Current best options for low power NAS/download box

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MoJo
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Current best options for low power NAS/download box

Post by MoJo » Tue Feb 09, 2010 11:42 am

I am looking to up/downgrade my current combined NAS and download box into something lower power but which still gives reasonable performance.

Requirements:

- Gigabit LAN
- 2, preferably 4 SATA ports
- Minimal power consumption, aiming for <20W
- Low cost

I already have a case and DC PSU. I just need a mobo and CPU.

I use Truecrypt to protect my data so I need a moderate amount of CPU power. An original single core Atom is too slow, but a Via Nano or newer dual core Atom would be okay.

Fanless is best. Having a machine that runs 24/7 and living by a main road tends to clog fans pretty fast.

Current options I can see:

Dual Core Atom
+ Low power consumption out the box
+ Cheap
+ Fanless boards available
- Poor performance
- Most mobos only have 2 SATA ports

VIA Nano
+ Better performance than Atom
+ Lower power consumption than Atom
+ 4 SATA ports on some mobos
+ Low power out the box
- Ridiculously expensive
- Small and loud fan

Low power AMD system 7xx based
+ Good performance
+ Lots of SATA ports
+ Fairly cheap
- Needs underclocking/undervolting
- <20W might not be possible

Any comments? Any other options? I know 20W as a budget is fairly ambitious but it can certainly be done with an Atom or Nano board. The problem is that the dual core Atoms push idle power consumption up to 18W even with a very good DC-DC PSU, and the performance is still fairly poor.

I am also not convinced by VIA's gigabit LAN controllers. I have a C7 board with gigabit and it can barely manage 15MB/sec in artificial tests, and it's even lower when copying files from disk. The C7 was slow anyway but the quality (or should I say lack of quality) of VIA chipsets really dragged the system into the gutter for NAS use. Even the SATA was terrible.

MtnHermit
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Re: Current best options for low power NAS/download box

Post by MtnHermit » Tue Feb 09, 2010 1:30 pm

MoJo wrote:VIA Nano
+ Better performance than Atom
+ Lower power consumption than Atom
+ 4 SATA ports on some mobos
+ Low power out the box
- Ridiculously expensive
- Small and loud fan
Not True, not by a long shot. I also believe the reviewer was referring to Diamondville, not Pine Trail, which uses substantially less power.
Power consumption
For power economy, Intel's Atom has a clear advantage. The 1.8GHz VIA Nano needs a hefty 20W more under full load than the Atom.
Source

BTW, can't you simply use the PCI slot to add SATA's?

MoJo
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Re: Current best options for low power NAS/download box

Post by MoJo » Tue Feb 09, 2010 2:50 pm

MtnHermit wrote:
Power consumption
For power economy, Intel's Atom has a clear advantage. The 1.8GHz VIA Nano needs a hefty 20W more under full load than the Atom.
Sure, but peek power is largely irrelevant. It's idle power that counts and in every test I have seen the Nano beats a dual core Atom by at least a few watts.

jessekopelman
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Re: Current best options for low power NAS/download box

Post by jessekopelman » Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:37 am

MoJo wrote:It's idle power that counts and in every test I have seen the Nano beats a dual core Atom by at least a few watts.
What tests are those? I've seen very little review of Nano based solutions. I'd be especially interested to see it compared to the new BOXD510MO, rather than a power hungry D945GCFL2.

MoJo
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Post by MoJo » Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:44 pm

Nano vs. Atom power consumption:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/cpu-memor ... el-Atom/p5

That is a single core Atom. The dual core ones have a higher rated TDP but then again they are also on a smaller and possibly more efficient process.

Having thought about it I think that the D510 on the D510MO is probably the best option by a long way. Consider this:

Image

Multiple threads are where the D512 really shines. Truecrypt is multithreaded and it also helps with gigabit LAN a lot too. 18W idle is pretty good for a system with XP and a single HDD. With Windows 7 or Server 2008 and a 2.5" HDD I think it could go a few watts lower.

I have decided I will never buy another VIA product. Their chipsets have always been rubbish and their products simply don't work as advertised (e.g. no hardware video decoding on the C7 due to lack of drivers, no hardware AES acceleration in anything but their demo app etc.)

jessekopelman
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Post by jessekopelman » Thu Feb 11, 2010 10:12 am

MoJo wrote:Nano vs. Atom power consumption:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/cpu-memor ... el-Atom/p5
This is exactly what I'm getting at. This test is 1.5 years old and is testing total system consumption, not CPU to CPU. We all know the 945GC on the motherboard they tested is horrible and it barely lost the idle test. If they had tested against a 945GSE board, the Atom solution would have won handily. Now you can't get dual-core Atom + 945GSE, AFAIK, so it is a bit of a moot issue. But, I'm pretty sure that the BOXD510MO idles better than even single-core 945GC based boards. What would be an interesting test is the BOXD510MO against a Nano-based solution. Considering that the passive Nano boards use the wimpy 1 GHz Nano, I bet the BOXD510MO wipes the floor with it in every regard, from power consumption to performance. Meanwhile, it also costs half as much . . .

