[geeks] Nifty NAS board (Atom-based FlexATX from Supermicro)

[Lionel Peterson]

On May 21, 2009, at 3:27 AM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 20 May 2009, at 20:45, William Enestvedt wrote:
>
> For  what it is, and what it costs, that board is quite nice,  
> although a 330 CPU would be even nicer, and a more up to date  
> chipset is absolutely chronically required on those boards.

I'm not sure which board you think is nice, but the one I first  
pointed out has an Intel 330 Atom dual-core w/Hyperthreading  
supported, four SATA poets with ICH7R RAID, two PCI-Express slots (one  
x8, one x4 in an x8 socket), dual Gigabit NICs, and a socket on-board  
a USB flash drive (for boot or other storage)... All for under $150 it  
seems.

If you go to SuperMicro.com and drill down to Atom MBs, they have two  
listed, the nice one ends with "-H"...

> Surely a later, lower power 9xx series chipset that supports 4GB  
> sticks of RAM and PCIe isn't  too much to ask, right? I'd pay more  
> for the board just to get that,

See above, the 4 Gig RAM would be nice, but 2 Gigs is OK. The "mature"  
chipset and on-board graphics ensures good compatibility with most OSes.

> I mean NVIDIA's Ion platform is perfect but I'm, not sure I need a  
> GeForce 9400m onboard,
>
>> But doesn't ZFS eat RAM (in the ARC Cache) for lunch? Would a little
>> system with only [I know, I know] 2GB bear up well enough?
>
>
> I agree there, I think 4GB significantly enhances ZFS performance.  
> If you want to build a really nice Atom-based ZFS box you'd be  
> better off looking at one with an NVIDIA Ion chipset and using it's  
> more advanced and power efficient chipset.

OK, so your saying ZFS would benefit from additional RAM, that's what  
I was curious about...

Thanks,

Lionel