AMD E-350 APU for NAS

[bnborg]

I am thinking of building a NAS using an E-350 board, ASRock E350M1/USB3. You can get them for as little as $110. That's a lot of bang for the buck, considering that the E-350 is a dual core 64 bit processor.

These boards have four or five SATA 6.0Gb/s ports and sometimes an eSata port. Some also have USB 3.0 for an extra $10 or $20.

The only disadvantage seems to be that they don't seem to have BIOS supported RAID. The SB850 SATA controller should support RAID but the EFI BIOS doesn't.

I am leaning towards Windows but I might play with others. I have both WHS 2011 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 available. WSS could provide iSCSI targets.

 

[Jesse B]

I've seen others build similar machines with good outcomes. I've seen 70MB/s-80MB/s using ZFS on an E-350 based system numerous times.

 

[s0rce]

I just built one:

ASRock E-350 miniITX
8GB ram
16 gig kingston SSD for the OS (over eSATA->sata)
4x Hitachi 5k3000 in Raid Z (onboard SATA ports)

edit: running Solaris 11 Express

Total cost was around 600 something $. I'm considering adding a cheap IBM BR10i HBA, moving the drives to it and then adding a second 16gig SSD to mirror the OS drive and a L2ARC, probably a 60 gig OCZ vertex 2 SSD I have around.

using the integreated realtek gigE link I get around 80-90 MB/sec reads/writes but I can't really take full advantage of it yet since I'm still on my laptop, waiting until I move before I build a new desktop.

edit 2: averages around 45 watts.

 

[bnborg]

Thanks for your feedback, both of you.

I've already got a ASRock E-350 miniITX that I am planning to use for an HTPC. Or maybe I'll put the USB3 one there and use the USB2 one for a NAS.

 

[stevech]

How does that AMD ASROCK 1.6GHz compare to a dual-core Intel Atom D525 with DDR3 memory?

 

[bnborg]

I don't have an Atom to compare it to, but FWIW Windows 7 x64 SP1 reports a performance index of 3.8, with the CPU being the limiting factor.

That was on the USB2 model, with 8 GB of DDR3. I'm still building the new computer.

 

[konrad]

Saw this thread and was interested in purchasing an ASRock E350M1/USB3 and was wondering what the compatibility with Solaris Express was like.

Did you need to install any additional drivers, e.g. Network?

What's compatibility with USB3 like? Would like to extend it with Hotway 4 or 8 bay enclosure at some point in the future as these work very well but the USB2 speeds are shockingly bad and E-Sata support typically required port multipliers. (Prefer to use ZFS based RAID).

Does the E-Sata port support port multipliers? I.e. with all the internal sata ports consumed. Am guessing it doesn't?

 

[bnborg]

I haven't played with Solaris in years. Maybe one of the other posters could respond to that.

I have now built mine, with four 1 TB 6.0 Gbs drives and 8 GB of DDR3. I put Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 SP1 on it. It has DFS with replication to two other servers. The Windows interface can get "slow", especially when there is a lot of file transfer.

I also put the iSCSI software on it and created a target. I plan to play some more with that.

 

[s0rce]

in case of interest here are my bonnie++ benchmarks: