[geeks] Nifty NAS board (Atom-based FlexATX from Supermicro)

[Mark Benson]

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> If you go to SuperMicro.com and drill down to Atom MBs, they have two
> listed, the nice one ends with "-H"...

Sorry, got my beans confused between the new Intel board and the
SuperMicro :o) The SuperMicro board is nice but still limited to 2GB.

>> Surely a later, lower power 9xx series chipset that supports 4GB sticks of
>> RAM and PCIe isn't  too much to ask, right? I'd pay more for the board
just
>> to get that,
>
> See above, the 4 Gig RAM would be nice, but 2 Gigs is OK. The "mature"
> chipset and on-board graphics ensures good compatibility with most OSes.

Except Solaris 10 :P I guess it works okay in OpenSolaris though which
would suffice for most applictions.
Regardless, I'm sure there are better, more modern Intel chipsets they
could use that work as well as a 945 with the OSs it's targeted at.

> OK, so your saying ZFS would benefit from additional RAM, that's what I was
> curious about...

Yeh, ZFS will basically use whatever is can find for Cache and 2GB is
pretty much 40-60% used by the OS leaving only approx. 1GB for the
Cache. On a system with 4GB you've got upwards of 75% of the RAM free
to do that.

The only other effective way I've seen mentioned of doing it, that
might be practical on a 4-channel board, is use a SATA SSD drive for
cache, it's something Sun have been getting excited about recently in
arrays, and the facility is there in ZFS to use it, I don't know the
full details though.

--

Mark