot.

SATA, and expansion are kind of must haves where dual Nics are nice to haves.
 
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nexusalt said:
Motherboard\Processor: Supermico MBD-X7SLA-H-O - $139.52
RAM: Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) - $23.99
Controller Card(x2): Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 $198.94
Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650W - $87.84
Case: NORCO RPC-4220 -$269.98
Cables(x4): 3Ware 0.6m SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 Cable - $47.96
Click to expand...

Where are you getting the Norco for that cheap? Everywhere I've looked has been $300+.

I would probably go with an e5200 or AMD build as well, because you can get one for the same or less money that you can underclock/undervolt and be more powerful with better options for upgrading.
 
That SM is one of the best Atom boards I've seen yet, for my needs. Looks like it would make a great WHS board too. 2 SASLP's and still a PCI for whatever.
 
Atom + 945GC is a power consumption fail. You can do just as well with a desktop board and and desktop processor. G31 + Wolfdale is on par and so are a bunch of AMD 7x0G solutions.

The only reasonable Atom is Atom + 945GSE.

An e5200 on a minimal G31 board with two phase power will idle within 5-10W of Atom + 945GC. One of the e3000 chips might do even better and they're due soon.

On the AMD side it's not hard to do 25W idle with a 740G board and a low power chip. You have to be a lot more careful about choosing the board and chip though. Some boards have broken C1E when combined with the new "Athlon II" low power chips.

You may not need a lot of CPU horsepower but why pay more for similar power consumption and a tons less horsepower?

I was going to go the Atom route too but chose G31 + e5200 instead. I did some testing with an e7200 and an old G31 I had lying around. The board is full ATX and has three phase power so it's not the best you can do from an idle power standpoint. It idles 40W at the wall on an ancient PSU that would be lucky to be running at 75% efficiency. I'd throw a pico psu on it but it would take over 4 years to recoup the cost.
 
AreEss said:
I actually recommend strongly against the Supermicro Atom board. Use the MSI IM-945-GSE. It costs a touch more, but it has dual Intel PCIe GigE instead of RealTrash.
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/ms_9830
Click to expand...

nitrobass24 said:
Yea but the part that sux about the mini-itx ones is they only come with 2 Sata ports, and one expansion slot.

SATA, and expansion are kind of must haves where dual Nics are nice to haves.
Click to expand...

I was trying to figure that outmyself why AreEss would recommend a motherboard that wouldn't fit the intent of the system?
 
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Sorry, missed the extra AOC-SASLP-MV8's. Frankly, DON'T USE AOC-SASLP-MV8'S FOR RAID EVER. They're utter crap if you want to do anything other than attach mostly idle disks to their ports. The RAID is unusable - especially on an Atom board.
So okay, let me revise. The RealTrash that SM used on that board really, really is complete crap and you WILL need an actual Ethernet card. Our parameters are Atom or similar power consumption, and many SATA ports. I can work with that.

Supermicro C2SBM MicroATX. 2x PCI, 1x PCIe16x, 1x PCIe4x
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182152
Onboard network is sufficient, being Intel. It's MicroATX. It's relatively low power consumption. It's pretty cheap. It's got ports.
 
AreEss said:
Sorry, missed the extra AOC-SASLP-MV8's. Frankly, DON'T USE AOC-SASLP-MV8'S FOR RAID EVER. They're utter crap if you want to do anything other than attach mostly idle disks to their ports. The RAID is unusable - especially on an Atom board.
So okay, let me revise. The RealTrash that SM used on that board really, really is complete crap and you WILL need an actual Ethernet card. Our parameters are Atom or similar power consumption, and many SATA ports. I can work with that.

Supermicro C2SBM MicroATX. 2x PCI, 1x PCIe16x, 1x PCIe4x
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182152
Onboard network is sufficient, being Intel. It's MicroATX. It's relatively low power consumption. It's pretty cheap. It's got ports.
Click to expand...

Dude...this is a WHS system. Therefore, most people can figure out it will be a pool of drives. So cares about its "RAID" ability. Sigh really...I just don't get you.

That SM mobo and SM cards WORK together. Thus you get 20 SATA ports for a WHS system which is a pool of drives. The Realtek NIC is sufficient for that. What is so hard about this?
 
Yea..

AreEss, step back, breathe and read what the OP is trying to do. :p

That way he doesn't get confused over these suggestions which so far have been off base and basically not helpful.

Of course one wouldn't use the SASLP for raid, they aren't raid cards after all. We know this.

Besides WHS usually doesn't need raid unless one is going to go the extra step. WHS is JBOD with software duplication, which I suppose you could use on top of raid, others here have done it.
 
Is it just me or does every thread that AreEss post in becomes Hostile?

OP dont worry about Mr. Enterprise over here, the SM setup will do just about anything you could want in a WHS.
 
He's just a snobby elitist. Just realize that fact and move on...

(IMHO Atom's are pretty damn slow, and I'd look to something else.)
 
extide said:
He's just a snobby elitist. Just realize that fact and move on...

(IMHO Atom's are pretty damn slow, and I'd look to something else.)
Click to expand...

Atom should be enough for a WHS though. At work I run a WHS on a 733MHz PIII but it does have 1.5GB SDRAM which I think makes the difference. Lots of WHS boxes don't have enough RAM.

On my WHS box I have a quad core but I'm running cool n quiet so it sits at 900MHz almost always cause nothing ever happens to ramp it up back to 1.8GHz. Also I have 4GB of RAM and when dumping big files over gigabit I get about 100-110MB/sec transfers which is faster than any of my drives can write. Looking at the task manager it is dumping it all in RAM then writing it.

If the OP goes with the Atom just max it out on RAM, no reason not to, RAM is certainly cheap enough.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Is it just me or does every thread that AreEss post in becomes Hostile?
Click to expand...

