[geeks] LittleFall2

[Nadine Miller]

On Sep 25, 2008, at 5:51 PM, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> On Sep 25, 2008, at 4:06 PM, Micah R Ledbetter <vlack- 
> lists at vlack.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sep 25, 2008, at 1:25 AM, Jonathan Groll wrote:
>>> I don't think the D945GCLF2 motherboard can do anything other than
>>> PCI, I am afraid. So, no 3ware PCI-X ;-( Are there better  
>>> motherboards
>>> for Atom 330 perhaps?
>>
>> Well, the card should work, just slower, right?
>>
>> The long, 64 bit PCI-X cards are supposed to be backwards  
>> compatible with "normal"-sized 32 bit slots. The only time I  
>> remember hearing that this was a problem for someone was if the  
>> motherboard manufacturer put something like a big heatsink or  
>> capacitor in the way of the extra PCI pins, which have to hang over  
>> the back of the 32 bit slot. I have definitely run 64 bit cards in  
>> 32 bit slots.
>
> I'm pretty sure a PCI-X card won't fit on the miniITX board - though  
> I haven't tried it or looked too hard into it.
>
> OTOH, what use is 3 Gb/sec disk I/O if you are using 1  Gb/sec  
> Ethernet in a file server role? Can a dual core (quad thread) CPU  
> really exhaust a PCI interface SATA 1.5 Gb/sec interface?
>
> How are the on-board SATA ports connected? I suspect PCI Express, so  
> for a small fileserver applianc where speed is a factor, I'd use the  
> on-board ports for data and boot off either IDE or Flash memory...

It'd probably be fine if you are willing to use software RAID, and are  
not planning on using the file server for anything else.  But I'm  
trying to get down to one box that runs my test web server instance  
and svn repo, serves files over netatalk for Time Machine, and runs mt- 
daapd as well as streaming video.  I know 2GB would be walking the  
edge for these services, especially if the LVM is on ZFS (apparently  
ZFS is pretty memory intensive).

As I said, price point and features are more important to me than the  
size.  A mini-ATX board with 2 expansion slots and 4GB (or more) RAM  
capabilities can be had for about half of the D945GCLF2.

=Nadine=