Re: Buying recommendation for silent router/fileserver

I did not, but I put it on my list to try to accomplish.

On 10/11/12 13:41, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> 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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