Intel D945GSE vs Zotac ION ITX (was: Support for Zotac MB with nVidia ION chipset)

[Dan Naumov]

Just a small comment regarding Atom suitability for a home NAS: feel
free to completely ignore people saying that ZFS overhead is too much
for an Atom to handle efficiently, they have no idea what they are
talking about. I am using a Supermicro X7SPA-H board (Atom D510) and I
an easily achieving ~85mb/s transfers over Samba to and from the
machine. 85mb/s is also the best these drives will do and my CPU is
nowhere near maxed during these transfers, so with better disks I
would be easily saturating gigabit, while still having plenty of
available CPU time. What you want is a good disk controller and fast
and reliable disks, 2gb RAM is enough, but with 4gb ram you can
basically safely enable prefetch for a very noticable boost in
sequential pattern reads. Below are some numbers from my personal Atom
NAS system:

===================================================================
bonnie -s 8192

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
                 8192 29065 68.9 52027 39.8 39636 33.3 54057 95.4
105335 34.6 174.1  7.9

dd if=/dev/zero of=test1 bs=1M count=8192
8589934592 bytes transferred in 111.300481 secs (77177875 bytes/sec) (73,6mb/s)

dd if=/dev/urandom of=test2 bs=1M count=8192
dd if=test2 of=/dev/zero bs=1M
8589934592 bytes transferred in 76.031399 secs (112978779 bytes/sec)
(107,74mb/s)
===================================================================

This is a ZFS mirror of 2 x 2tb WD Green drives with 32mb cache with
the automatic headparking disabled via WDIDLE3. The drives are very
cheap and hence, are the bottleneck in my case.


- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov