Yes they are very tasty boards and were on my list at one point. I think the convenience of having everything onboard makes it a good value case. Back to OS wise, have you looked at unraid? I know 6.9 added support for AMD. You could have a cache pool of your SSD's and then rust spinners for the arrays. It was a good blend of ease and the ability to unleash it where needed later. Personally in the end it wasnt for me, but it is still an amazing bit of software.
I have it on a stick right now and am trialing the VMs I want to run, seems pretty decent and I am making better progress than I have with OMV, mainly because I am a bit of a muppet with this stuff and don't know what I am doing, so its lots of Google Fu and Youtube, learning a lot but its a lot of faff I have to say and I am flip flopping again...... Thing is I don't know that a prebuilt NAS will require anyless faff for the stuff I want to run, I could buy one and discover that I am still doing a lot of dicking around and have paid more for weak hardware, or it could be the small NAS/Server Nirvana I have been looking for, I need a QNAP test drive
once Unraid is setup, its set and forget. My main server is just getting parity drive update but I rarely do anything on it these days... it just works. ( I have a very limited knowledge in all things server/linux related )
I hear you. Ive done lots of tinkering with OMV, DSM, UNRAID and Xpenonolgy over the years but not much on the qnap stuff directly. My buddy up the road has an AMD based qnap which I remoted in to help him a little, personally I didnt like the interface as much as DSM hence when I did buy off the shelf I stuck with synology. I also hear your point around set and forget, after getting in the DS920+, I moved all my stuff over, got all my dockers running and have had no need to log in to it again. Sure its not bleeding edge in terms of 10gbe or multiple transcoding etc but it really does suffice for my needs. (I did upgrade the memory a little to help docker).
Yup once I get it running the stuff I want with appropriate vlans etc I'm sure I'll never touch it again, it will just be doing its work invisibly in the back ground like the HP did, I'm hoping which ever route I take it will offer far greater performance but hopefully sub 60W which is the current 24/7 burn rate of the HP it was less but the dual SFP 10G added a lot, I had also hoped to switch its drives for SSDs to reduce noise/power but am having a compatibility fail...grr. Biggest problem I had with Unraid was getting the thing to install in the first place, so many SD card install fails QNAPs Youtube has been really good and shows the setup of nearly every VM and docker I want to run, it's doing a good job of upselling to me. Definately still a lot of commandline unix rubbish though which does make me think I should just build.
Had some further explorations in build options this weekend, I built my current NAS into my Daughters machine using TrueNAS just to get a feel for performance and software and to see how it compared to the HP, seems a 3400G in a B450 is quite a bit more power efficient, doing a little over 35w so a little Ryzen will be a good build option particularly if I can get a 35w 4300GE or some such, as 3400G is a Zen+ 65w chip. I could probably get it using quite a bit less power as I have OC'ed her system. Quite liked the trueNAS software though it did not support one of my 10Gb NICs where both OMV and unraid have much better support.
Is your NIC an Aquantia model? FreeNAS/TrueNAS has had issues supporting Aquantia 10G nics for a couple of years - I honestly thought they'd have fixed this by now.
No its a HP 522 Qlogic thing from circa 2010, probably why it takes over 20 Watts it was a 20quid test purchase off of Ebay that worked out. I didn't want to buy a new NIC yet as I may still go for the asrockrack ITX server board and end up not needing it or I would have picked another Aquantia or Intel NIC, sounds like I should probably stick to Intel to be safe and get broad compatibility from the wording of your post. TrueNas worked fine with my Intel NIC so it supports 10G fine just not as widespread hardware support as the other OS I guess. I tried to see if I could add the driver as it seems to exist for freeBSD but I wasn't very successful, not a Linux bod really, if it doesn't just work and I don't find a guide I'm a goner Not too fussed I won't be using it going forward, it overheats when your thrash both ports and shuts down, just using it for discovery and understanding at the moment whilst I work on a shopping list.
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/a...d4id-2l2t-uses-deep-mini-itx-form-factor.html Could this be an option?