MoJo
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Post by MoJo » Thu Feb 11, 2010 4:41 pm

I think I am probably going to go with the BOXD510MO.

Despite having only two SATA ports I think it will make a good low-power NAS. I am planning to make a custom USB controlled power switch that will turn external USB drives on and off. It will also electrically isolate them so they become immune to power surges.

I am aiming for maximum 20W idle power consumption and 40MB/sec file transfer speed over gigabit without encryption, 30MB/sec with.

iBurger
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Post by iBurger » Mon May 10, 2010 1:34 pm

*old topic*

What did you go for in the end, Mojo? I'm quite interested in your experiences with the Atom based NAS. Also, what raid level did you settle for? I'm researching the same thing, basically, I want a powerful yet energy efficient NAS solution, with some bandwidth for more. Hate raid-controllers... My choice at the moment is the

- Intel i3 530 @ 32 w idle*

Powerful CPU but also relatively energy efficient. I have read other users confirming these low idle power requirments, though often a tad higher, like in the 40+ range.

*link: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/processo ... ore-i3-530

MtnHermit
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Post by MtnHermit » Tue May 11, 2010 7:16 am

iBurger wrote:- Intel i3 530 @ 32 w idle*
My i3-530 + 2-HDD idles at 28W, but that's with a modded Dell RM112 (not for the faint of heart). With a EA-380 it used 34W.

I have a Gigabyte MB, reviews I've read suggest either a MSI or Intel MB would drop the idle another 5W.

FWIW: Toms published a Atom vs i3 review a few days ago.

ilovejedd
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Post by ilovejedd » Tue May 11, 2010 7:48 am

MtnHermit wrote:My i3-530 + 2-HDD idles at 28W, but that's with a modded Dell RM112 (not for the faint of heart). With a EA-380 it used 34W.
What HDDs were you using? With the included PSU (Fortron?) in a Silverstone Sugo SG06, I'm getting 30W idle with a single WD10EADS drive.

MtnHermit
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Post by MtnHermit » Tue May 11, 2010 2:55 pm

ilovejedd wrote:
MtnHermit wrote:My i3-530 + 2-HDD idles at 28W, but that's with a modded Dell RM112 (not for the faint of heart). With a EA-380 it used 34W.
What HDDs were you using?
My primary HDD is a Toshiba 500GB 2.5" and my storage HDD is a WD 1.5TB EARS, they are set to go off after 3-min in WinXP.

csavery
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Post by csavery » Tue May 11, 2010 3:10 pm

I just thought I'd add a few bits of info from my recent experience messing with a similar goal in the last few weeks.

I built a small router/NAS box based on the Intel D510MO board running Ubuntu 10.4 server.

My measurements showed about 19-20W idle and somewhat more under load. Using iperf to measure gigabit lan performance I got about 780 Mbps throughput. It ran fine without a fan, though a small fan run at half speed keeps the temps a little nicer. This board isn't great for SATA.

I replaced the board with a Jetway NF93-LF in order to gain a Dual LAN config and better performance. This Jetway is on sale at Logic Supply now for $119 so it's quite the deal if you don't need RAID (which the new version has at a higher price).

The Jetway running a T5450 Core 2 Duo measured in at 22W idle and blasts up to around 38W when under heavy load. So most of the time it's pretty close to the Atom surprisingly. This is with a second gigabit LAN port and 4 SATA ports so you get more too.

Tested this one with iperf and it gets closer to max at 950 Mbps through put. I have 2 eSata drives hooked up and served using iSCSI. It's also running Ubuntu 10.4 server.

This board comes with a small CPU fan that is very quiet usually since it runs at low speed when idle. I'm playing around with a small case fan too but it doesn't make too much difference so I may drop that. It's quiet as well though not silent when you put your head down next to the box.

I have an Atheros miniPCIe wifi card installed and it's configured to host mode giving WPA2 support. The second LAN port is used as my gateway to my apartment building LAN which goes to the net. This has all been fairly easy to setup with dnsmasq, hostapd and iptables. It usually uses about 60MB RAM though 1GB is on board. I may cut that back to 512 if I can use it elsewhere.

