Starting to think about the next SNB NAS testbed

[thiggins]

Well, the current SNB NAS testbed is getting a bit long in the tooth. I'm starting to see some NASes get above 100 MB/s and awfully close to the 125 MB/s Gigabit Ethernet limit.

So I need to get aggregated Ethernet ports into play. I also wasn't able to test the Thecus N7700 Pro with the 10 GbE fiber adapter they provided. Although I don't think NASes with 10 GbE fiber interfaces will be that common, it would be good to be able to test them if they come along.

The main problem for the existing testbed is that the ASUS P5E-VM DO mobo has too few PCI-e slots. Otherwise I think it has plenty of horsepower to test even 125 MB/s+ NASes.

It would also be nice to have USB 3.0 and eSATA ports.

Thecus suggested an ASUS P7H57D-V EVO, which they are using on their in-house test bed. Anyone have thoughts or other suggestions?

 

[teknojnky]

I don't have any board suggestions, but I would suggest that you use a board with dual gbit nics of the same type/model so they can be bonded easily.

I would also suggest using a raid-0 SSD setup for file transfer testing etc. Raid-0 SSD should max out sata2 and perhaps a good chunk of sata3.

Of course SSD aren't exactly cheap, but if your going for long term test material, 3 ssd should be the way to go (1 system drive, 2x for raid-0).

 

[thiggins]

I plan to use dual Intel Gigabit NICs. Hard to find onboard, so I'll need two PCI-e X1 slots for the PRO 1000 CTs I have.

I'm leaning toward NOT using SSDs. Depending on the drive, they can behave oddly.
I'm willing to be convinced, however.

 

[teknojnky]

I have an intel g2 80 gig ssd in my laptop (older thinkpad t60p, running win7) and it flies... and its on a sata 1 controller.

There are faster drives out now, but last I remember reading, the intel drives are typically (among) the most consistent. Anandtech has some pretty comprehensive articles if you haven't already read them.

I know the next home system I build will be all SSD for local storage and nas for anything else.

The intel g2 has made me a believer.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the info.

From what I read, random read/write for SSDs are good, but sequential r/w can be slower than with SATA drives, particularly for the "value" / partially populated products.

I'll still need to do my homework here. Thanks.

 

[00Roush]

I plan to use dual Intel Gigabit NICs. Hard to find onboard, so I'll need two PCI-e X1 slots for the PRO 1000 CTs I have.

I'm leaning toward NOT using SSDs. Depending on the drive, they can behave oddly.
I'm willing to be convinced, however.

Are those NICs the desktop versions? If they are it will be a no go for teaming in Windows. For Intel teaming you need at least one server nic. If you need a server card I have at least one extra Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual port cards I could sell for cheap.

I was wondering... why didn't the 10 GbE fiber adapter work in your motherboard? It should have fit just fine in your PCIe x16 slot. I currently run a Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual Port card (PCIe x4) in a PCIe x16 slot and have had no problems.

The recommended ASUS P7H57D-V EVO would probably work just fine but it does depend on what you plan to put in the PCIe slots. Also I am not sure if the USB 3.0 controller might be bottlenecked on that board by how it is hooked up to the chipset. Please read this for more info about what I mean.

00Roush

 

[thiggins]

The CTs will team. But the inboard NIC in ten current testbed won't.

I didn't see a x16 slot on the mobo. I'll have to look again.

Thanks for the other info.

 

[thiggins]

Ok folks, here are the essentials of the proposed build for the next SNB NAS testbed:

Mobo: ASUS P7H57D-V EVO
CPU: Intel Core i3-540
RAM: 4 GB
OS: Win 7 Home Premium - 64 bit
Disk: OCZ Agility 2 60GB SSD
NICs: Dual Intel PRO 1000/CT
USB 3.0: PCIe board based on NEC D720200F1 USB 2 / 3 Host controller

I chose the ASUS board because it has lots of PCIe slots, including 2 PCIe 2.0 x16 slots that can park the USB 3.0 board in if I need higher bandwidth. It also uses the Intel H57 Northbridge, which provides access to the i3-540's onboard graphics.

This testbed should be able to test NASes that have higher than 125 MB/s performance (via aggregated Gigabit Ethernet) or 10GB fiber interfaces. The OCZ Agility 2 was recently tested by Anandtech and found to support > 250 MB/s sequential read and write.

Note that when I change to the new testbed, I plan to retire iozone and bring in selected benchmarks from the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit. I'll retain the robocopy-based filecopy test, however, which I recently set as the "landing" benchmark for the NAS Charts.

Comments and questions are welcome before I pull the trigger and order the parts for this build.

I wish I could have ordered an off-the-shelf system, but neither Dell nor HP had systems with enough PCI-e slots. But if I missed something, sing out!

 

[SoftDux-Rudi]

Tim it would be really great to see tests on the higher-end NAS devices, especially those with NIC load balancing, 8+ SATA/SAS HDD's and hardware RAID cards. Your test rig should be fine, but do you have a switch that can support Link Aggregation and Jumbo Frames?