I'm not normally someone who really cares about what a device will use, it needs what it needs but for something that will be sat idle a lot of time and I don't need ultimate power I will pay a bit more attention, playing with my daughters machine downclocking RAM etc I can get it down from idling around 33w to around 27w with my drives in, I've not even played with voltages. Under heavy load full 8 thread usage and drives its upto 110w. I have the 4300GE on my desk now so will be interesting to see what the power drops down to, assuming it does, it is a more powerful 4c/8t chip after all, it might not, its also another reason why I might be interested in a rack board as integrated devices will typically use less power than an add in boards. For my use really an embedded Celeron or Ryzen V series is probably a better option but they are never as cheap as you want them to be and at least with desktop parts I will easily be able to source replacement parts as AM4 has an abundance of options. Yes it could actually, should use less power than the x570 based board and might be easier to cool, though I am considering bigger cases for cooling space.
Yup Zen 2 is a beast, as everybody already knows 4300GE is working out quite well, ~7-10w less at idle so machine is around 22w running at stock settings, TDP cap is working well so when loading CPU/GPU it clocks down nice to keep temps/power in check and barely cracks 50w, might have seen a blip to 55w. This is just popping it in stock and running ram at 3200, I would be capping speeds and voltage in the final device, still in its stock TDP capped form its enough to run CPU at 8 threads at ~4.1Ghz when GPU isn't ding anything, very good start, seeing as it'll be headless ultimately. Its my strongest AMD CPU in single thread As is low end desktop chip its not a million miles away from the 3400G stock v stock in timespy the 4300g does well despite 6 GPU cores versus 11, so a Zen 2 full APU would be quite nice if they ever release them to the general public (this is an OEM chip I bought from quietPC) If you can uncap TDP and up GPU clk it'd probably be as fast if not faster than the 3400G as the iGPU in higher specs clocks ~400Mhz higher even with more CUs, none of this is important for how I am going to be using it, I just thought it was interesting.
Thanks for sharing the numbers, interesting to see. You said the 3400G was a disappointment compared to the 2400G, which is evident here. I'm surprised, what do you think accounts for the lower performance?
Actually what I discovered was that there is a quirk in the BIOS that does an all core overclock of the APU when you change GPU clockspeed and so the 2400G was running a tidy all core overclock due to BIOS, they basically all run at max boost clock, Asrock does say you shouldn't run this BIOS on Zen/Zen+ perhaps this is why. You'll see the 3400G in this list twice once stock and once with the OC quirk enabled it does end up stronger single core, multicore is probably impacted because I spent hours tuning 2400G RAM timings for best gaming performance, really tight at 3400MHz, unfortunately the 3400G couldn't run to the same level of aggression and I couldn't spend any time on it as my daughter was using it for school work, so that is probably 3400 CL14 tuned timings vs 3200 CL16 XMP. Found the same thing with my Threadrippers basically Zen+ improved memory controller couldn't hang with Zen if you were to dig into all the tertiary settings.
Asrockrack x570 board on route this morning, completely unnecessary, overpriced and no doubt uses far too much extra power for that IPMI hardware and the x570 chipset for my use case, but sometimes it's nice to just dick around with new (to me) stuff will be nice to be able to remote into it prior to boot and see what is what, with my HP I have to take it around to an old monitor to get its VGA output running sometimes when I've done an update and something doesn't fire up as new screens don't do VGA and the myriad of adaptors I have that do VGA to HDMI don't work with all text style outputs and controller BIOS screens etc , so can definitely see the benefit. fingers crossed its all sorted in respect with IOMMU etc and the IPMI works as well as the vision in my head thinks it will Going to pop it in a Fractal Node 804, a bit on the big side and perhaps not the best case design but lots of space for expansion and cooling.