According to benchmarks (not by me) the Atom 510 scores passmark 660, the T5450 scores 930.

The ideal Core2Duo would be the P8400 which scores 1540 and would produce about 10W less heat. I may upgrade to that when I have some cash. A T5450 goes for about $35 on eBay whereas a P8400 still runs $100+.

Just some info to add into your figuring. This is working well for me and performs nicely. The main downside to the Intel Atoms boards for me is that none of them have Dual LAN and so don't work well for gateways.

Also some numbers on eSata drives in this setup. From drive to board I get about 90MB/s xfer. When it goes across the LAN using iSCSI this drops to about 45MB/s xfer. Both measured using dd. This is using Hitachi 500 GB 7200 RPM drives. I was hoping for better across the LAN but I guess iSCSI isn't as low overhead as expected or maybe it can be tweaked to perform better. On the Atom board I used the drives in USB mode and the best xfer I could get was about 30MB/s.

MoJo
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Post by MoJo » Tue May 11, 2010 4:05 pm

iBurger wrote:*old topic*

What did you go for in the end, Mojo? I'm quite interested in your experiences with the Atom based NAS. Also, what raid level did you settle for? I'm researching the same thing, basically, I want a powerful yet energy efficient NAS solution, with some bandwidth for more.
I got an Intel D510MO board. Up until the Atom D510 CPU all the previous ones were pretty poor performers. With the D510 though you get a dual core hyperthreaded CPU (so four virtual CPUs, sort of). I am using a 120W DC-DC PSU, 2.5" WD SATA HDD and 2GB RAM in a single module which gives an idle load of 17W.

That's pretty impressive IMHO. I have another 2TB drive which is also on SATA but spun down when not in use. When running it adds another 5W.

I was lucky to get the case and PSU very cheap. The D510MO is a good value for money board but ITX PSUs and cases are still very overpriced to the point where any benefit you get from lower power is wiped out by higher build cost.

Performance wise it's not bad. ~35MB/sec in TrueCrypt using Twofish which seems to be faster than AES on the Atom core. It's still a way off matching HDD speed but then again I only need to encrypt the system drive as the larger storage drive has nothing important or personal on it.

I was worried that the Realtek gigabit LAN might not perform well. Realtek's 100mb chips re-defined "low end" and were basically the LAN equivalent of Winmodems, but it seems their recent gigabit offerings are a lot better. Still seems odd they didn't use an Intel one though. Anyway, ~45/mb sec with jumbo frames from the data drive and ~30mb/sec from the encrypted one.

I have not done any synthetic TCP/IP throughput tests on it yet, mainly because it just works satisfactorily and there is no need to tweak it.
- Intel i3 530 @ 32 w idle*
Seems pretty good but I'd say consider if you need that extra power. For NAS, encryption and general server stuff an Atom D510 is fine. It doesn't feel any slower than the dual core Pentium I was using before, although on paper it is.

I actually use that box for encoding video from time to time too. It takes about 2.5-3 hours to do a 45 minute video in Handbrake to H.264, but it doesn't really matter as I just let it run for a few days doing an entire season of DVDs.

In short I'd say that the Atom is enough for home server usage and the D510MO board is not only good value for money but also fanless and very low power. No need to modify it or shell out for a big cooler.

MoJo
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Post by MoJo » Tue May 11, 2010 4:09 pm

One other thing. I have set up an Acer Aspire Revo based access point which also uses an Atom. I get about 22W idle, higher than I expected by still okay.

It runs pfSense and provides a captive portable and general net access for customers in a shop. It works very well, no load issues what so ever. Had to replace the wifi card due to lack of drivers and I added an external aerial. I plan to replace the HDD with a CF card at some point.

ilovejedd
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Post by ilovejedd » Tue May 11, 2010 4:35 pm

MoJo wrote:I have set up an Acer Aspire Revo based access point which also uses an Atom. I get about 22W idle, higher than I expected by still okay.
How loud is the Revo? Currently, my grandmother and aunt overseas each have Vonage accounts (which I'm paying for). We're considering moving them to MagicJack ($20 vs $360 per year seems like a no-brainer), but they both need tiny, quiet computers that can be left on 24/7. Playing on Newegg right now and I'm finding it near impossible to build something for $200 after shipping.

MoJo
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Post by MoJo » Wed May 12, 2010 9:12 am

It's hard to judge noise levels as it was set up in a workshop and installed in a shop front so the ambient level was quite high. In that environment even a crappy Dell SFS system seems fairly quiet so I really can't make any useful comment here.

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