It is really unfortunate, he has a bit of practice knowledge (his ego will flame me for saying "bit") but his constant belligerence, useless user bashing and overall crappy attitude just drags down all threads he comments in. He does it often enough I'm surprised even Kyle puts up with it. I'd encourage all to reports his posts when it happens.
 
Thanks for the tips from everyone so far.

I think I'm going to change my plans slightly, mostly due to an oversight on my part. When I originally spec'd this out, I was thinking of using the RPC-3216.....so the 2 SAS card's would have supported all the hot swap bays, and I could use the onboard for the system drive, dvd, etc. Since I've now found that I can get the RPC-4220 for cheaper, it doesn't really make sense to go with the smaller capacity case. Anyhoo, the 2 SAS cards + the Atom motherboard gives me 20 ports for the bays, but nothing left over for a system drive\dvd.

So I'm thinking of bumping up to the Supermicro C2SEA with an E5200. This will give me the 2 extra onboard SATA ports to run a system drive and what not, while still being able to fully populate all the hotswap bays.The board itself is cheaper than the Atom, so the total cost for MB\RAM\CPU is only going to be about $30 more, and I get to keep the other expansion slots as well. From peoples comments and some reviews online, it looks like the power consumption should stay fairly similar at idle as well (which honestly is probably what it will be doing a lot of the time).

It would be awhile before I even ran into this issue, as I don't plan to fully populate the thing right off the bat....but I'd rather not end up trying to swap out a motherboard after the thing is loaded up with data.

Anyone have experience with this board in particular?

As an aside, I'm not really to concerned about the Realtek network on the boards. The only time that I've had trouble with them in the past is under non-Windows OS's. Incidentally, I'm typing this from a workstation with a Realtek 8111C adapter in it right now, and it has yet to light on fire, rob a bank, or kill a baby. I'll agree that Intel NIC's are certainly superior, but in this instance it's not going to make a huge impact.
 
You really should look into gigas boards if you plan on going low power... They can undervolt a lot of components even on their low end boards... It gave me quite a bit power savings ;)
 
See, same problem I figured you'd run into; any time you start ramping up storage capacity on a PC you start finding weird port problems. Specifically, "oh crap now where do I put this?" (Yeah, contrary to what others like to tell themselves to feel better, I do know my shit. I'm an "elitist" because I tend to insist a $300 part work without major defects needing 4 BIOS revisions to fix.)

The main reason for staying away from the Supermicro Atom board isn't just that it's RealTrash. RealTek has produced some tolerable NICs, like the 8111C. The problem is that SM's Atom isn't 8111 - it's 8110. The 8110 is a horrid, horrid thing that has way too many quirks and bugs.

But yeah, the C2SEA's an excellent choice for your particular situation, especially if you're not using the Marvell for any RAID. I've worked with the C2SEA, and while it isn't perfect, it's a very stable board. It's excellent if what you want is "does not break" and not "OMG OVERCLOCK! SCREAMING FAST!" You won't set any speed records, but you might set some uptime records.

Even so, I think the E5200's overkill on the lines of TNT for a single fly. If it wasn't for the price, I'd be going "WTF?" But bang for the buck, I totally agree.

Sounds like a good build to me. :)
 
thebeephaha said:
IDE???

One IDE system drive and optical. No?

That's what I did for mine.
Click to expand...

Even I have trouble finding IDE parts any more. I won't even use them in a new build, just because I can't be sure I'll be able to get a replacement next year.
 
mixing sata and ide never really worked for me, lol... there was always something twitching.
 
XS Janus said:
mixing sata and ide never really worked for me, lol... there was always something twitching.
Click to expand...

I've never had any issues mixing the 2, but I still wouldn't do it. Personally, I would just use 20 drives total, including the system drive. Since WHS uses a majority of the "system drive" in the pool anyway, I'd just use one of the hotswap bays for the system drive. Of course, you'd have to label well.

Edit: While I have an optical drive in my WHS, I don't use it. I use my desktop to rip, rename, and add to MyMovies, then push it over to WHS via the network.
 
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XS Janus said:
mixing sata and ide never really worked for me, lol... there was always something twitching.
Click to expand...

Back in the good 'ol days, I had a Linux SW RAID 5 setup - the first RAID was 7x SATA 250gb drives + 1 250gb IDE drive and the second RAID was 6x200gb IDE drives on SATA converters.

That was an ugly, ugly build, but it worked fine.
 
AreEss said:
Even I have trouble finding IDE parts any more. I won't even use them in a new build, just because I can't be sure I'll be able to get a replacement next year.
Click to expand...

That actually makes sense. I have access to IDE stuff at work, a lot of it, so my supply is not in shortage but I guess for a new build this could be problematic unless one wanted to buy replacement parts ahead of time.

Another solution is to use an IDE bus to SATA drive adapter. I've used them before and never had an issue. Throughput doesn't really suffer either, at least not enough to make a difference in this situation since WHS doesn't really thrash the OS drive.
 
XS Janus said:
You really should look into gigas boards if you plan on going low power... They can undervolt a lot of components even on their low end boards... It gave me quite a bit power savings ;)
Click to expand...

I haven't been able to find a gigabyte board that offers enough PCIE slots for 2 AOC-SASLP-MV8 and onboard video.

I was curious how the build turned out since I am looking at a very similar build though I would love to know where you found the 4220 and AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards that cheap.
 
brennok said:
I haven't been able to find a gigabyte board that offers enough PCIE slots for 2 AOC-SASLP-MV8 and onboard video.
Click to expand...

Get a cheap pci gpu for when you need to work locally on the server? You might find a board that can boot without a GPU installed to be able to run a low-power headless server.
 
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