Abit A-S78H motherboard - level one tested

Parity check completed, memtest 24hr burn-in done. Data copied to array md5 checked. Pretty good speed for parity check too. Disk share copy 35MB/s.

Sep 29 22:31:46 Tower kernel: md: sync done. time=14080sec rate=69372K/sec

Sep 29 22:31:46 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread sync completion status: 0

I think I'm the first to use a GIGABYTE GA-MA785G-UD3H motherboard. What is needed to level 1 test? How many level tests are needed to add a motherboard to the compatibility list?

So far its been working with rosewill raid cards, but I have not assigned a parity drive yet. I'm still in the process of copying my data.

check out the Motherboard Rating System thread on a discussion.  Also take a look on the Hardware Compatibility Page and look through the boards that have been tested, they will lead you to the specific threads that you can base your testing on.

After looking at the syslog it seems the Seagate drives in the system dont like AHCI mode. They dissappeared during the parity check.

I switched to Native IDE and am re-running the parity check.

I did try legacy IDE but the syslog showed all drives as UDMA100 so I skipped that mode.

Data copy checked for speed (disk share write 35MB/s), MD5 checked OK.

Parity check seems to be running at a more consistent speed (85-95MB/s), whereas in AHCI it would bounce between 70-90MB/s, finishing the parity check at 69MB/s.

I'll post the syslog once the check is completed.

Syslog from last nights parity check. Native IDE mode selected. Seagate drives are still seen by the system. Parity check speed was slightly better also which is a bonus. Force NCQ disabled = yes.

76MB/s was the final figure upon completion.

Summary

AMD 780G NB and SB700 SB.

ATI Radeon 3200 onboard video.

Socket AM2+

uATX form factor.

6 x sata ports (Legacy SATA, Native SATA, RAID and AHCI)

1 x Gb Marvell NIC (88E8056).

No e-Sata ports.

Additional info

Supports 8GB ram (4GB installed). Four slots, DDR2 1066 (requires AM2+ CPU).

1 x PCI-e x16 slot

1 x PCI-e x1 slot

2 x PCI

10 x USB (EHCI compliant) (four on backplane, six onboard).

Supports MPS 1.1/1.4

Environmental

CPU temp 39 C/35 C, MB temp 35 C, HDD temp idle 24 C, load 35 C.

CPU info

AMD 3250e low power dual core 1500.

ADJ3250IAA5DO.

AMD dual core TDP 22W (11w per core).

Expanded the array by adding another drive, added a cache drive too. Parity generaton triggered.

Oct 1 00:53:07 Tower kernel: md: sync done. time=25330sec rate=38561K/sec

Oct 1 00:53:07 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread sync completion status: 0

Rather pleased with the results. 4 x 1TB, Adding 2 x 500GB for Parity creation test.

                            Parity creation    Parity check  Disk share write  Load testing    Adv load test

Previous pci system        14MB/s            25MB/s            25MB/s        5 streams    5 streams no writes

Pci-e system                38MB/s            76MB/s            35MBs          5 streams    5 streams with writes

Performance was acceptable previously, however writing to an in use (streamng) disk could cause some stuttering.

Parity generation and checking are @ three times faster, disks share writes also increased noticably. Being able to write whilst reading is a big and unexpected plus. No more lsof for me.

This is also with a low power cpu installed, admitedly dual core vs single core. Disk share writes are based on file sizes transferred, bwm-ng shows Gb throughput averages around 45MB/s.

System              pci            pci-e

differences

cpu                  3500+        2 x 1500

cpu type          Sempron      Athlon x2

memory            ddr 400      ddr2 800

sata controller      sil pci        sb700(amd) *

vga                  fx5200      ati radeon 3200

Gb                  rt8169        yukon

* native ide mode ncq disabled = yes

OK managed to break it, added another two drives and it no longer boots the USB device. Seems max drives bios can handle is seven and still boot the usb device.

Tried latest bios, beta bios, switched usb device to force fdd as per some asus boards, the onlt thing I havnt tried is adding a floppy (dont have one!).

Revisiting the XFX Geforce 8300 board to see if we can get that to work. 

You might look at the Topical Index and the PloP Boot Manager section.  It might allow you to boot unRAID a slightly different way and still allow for more drives.

Yes, I thought of PLoP (I used it very successfully on my original unRAID server - excellent little tool) , but I dont run a cache disk, prefering to copy direct to disk shares.

If both of the other two available motherboards wont work, I may revisit the Abit A-S78H but for now it is being re-tasked as a VMWARE testbed server.