Mini ITX Zotac H55ITX-A-E

New Board up for discussion

http://pden.zotac.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=211&category_id=15&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1

I really look forward to building it up with the new Mini ITX Zotac H55ITX-A-E motherboard I have on the way!  Part of me regrets the 9-10W of idle power and fanless operation I'm going to lose compared to this supermicro, but the performance headroom for running other applications (and wicked-fast startup time) is something I really value.

I would like to know more about the wicked fast startup time.

From my perspective, the longest delay is reading the bzroot from the flash drive.

Whenever I've put that directly on a hard drive somewhere, unraid comes up very fast.

using grub4dos I'm able to boot from any of the hard drives that have a bzroot and bzimage file on it.

So backing up the bzroot/bzimage to each of the array's drives provides the potential for lightening fast unRAID booting.  This is probably where a cache drive or divided cache drive could help a great deal.

[offtopic]

I never really cared about boot times.  I just switched to a different motherboard and it does boot faster, but frankly I could care less.  The server gets turned on and off so little that the extra 2 minutes that it use to take are of no consequence.

[/offtopic]

The above board looks nice!!  This is the type of board I see myself using when I start build different unRAID servers.  I am thinking I will start making smaller, more dedicated machines then one big guy that can hold twenty drives.  When I can get into a house of my own I will probably start playing with this concept.  Right now it is not feasible as I am limited by the amount of space in my apartment, so it is easier to put more drives into a single system.

I would like to know more about the wicked fast startup time.

 

My startup time on an ATOM 330 based platform was several minutes.  I would estimate about 3.  I know you don't do this often, but it was painful.  This new H55/i3-530 is accessible in under 45 seconds.  

I have also seen substantial improvement in my drive read and write performance vs ATOM.  A significant benefit in read speed (which most people don't care as much about) and a measureable but much less significant boost in overall write performance.

I will repost my latest data here later (power consumption, unraid load times, read and write performance).  Unfortunately, I don't have an Atom system running the ICH9 controller such as the new Supermicro.  The performance differences there may not be as substantial as mine were (ICH7 based).

I have been experimenting with a number of different systems to gage the over-the-wire performance of unRAID along with the tradeoffs between power consumption and processing power for other applications.  I started with a my 4 year old Pentium D820 (Dual Core) running on an ICH7 Asus motherboard and I have landed on an i3-530 based system running on the H55 chipset.  

For me, this upgrade has resulted in:

• A 50W drop in idle power consumption (disks spun down) from 86W to 36W (-58%)
  
• Improved READ performance from 31.2MB/s to 44.1MB/s (+41%)*
  
• Improved WRITE performance from 13.9MB/s to 20.0MB/s (+44%)*
  

*The read and write numbers are based on large file transfers of 4GB.

There are a number of improvements driving the above results and the cpu/chipset combination is only one of them, so I also tested performance among the various platforms when only the processor and motherboard were changing.  Below are the results that I measured.  The disks used in these tests were fast vRaptor 300GB hard disks, but similar results would be expected with the new 500GB per platter WD Black, WD RE4, Seagate XT or any other drive that can average 110MB/s read and write performance.

Load Time (Time from pushing power button to unraid fully loaded)

• Atom 330 ICH7:  360 Seconds <- I am curious, are other Atom users here seeing 6 minute load times?
  
• Core2Quad Q8300 ICH10:  57 Seconds
  
• i3-530 H55:  43 Seconds
  

Power Consumption (Disks Spun Down, Measured with Kill A Watt P4400, 80% PSU)

• Atom 330 ICH7:  38W
  
• Core2Quad Q8300 ICH10: 40W
  
• i3-530 H55:  36W
  

Read/Write Performance - See Attached Charts

• Fastest Write Performance: Core2Quad Q8300 ICH10
  
• Fastest Read Performance: i3-530 H55