Atom motherboard for WHS

[Freakboy]

I'm looking for an affordable Atom based motherboard for my WHS build. I don't really care what processor or brand, my only requirement is that it must have at least 4 SATA port. Are there any boards available in SA at the moment, and from who?

 

[ponder]

Most only have 2x Sata. This is due to restrictions some restriction by the manufacturers or intel.

Boards like the Super Micro X7SLA, Zotac NM10-DTX, MSI IM-945GC etc support 4 or more sata ports. You will have to find a local source though.

An alternative is to get a normal 2 port board and just buy a sata controller.

 

[Rudimental]

I doubt you will find an affordable motherboard with 4 internal ports. I can only think of 2 options:

1) Something like the Zotac Ion ITX B (single core cheaper version) with 3 x internal sata and 1 x e-sata.
2) A board with 2 or 3 internal sata ports and a PCIE slot + PCIE sata controller or PCI slot and PCI sata controller (PCI = 133MB/s tho, iirc).

 

[Messugga]

I've been doing a fair amount of research on this during the course of the last few days as I have a new Atom board coming in. 90% of the Atom boards come with PIC, which is useless for any form of RAID, especially RAID5, unless you spend money on a really expensive RAID controller, in which case it'd be cheaper to just buy an ATX motherboard with 6 SATA sockets onboard and a bunch of PCIe sockets for expansion.

My new board has dual gigabit ethernet, so it should be pretty quick with link aggregation. I'm just waiting for those new 3TB Seagate drives to arrive, then I'm probably sticking at least one in there, for the mean time.
When I need more than 6TB of storage, I'll turn the Atom into a firewall/FTP/Torrent box and build a proper system as a NAS.

 

[Freakboy]

That was also my concern with the PCI expansion slot. What type of performance reduction do you get using an expansion board for SATA. I haven’t really used expansion boards before. And I not going raid, don’t want to fiddle with things I don’t know. The normal duplication in WHS will have to do for my photos & documents protection. Vids and music I can always “borrow” again

I was asking for 4 SATA port because I want to run 3 X 1.5TB drives for WHS and the pooled drive D, and the 1 X 500GB unspooled drive for downloading. Because the box is going to be on most of the time I wanted to go Atom. I have enough parts lying around to build a box, but don’t want a “full” system running and eating up all that power.

I will look around some more if I can’t find any of the boards mentioned here. I see that Take2 does importing from Amazon I think, so will check what prices they give on Atom board I can find there. Thanx for the info and advice so far.

 

[Messugga]

I paid R750 for my previous Atom board and R800 for the new one, just to give you a ballpark figure. As for bandwidth - You have 133MB/s over PCI, which obviously gets shared between the hard drives connected to the card. Accessing multiple drives on the card at once is when you start taking a serious performance knock. Real world, it seems you can get around 30MB/s from the card. Not terrible but not great either.

 

[Freakboy]

Thanx Messugga. Will keep the SATA card & 2 port MB idea for backup.
Any suggestions on brand or type or card to use? It doesn't have to be flashy with RAID or anything.

 

[Messugga]

There are loads of cards based on this chipset:
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=28

RAID's fairly standard on all of them, but it's software RAID and thus cheap and rubbish. Hardware RAID you only find on the expensive cards. The SIL-based cards go for around $20-$30 - no idea about local pricing. Manufacturing on most seems to be a bit iffy, unfortunately and the market is flooded with low quality Chinese parts. Whether they work or not seems to be a bit of a hit/miss, which is why I decided that I'll just stick with the 2 drives and should I need more storage, I'll just end up getting a bigger system and undervolt and underclock the heck out of it. I hear you can get down to 30W with certain AMD processors, excluding the hard drives, which is fine in my mind. It pretty much means you should be able to run 6 or so drives at under 150W and then you have the flexibility of being able to expand to a good ~40 drives if you're willing to spend a large enough amount of money on the appropriate expansion cards and whatnot.

 

[ponder]

That was also my concern with the PCI expansion slot. What type of performance reduction do you get using an expansion board for SATA. I haven’t really used expansion boards before.

I have enough parts lying around to build a box, but don’t want a “full” system running and eating up all that power.

As for bandwidth - You have 133MB/s over PCI, which obviously gets shared between the hard drives connected to the card. Accessing multiple drives on the card at once is when you start taking a serious performance knock. Real world, it seems you can get around 30MB/s from the card. Not terrible but not great either.

