Posted by Enlightenment on 17 januari 2008 @ 17:21
While many would look at Phenom to equip their desktop or even gaming system, I plan on using it for my new NAS file-server. Ultimately, a good NAS computer system has a very low idle power consumption since it is running 24/7, coupled with lots of full-speed Serial ATA ports.
New motherboard featuring SB700 southbridge chip
OCWorkbench caught my eye
when presenting the first retail board with the new AMD SB700 southbridge. This south bridge chip is already in production, but its worldwide sales has been postponed due to lack of proper driver support. One specific feature, Hybrid CrossfireX, does not have proper driver support yet. This allows the onboard IGP videocard to be utilized in conjunction with an add-on videocard in the PCIe x16 slot. SB700 packs 6 instead of 4 full-speed Serial ATA ports and hopefully has a fix for the ACPI/AHCI issues that plagued the SB600 chip.
The Supox AK780G is one of the first boards equipped with AMD's new chipset (RS780 + SB700).
Look at the compact size of the board and the modest copper heat-sinks. Small heat-sinks usually mean low power consumption. Also micro-ATX shaped motherboards with onboard video usually have much lower power drain than a full-size ATX board. This Supox board will hit the Chinese market, the worldwide market will have to wait for completion of the (Windows-only?) drivers which include support for the Hybrid CrossfireX feature.
Low idle power consumption of new AMD 7-series chipset
Unlike nVidia, AMD aims to minimize power consumption in their chipsets. The 690G chip was already much more efficient than comparable nVidia single-chip design. The high-end AMD RS790 northbridge consumes only 3W in idle according to
Wikipedia.. *drool* 
My own thoughts
Personally, I'm awaiting the arrival of the Phenom 9100e quadcore processor which will have dualcore pricing (I expect around €130 on webshops) paired with AMD's new RS780+SB700 chipset. This combination allows for very low idle power consumption paired with very high performance thanks to quadcore and HyperTransport 3.0.
Cost
If i have to make an educated guess about prices, a cheap quadcore system would look like:
AMD Quadcore Phenom 9100e - €130
Socket AM2+ motherboard with RS780/SB700 IGP chipset - €75
2GB DDR2 memory - €30
Casing and power supply - €40
That makes a working PC for about 275 euro - exactly what i had in mind! You can throw in a juicy graphics card and you have a cool gaming system, or throw in 6 Serial ATA drives and create a cool 5TB RAID5 NAS with encryption and journaling enabled. Oh, did I mention low power consumption means silence? I can't wait to buy one!
| Reply by roadrun777 (unregistered) on Fri, 25 Jan 2008 @ 14:01 | Quote |
I don't quite understand why you would need 4 cores for a simple file server? I thought I/O CPU utilization was very low for disk access.
By the way, what operating system will you be using?
| Reply by Enlightenment on Sat, 02 Feb 2008 @ 22:33 | Quote |
Encryption will put a heavy burden on your CPU, network throughput (more than 1 gigabit) will also consume a lot of cycles. And if you are willing to do Software RAID5 with huge performance, a single core CPU will mean a slow connection.
Even an expensive Core 2 Duo 6850 3GHz will have trouble keeping I/O flow constant and at a high rate. Encryption alone will put both cores to its knees at 105MB/s, just above gigabit speed. No RAID5 overhead and gigabit netwerk overhead have been applied, and only the lowest encryption scheme without authentication has been chosen.
A quadcore CPU will be excellent for this task, since encryption can be spread out on as many cores there are available. Also, a quadcore Phenom 9100e will cost about 130 euro while the Core 2 Duo 6850 can be found for ~230 euro.
I will, ofcourse, be using FreeBSD 7 as NAS operating system, which offers the best software RAID5 performance defeating any other software implementation to date, it even defeats my Areca ARC-1210 in sequential write throughput!
| Reply by Joost (unregistered) on Fri, 07 Mar 2008 @ 19:53 | Quote |
Just wondered if you made any progress on your NAS with the hardware you described. Please let me know as i am planning on a NAS with the same components. Does FreeNAS support these components?
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