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

[Dan Naumov]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Jeremie Le Hen <jeremie at le-hen.org> wrote:
> Nonetheless I'm a little worried by what you said about the lack of ECC.
> Computers has been used for years before ECC came out and obviously they
> worked :).  Do you really think it might happen to be a problem?  Would
> an Intel board would compensate for this?  Dan, have you ever
> experienced weird problems that could be explained by bitflips?

Personally, I haven't had any issues, but then again on the ZFS scale
of things, both my current pool size (2 TB) and projected pool size
when I add more disks (6 TB) is pretty small. If this was a heavily
used machine with a 10 TB pool or bigger, I would definately give
strong consideration to ECC.

> For the records, I've found an interesting and very recent post about
> someone running OpenSolaris on this Supermicro motherboard [1].  He uses
> a thumbdrive for the operating system and with four drives connected
> onto it, the whole system sucks 41 watts when idle (27 without any HDD,
> which is twice as the Intel D945GSE

The power draw (from the wall) for the Supermicro X7SPA-H without any
disks attached is as following:

26W - During boot.
24W - IDLE at console
28W - Full load

This is with a 80+ rated Corsair 400CX PSU. Sadly, I did not have the
opportunity to measure the power draw with powerd enabled. The D945GSE
is unsuitable for use as a ZFS NAS due to it's severe feature
limitations when compared against the X7SPA-H, of biggest concern
would be the limitation of RAM, followed by the amount of native SATA
ports, followed by the fact that you only get a PCI-E x1 (both
physical formfactor and speed-wise) slot for expansion, while most
controller cards are either 4x or 8x, meaning they simply wouldn't
physically fit into the slot.

Singlecore 1,6Ghz Diamondville Atom VS Dualcore 1,66Ghz Pineview Atom
1 RAM socket supporting a max of 1GB VS 2 RAM sockets supporting a max
of 4GB (note that X7SPA-H uses SO-DIMMs, not regular DIMMs)
2 SATA ports vs 6 SATA ports
1 Realtec NIC vs 2 x Intel NIC
PCI-E x1 Slot VS PCI-E x4 Slot (in x16 form factor) for expansion


- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov