ASRock Rack C2750D4I Review: A Storage Motherboard with Management
by Ian Cutress on April 29, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- Atom
- ASRock
- Silvermont
- Enterprise
- server
- Avoton
System Benchmarks
USB Backup
For this benchmark, we run CrystalDiskMark to determine the ideal sequential read and write speeds for the USB port using our 240 GB OCZ Vertex3 SSD with a SATA 6 Gbps to USB 3.0 converter. Then we transfer a set size of files from the SSD to the USB drive using DiskBench, which monitors the time taken to transfer. The files transferred are a 1.52 GB set of 2867 files across 320 folders – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are the videos used in the WinRAR test. In an update to pre-Z87 testing, we also run MaxCPU to load up one of the threads during the test which improves general performance up to 15% by causing all the internal pathways to run at full speed.
USB effectiveness is often limited by how quickly a system can turn on all the pathways for the required data, as well as the underlying chipset implementation. Avoton is not going to win any records today for USB speed, and the lack of a USB 3.0 port is an oversight.
DPC Latency
Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority. Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser priority requests, such as audio, will be further down the line. So if the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request is processed before the buffer is filled. If the device drivers of higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can cause delays in request scheduling and process time, resulting in an empty audio buffer – this leads to characteristic audible pauses, pops and clicks. Having a bigger buffer and correctly implemented system drivers obviously helps in this regard. The DPC latency checker measures how much time is processing DPCs from driver invocation – the lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer sizes. Results are measured in microseconds and taken as the peak latency while cycling through a series of short HD videos - less than 500 microseconds usually gets the green light, but the lower the better.
While the system is not a digital audio workstation target, as our DPC test is quick and painless the results are included for completeness. The system actually does rather well, right in the middle of our Z77 testing.
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chekk - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Yes, for that price and target market, they should have gone with an LSI chip. You don't see Supermicro or Tyan boards in that price range using Marvell.cen - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I know it was said that the actual storage review is coming in the future but I think this article is a complete waste of time. You should simply let the storage review happen and not bother with this at all. More than half of the benchmarks are useless, the only ones of value might be encryption and compression.What we actually want to see is FreeNAS thrown in there with a 16TB ZFS zpool and some IO benchmarks. :)
Calista - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Could be perfect for anyone wishing to build a tiny box for virtualization, a task in which many a NIC, plenty of RAM and a multicore processor is most helpful.RandomUsername3245 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I've wondered how one of these Avoton boards would compare to a Supermicro C2xx + Pentum G3430 (which supports ECC). This is the cheaper option if you don't need lots of ports, but once you add $100 for a sata card from Ebay, these options are similarly priced.Calista - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Could you please measure power consumption without the 770 as well? I have a HP Elite 8200 with a quad i5, SSD + 2.5" HDD, 32 GB RAM and an extra NIC as a makeshift box for ESXi and with 6-8 virtual machines running it draw less than 30 watt. It would be interesting to know how low this machine could go since any machine running 24/7 will add substantially to the power bill.Guspaz - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
If I was using this in my home file server, I'd make a few changes to the board. The number of SATA ports is fine, because even though I've got 18 drives in mine, that PCIe slot lets you put in a SAS/SATA controller to get the total up as high as needed (16 port cards aren't hard to find, higher is available).However, I'd change a few things:
1) Replace the CPU. Home file servers can often be bottlenecked by individual CPU core performance, because not all filesystem operations on ZFS are multithreaded (although it's far better these days). For the ~25W TDP, I would much rather have a Haswell part, even if it meant fewer cores. For that TDP, you could get a ~3GHz dual-core part, or a ~2GHz quad-core part. Either of those would be better suited.
2) Add digital video output. HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, any of them. I'm not suggesting using this thing for HTPC use, but many monitors these days are digital-only, and nothing is more annoying than trying to diagnose problems with a headless system when your motherboard is VGA-only and all you have is digital-only monitors.
3) Drop two of the RAM slots, and use them for another PCIe slot. Four slots is excessive for anything but enterprise use. Two slots cheaply gets you 16GB of RAM, or 32GB if you're desperate, either of which is more than enough for a home file server. A second PCIe slot, on the other hand, could enable a variety of other options, be they multiple SAS/SATA cards, a discrete video card if you really do want to use the thing as an HTPC, a video capture card (this board in that Silverstone case would probably make a decent HD-SDI recording box), etc.
4) More USB ports, prefereably 3.0. If extra space is needed for the ports, ditch one of the three GigE ports; two is plenty.
5) An mSATA slot for a boot drive could be useful, although it would probably increase board complexity by requiring some of the board components to move to the rear.
stoatwblr - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
"Two slots cheaply gets you 16GB of RAM, or 32GB if you're desperate"My ZFS media rig has 19 drives (21 including the ZIL and l2arc), plus boot media and at 36Tb it _needs_ 32Gb of ram to work efficiently. It kept bottlenecking at 16Gb. The next round of storage will push well past the 32Gb requirement.
+1 on the video output, +1 on usb3 - but I don't think it needs more ports. That's not a good fit for the target, which is a storage controller. Ditto on the mSATA.
If you need fewer cores there's a quad-core version which is cheaper.
I'd prefer that they placed a lsi sas controller onboard and dumped the sata ports for minisas (an expander cable is cheap, tidy and positively locks into place to ensure no problems.) The downside is that a decent sas controller would add at least $100 and a port multiplexer as much again.
If I was designing, I'd think about 10Gb copper, but that adds 15W to the power consumption and $150 to the price.
This thing is expensive for prosumers and limited for enterprise, but compromises are always like that. Supermicro's version has similar issues and the fact that they don't use minisas makes me think that perhaps Intel have placed restrictions on what can be used.
bernstein - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
well my zfs rig has 20 2.5" 2tb sata hdds (2x 16tb raidz2). no ZIL. no L2ARC.runs on a single 8GB ecc ddr2 dimm on a sandy bridge i3-2100T.
as a home fileserver this system rocks. it might be ram "bottlenecked" for high i/o tasks, but all i can see is that it performs at least as well as a single USB3 hdd... and it outperforms any consumer nas.
Daniel Egger - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
For a NAS or SAN build this seriously lacks 10GbE and USB 3 ports. All in all this board seems like a pretty strange amalgamation of random features, as there're better choices for about any possible use case around.Gunbuster - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
14000 RPM Delta fans? No Thanks!I would have called it the AssRack. Sorry I couldn't resist!