MSI Wind Atom 330 with FreeNAS .7 - Anyone?

[rcassettyjr]

I am looking to replace my Buffalo Terastation (1.0Tb/R5) with a smaller, more quiet, and way more power efficient unit. I plan to use the MSI Wind barebones system with the Atom 330 dual core. It would have 2G ram, 2 SATAII 750G Samsung F1 Raid drives in a raid 1 mirror, and a 2G CF card for FreeNas (Embedded .7 for CF/realtek GBe Support).

I have been researching this for a while and used the info I found to decide on the hardware and setup listed above. Is anyone else here running FreeNas on an Atom 330 MSI Wind from a CF card (embedded) with a raid 1 mirror?

Any problems? Am I missing anything?

Heres the info I used for my choices if it makes any difference:

I chose the MSI Wind atom 330 for the built in CF slot, the Gigabit lan, the SATA II 3.0G support, the external power setup, the included case, and the dual core proc. $149
I chose FreeNas because it is popular, will run as embedded from the CF card and the .7 release has support for the Realtek GBe of the MSI board. Free
I chose a single stick of 2G of ram because FreeNas runs in Ram after it loads from CF so it won't wear the CF card out (embedded version). $20
I chose the Samsung F1 Raid 750G drives because they have very low power consumption but will not have the Raid issues of regular "green" drives. $90 each

This setup should use no more than 60W max. The current Buffalo uses between 150 and 200 W. My total cost will be $350 plus a few bucks for shipping and will be offset by the sale of the buffalo. That should bring my end cost low enough that the power savings will pay for the parts in a year or so.

Thanks

Bob

 

[rcassettyjr]

Just a little something to add...

Today I ended up picking up an MSI nettop with the atom 230 in it. I popped in some parts that I had laying around to see how it would do as a nas. The only difference in the MSI machine is the processor is the 230 (single core hyperthreaded) vs the 330 (dual core). I used a 512M stick of DDR2 533 and two WD raptor 74G drives. The CF card is a 2G I got from office depot on clearance a while back. I downloaded the nightly .7 embedded build and renamed it with a .gz on the end. I copied it to a usb stick. I then loaded ubuntu 32b desktop to one of the raptors. I may have been able to do this from the live CD but with 512M the live CD is way slow. Ubuntu runs just fine from the raptor on this box. I opened a command line and entered the necessary commands I found on the net. It didn't work. I found out that my box used sda instead of sdd for the CF card dev at the end of the command. I changed the letter and in seconds it loaded the image to the CF card. I rebooted and set the bios to boot from the cf card and had FreeNAS up and running. I set up the drives as a software raid 1 mirror and created the shares. I hooked the atom to a gigabit switch and also hooked in my monster desktop (dual xeon 3.2s/4G/gigabit/ubuntu 8.04x64). I copied a 16G folder in my software folder and pasted it into one of the shared folders on the nas. It immediately started the copy and was running between 15 and 18 MB/sec. After a few minutes it dropped to 4 to 5 Mb/sec. What is odd is the gui from freenas says the traffic is running between 40-60Mbps and the progress bar on my machine says 4-5 MB/sec. Is something wrong here? Is this normal throughput for a homebuilt NAS? (This is my first home built one).

Edit: I rebooted the box and now the unit runs in the mid 20s all the time. Must have been something stuck somewhere.

Thanks

Bob

 

[rcassettyjr]

I guess nobody is going to reply to the questions but I figured I would add all the info so it will be here should someone else be looking to build one of these.

I did some testing on my atom nas. I made sure that it worked fine with windows, mac, and linux clients. I then tested the transfer rate against a buffalo terastation pro which was also on the gigabit leg of our network. Transferring a 577M iso file to the buffalo ran at 2.7MB/sec. Transferring it back ran at 9.5 MB/sec. Transferring the same file to the atom nas ran at 25.8 MB/sec. Transferring it back ran at 26.1 MB/sec. Not sure how well the buffalo performs compared to other commercial boxes but it seems my cheap atom nas with a 2 disk raid mirror beats the pants off the $600 4 disk raid 5 commercial unit. Not sure is there is an explanation for this. If there is, let me know.

I monitored cpu and ram usage on the atom box during transfers. CPU never went above 43% and ram never went above 26%. The raptors are older ones from my Dell 670 workstation and they make a little noise. Even with them, this unit is way more quiet than my buffalo box. It alsot uses about 20% of the electricity of the buffalo. I originally bought this MSI WIND nettop to serve as a linux server. I was going to install ubuntu server or CentOS with apache and MySQL in order to learn how to administrate them. I may just not bother with the dual core atom box and leave this one as my NAS. I will pop in the 2 new 750G drives and change the 512 to 1G and call it done. I am very impressed with this unit. For $119 plus a couple drives and a stick of laptop ram, this would be a good choice for a cheap home nas.

If anyone knows the answers to the questions I posted above or would like to add something to this topic, please do.

Bob

 

[thiggins]

The TeraStation Pro is a pretty old design. Your write speed seems a bit low, but I'm not surprised by the speeds you obtained. The difference is the CPUs and, to a lesser extent, RAM size.

The QNAP TS-439 Pro, which uses an Atom D270 @ 1.6GHz had RAID 5 write / read of 55 MB/s and 87 MB/s using our Vista SP1 file copy test.

I found Ubuntu Server provided more performance than FreNAS on the Atom.
Build Your Own Atom-based NAS - Part 1 (FreeNAS)
Build Your Own Atom-based NAS - Part 2 (Ubuntu Server)

 

[roamer]

[...]
What is odd is the gui from freenas says the traffic is running between 40-60Mbps and the progress bar on my machine says 4-5 MB/sec. Is something wrong here? Is this normal throughput for a homebuilt NAS? (This is my first home built one).

Edit: I rebooted the box and now the unit runs in the mid 20s all the time. Must have been something stuck somewhere.

Thanks

Bob

I have tested FreeNAS 0.7 with an Intel D945GCLF2 Board and RAiD1, and I also reached only ~20-25 Mbyte/s write throughput.
Afterwards I tested OpenSolaris as OS, which performed much better but the ZFS consumes a lot of RAM. (the max of 2GB was completly used during file copy.)

Finally I'm using now Ubuntu which has the best mix between performance and features.
-> write throughput ~40-60 MB/s and additional features like uPNP audio-streaming server
And as a goody - with Ubuntu is Wake On LAN working, with FreeNAS unfortunately it wasn't.

 

[aknab666]

Although I have the Wind 100 too I never tried freenas...I thought I read that some of drivers in Freenas were not that great so I skipped it.

I started with two Hitachi 7k1000b's in unbuntu(RAID1), moved to opensuse(RAID/LVM) and am now on Win 2008R2(No raid). Between R2 boxes and Win7 boxes I have achieved the max single internal drive speed over a single gigabit lan for large files...90MBps-110MBps depending on what part of the drive. Since I have now decided to try to aim for 2 gigabit LACP/RAID (200-230MBps) I have retired the wind.

I liked the Linux flavors but only occasionally saw greater that 80 MBps transfer speeds. Most notably in opensuse when the GUI was running I saw half that. I never had a chance to check NFS directly. Since I am only running Win7 and 2008/R2 I have gone back to the "evil empire". However this has but me on the road to try and understand where the bottle-neck lies..cpu, software, memory, disk, bus....I have pieces of the puzzle but they don't all fit yet. Clearly network file transfers are not easy....I want to know why.

 

[Osamede]

I liked the Linux flavors but only occasionally saw greater that 80 MBps transfer speeds. Most notably in opensuse when the GUI was running I saw half that.

Note that if you were running Windows Home Server, you would have topped out at half that speed. So its not purely a Linux vs Windows thing. I think Microsoft has done some things that to make it advantageous to stick to their latest OSs and dont mix and match, a sort of inducement to pay up and leave XP/Win 2003/WHS.