Re: Buying recommendation for silent router/fileserver

Did you ever file a PR for the slow SATA behaviour?



Adrian


On 11 October 2012 09:52, Adam McDougall <mcdouga9_at_egr.msu.edu> wrote:
> On 10/11/12 12:05, Gary Palmer wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 04:54:53PM +0200, Ulrich Sp??rlein wrote:
>>>
>>> Hey guys,
>>>
>>> I need to replace an aging Pentium IV system that has been serving as my
>>> router, access point, file- and mediaserver for quite some time now. The
>>> replacement should have:
>>>
>>> - amd64 CPU (for ZFS, obviously)
>>> - 2x GigE (igress, egress interfaces)
>>> - some form of wlan interface (I currently use an Atheros based PCI card)
>>> - eSATA for attaching a backup disk where I stream ZFS snapshots to
>>> - serial port is always nice, for when I mess up an upgrade
>>> - fan-less if possible
>>>
>>> So far, this here seems to fit the bill perfectly
>>> http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc/intensepc/
>>> but pricing seems to defy any reality.
>>>
>>> It does not state directly which chipsets are used for Wifi and
>>> Ethernet, the block diagram claims Ethernet chips to be Intel 82579 and
>>> RTL8111D, but I don't trust that fully.
>>>
>>> For Wifi I can always fall back to sticking in a supported USB stick,
>>> although that's kinda hacky.
>>>
>>> So how well is networking going to be supported by FreeBSD? Should I
>>> just bite the bullet and find out?
>>
>>
>> I'd recommend the Soekris net6501, but it's even more expensive than the
>> intensepc (I suspect due to low hardware volumes but thats just a guess)
>>
>> http://soekris.com/products/net6501.html
>>
>> You also don't specify what kind of storage you need, which is obviously
>> an important factor for a file/media server.
>>
>> Gary
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>>
>
> Be wary of the Soekris net6501, I bought three of the 1.6Ghz net6501-70
> model which has an Atom E-680 cpu (E series) and it compiles more than twice
> as slow as a 1.6Ghz Atom N270 in an older netbook.  Someone else running
> Linux reported similar CPU slowness.  As far as practical network
> throughput, I could only get 100Mbit/sec with a simple HTTP download of a
> file full of zeros, and OpenVPN could only push about 25Mbit/sec.  As a
> practical example of the CPU slowness, it takes about 1.5 minutes to compile
> pkg on the N270 netbook and 5 minutes on the 6501 (around 4.5 if I use -j2).
> A kernel compile took an hour. Unfortunately I had no idea this CPU
> (possibly implementation?) was so slow before I purchased it, and I could
> scarcely find evidence of it on google after hours of searching when I had
> already discovered the issue.  I was hoping to find some comparative
> benchmarks between various Atom series but manufacturers generally don't do
> that.
>
> Additionally, the total AHCI SATA write speed on the net6501 (in BSD only?)
> has a strange 20MB/sec limitation but reads can go over 100MB/sec.  If I
> write to one disk I get 20MB/sec, if I write to both SATA disks I get
> 10MB/sec each.  Write is equally slow on a SSD.  Both someone running
> OpenBSD and I running FreeBSD reported the same symptoms to the soekris-tech
> mailing list and received no useful replies towards getting that problem
> solved.  I tested the write speed briefly with Linux and it did not appear
> to have the 20MB/sec limitation.  I did confirm it was using MSI(-X?) with
> boot -v.  I think this hardware would need to fall into Alexander Motin's
> hands to get anywhere with debugging the SATA speed issue.  Since it seems
> fine in Linux, maybe some day it can be fixed in BSD but I have no clue how
> that limitation could happen.  The disks I tested with are fine in normal
> computers.
>
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