Well IPMI is handy, installed it lunchtime, it wouldn't boot, I could see it doing something but no output, logged on to the IPMI, this thing definately uses power by the way, a good 7-8w in standby is being used, must be that, anyway, updated the BIOS, still didn't work, used the remote desktop functionality to enter the bios on the machine and could see that the machine was setup to display graphics over PCI Express, despite no such card in the machine (unless the IPMI counts?) Set it to HDMI and we are away. Still the things that fail over HDMI also fail over IPMI remoting it seems, I get mad lines over the display when installing openmediavault and it also happens with remote display over IPMI so for that posrtion I'll still be walking over to that old screen, dammit That x570 chipset is a toasty mofo, will probably need a fan. Now to build the rest of it and get all my software going, hopefully I succeed and the machine won't be on marketplace in three months when I have realised I was being to ambitious and buy a QNAP
Hmm, think I'd much rather a consumer board with a couple of 10Gb NIC, the BIOS in this thing is atrocious. Fan control, rubbish, even setting up the CPU and memory speeds is poor, settings don't even register sometime, feels very Beta. Still up and running and maxing out 10Gb link over RJ45 Cat5e cable. 1.2 GB/s Read and 1.1GBs Write well at least last night, for some unknown reason this morning when I fired it up its 800MB read and 1.1Gb write, you expect the reverse, I was messing about probably stuffed something, having all the sensors available on a Web page for the server is awesome though, though most of the things I like about this board are only handy because most aspect of it are crap and you need this stuff to make sure its doing its job Will have to see if there's some fan control I can do in Linux. Should be noted that I like Asrock Consumer boards and have a couple, so it is not that I am Asrock bashing here, server group needs to talk to consumer group about doing a good job EDIT- Looking into it further the fan control is working on the pwm fans just not the 3 pin which run full pelt, might be a setting nested in the BIOS or IPMI.
Made a bit of a boo boo with CPU purchase, I thought all AMD CPUs had unofficial ECC, turns out the APUs do not unless you have a PRO model, doh! Oh well, half arsed research from me Still its been really stable and I've done a stack of mem testing with no issues at all, also done a stack of disk thrashing on the chipset, seems to be stable probably because the APUs aren't Gen 4 on the chipset so probably keeps things reasonable. Power consumption is reasonable, do I need ECC, probably not if I stick to conventional filesystems but seems to be recommended for things like zfs. I've put an order in for a 35w PRO CPU not that I expect one to arrive being OEM and in constraint but we will see, if it doesn't arrive as I don't need a GPU due to the BMC server chip I will look at the Ryzen 5ks when they drop, currently the price of the 35w 4750GE is less than a 3700x so I am happy to take a punt.
So a month on, how has it gone........ Not so well, still don't have a functioning NAS I did at times and the machine was flawless, VMS webservers and everything else, superb, pretty good hardware But I had a modern x570 chipset and access to new gear so it's become a fun little toy for experimenting with things, mostly me trialling hardware such that I can switch from my old HEDT platform to a much cheaper Desktop platform. Having fast storage on my NAS I have convinced myself, that I could fit a couple of NVMe to the NAS and some to my desktop and do somethings off of the NAS which would ultimately archive to big spinners. So first failing of normal desktop is not enough lanes to run NVMe drives I already own, I spotted when looking at QNAP that they have Quad NVMe cards for the NAS, they include a PLX switch to. mux the 4x4 lanes down to 8 lanes, sure you wouldn't get full speed but you know how it is you move from 1tb to 2tb to 4tb etc etc and end up with a load of old drives that are still useful, no problem in a Threadripper, it has all the lanes, x570, well any desktop setup no such luck. This Qnap card will work without PCI-e bifurcation and in testing on some old 1Tb drives very little impact in performance, clearly if you raided all 4 you would saturate a PCIe3 x8 slot but its not slow. single performance of 1 of my drives ( 3 shown, not top left that is 2x 512Mb striped in windows software) If I fire off all four of the 1Tb drives obviously there is a knock on effect but you know it is still not slow. So in summary, nice bit of kit with a small fan that is silent unlike the rubbish in my hyper x16 from ASUS, they have a pcie gen 2 and gen 3, obviously it would be better if I had gen 4 but the QNAP QM2-2P-384 will just drop in to any machine and show 4 independant NVMe and seems like a quality bit of kit, it is £140 though (under £100 for gen2) so you might not find value in it but as I have drives and want some slots it works for me, I was previously looking at some Aplicadata card or some such that is twice the price for the same thing, so seem like a bargain.