You obviously want low power so one can assume 5400rpm green drives would be the thing to use. Secondly 133MB/s will saturate a 1Gb/s LAN connection so the LAN is the lowest common denominator here.

There are some decent SATA cards out there. I've got a Adaptec 2 port SATA I card which delivers 1.5Gb/s per port which would be fine for your purposes.

Do you want a fast server or do you want a low power one?

 

[Messugga]

Ponder, what sort of real-life Read/Write speeds do you get with that card? Presumably you're not using any for of RAID? I assume it also set you back a pretty penny.

 

[ponder]

Ponder, what sort of real-life Read/Write speeds do you get with that card? Presumably you're not using any for of RAID? Also, what's the maximum drive size that card supports?

I honestly have no idea. I purchased it a good few years ago as I had to buy a new hard drive & my motherboard did not support sata at that stage and i knew I was gonna upgrade the whole PC in about a year or so and wanted sata for when I upgraded so I got the card & a sata drive. I never used it after I got my new motherboard.

If you tell me what HD benchmark utilities I can use for OS X I will go dig it out of the box and test it for you assuming OS X will see it. Else I will install win7 again for testing but don't really wanna go down that road.

 

[Messugga]

Don't worry about it too much. I'm sure performance on it isn't bad at all - actually wouldn't mind grabbing one myself. It just seems that they're not exactly cheap, which is unfortunate. Spending more on a SATA controller than an entire motherboard is a bit silly to me at this point.

Edit - Actually, it seems like this card is an exception to the Adaptec family. I found one on eBay for $8.99
Edit 2 - But they don't seem to ship to SA

 

[ponder]

Spending more on a SATA controller than an entire motherboard is a bit silly to me at this point.

Edit - Actually, it seems like this card is an exception to the Adaptec family. I found one on eBay for $8.99
Edit 2 - But they don't seem to ship to SA

The card was cheap when I got it, being Adaptec I expected to pay a lot but I was pleasantly surprise wrt the price.

I wish I can remember where I got mine from, definitely local though. Try Drive Control Corporation, think I got it from them as I got the WD drives from them.

 

[Freakboy]

Low power is the main thing. This will be used to backup our laptops/pcs, and to stream vids to my HTPC (which is also going to be upgraded soon) It doesn’t have to do any fancy transcoding or Raid, just sit there, DL stuff and backup/stream to other pcs. You could call it a streaming backup/fileserver if you want to And yes, going to use Green drives in the box.

 

[Tacet]

What box are you planning to use? This will make the ideal cheap, small NAS for home use (also without Raid). Would be a waste to put it in a large ATX case.

 

[Freakboy]

What box are you planning to use? This will make the ideal cheap, small NAS for home use (also without Raid). Would be a waste to put it in a large ATX case.

Hi have an old small ATX case with space for the 4 drives. But not being funny, I can't see the link

 

[Tacet]

Hi have an old small ATX case with space for the 4 drives. But not being funny, I can't see the link

There was no link in my post - with "this" I meant the whole Atom/WHS solution. I was looking for a cheap NAS for a while now, but couldn't find anything that I liked. The Atom/WHS idea will be perfect.

 

[Messugga]

Unfortunately it seems small form factor cases are somewhat expensive. Lian Li do a very nice case for around R800, but it doesn't have space for the 4 drives. You can find some overseas that has space for 4 drives, but even the guys from the US feel that it's expensive at around $90, PSU excluded.
Personally, I have it in an old ATX tower, behind a desk. Just waiting to move, at which point I'll be acquiring a server rack which I'll stick this along with my other gear, into.

 

[Freakboy]

There was no link in my post - with "this" I meant the whole Atom/WHS solution. I was looking for a cheap NAS for a while now, but couldn't find anything that I liked. The Atom/WHS idea will be perfect.

Sorry, my mistake. Reusing an old case is always the cheapest option

Unfortunately it seems small form factor cases are somewhat expensive. Lian Li do a very nice case for around R800, but it doesn't have space for the 4 drives. You can find some overseas that has space for 4 drives, but even the guys from the US feel that it's expensive at around $90, PSU excluded.
Personally, I have it in an old ATX tower, behind a desk. Just waiting to move, at which point I'll be acquiring a server rack which I'll stick this along with my other gear, into.

Small form factor cases usually are more expensive I know. The box is going to stand upstairs in my loft, so I don’t need a fancy case. I might add more drives later on, but then I will do the same and get a server rack & new motherboard.