Amd c60

[frosted]

Hello guys,

I'm actually planning on building my own NAS for home/home office usage. I haven't found any information about this low power usage AMD platform on this forum or elsewhere on Internet, but I'm curious to try it myself.
I would go with this CPU/Motherboard : http://ca.asus.com/en/Motherboards/AMD_CPU_on_Board/C60M1I/#specifications
I know it's not a very powerful CPU, but it's not much weaker than the AMD E350 and has a TDP of only 9w(!). As it will be running 24h/7/365, I'm looking at something really efficient energy-wise + I'm curious to try this setup.

The only problem I see here is with the Realtek 8111F, 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s). From what I'm reading, the 8111F controller isn't supported yet. I've read that it should be supported in the next FreeNAS versions, like 8.3 or 9.x.
http://support.freenas.org/ticket/1521

Support for RTL8168/8111F was added after releasing FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE, backported to 8-stable.
FreeNAS uses FreeBSD 8.2.
You'll be able to use it once we release FreeNAS 8.3 (which will be based off FreeBSD 8.3), or someone backport the patch for 8.2.

So I was wondering when I could expect this network card to be supported, thus looked in the roadmap:
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Roadmap

Version 8.3 is expected to be released in the second quarter of 2012. Version 9.0 will be released in late 2012, after FreeBSD 9.1 is released.

I guess they're off schedule a bit as I haven't found any trace of 8.3 or 9.0 around, as second quarter is ending in ~ 2-3 weeks.

Anyone has a better idea than I about the approximate release date of FreeNAS 8.3 or 9.x? I'm not in a hurry, I can afford to wait a couple of months but having a better idea of the release date could influence my hardware choice.

Let me know if any of you need more information, thanks!

 

[andoy31]

Managed to install rtl8111f driver-- http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?7402-Realtek-rtl81111f-support

Should you go this path, let us know about c60 performance..

 

[frosted]

Hey andoy31, thanks for sharing! :)

I don't know yet if I'll go with the C60 platform or wait for the 2nd version (Brazos-T) to be released upon back to school? Maybe I'll start with the C60 as it's real cheap and upgrade if I'm not happy... I don't know yet.
Anyhow, I will let you know how it performs when I'll get any of these.

Thanks again for your help!

 

[xmai77]

Hey andoy31, thanks for sharing! :)

I don't know yet if I'll go with the C60 platform or wait for the 2nd version (Brazos-T) to be released upon back to school? Maybe I'll start with the C60 as it's real cheap and upgrade if I'm not happy... I don't know yet.
Anyhow, I will let you know how it performs when I'll get any of these.

Thanks again for your help!

I JUST posted regarding the same APU! I'm curious as to whether the processor speed is enough to serve 1080p to 2-3 devices. Please keep us posted if you go with the C60!

 

[frosted]

I finally bought the board!

Using freenas 8.3 and CIFS, I tried to copy a 7gb rar file and I reached an average speed of 58MB/s, which is pretty good. After reading here and there, I was expecting at most 30MB/s!
I tried using FTP to see if I could get better speed and I reach around 65MB/s average for the same file. I thought it would be better using FTP, but please keep in mind that I've just upgraded my network to GBit, maybe my setup isn't optimal.

However, when copying smaller files (pictures folder) I get an average around 30 MB/s.

All in all, pretty satisfied with it as of now!

 

[xmai77]

I finally bought the board!

Using freenas 8.3 and CIFS, I tried to copy a 7gb rar file and I reached an average speed of 58MB/s, which is pretty good. After reading here and there, I was expecting at most 30MB/s!
I tried using FTP to see if I could get better speed and I reach around 65MB/s average for the same file. I thought it would be better using FTP, but please keep in mind that I've just upgraded my network to GBit, maybe my setup isn't optimal.

All in all, pretty satisfied with it as of now!

What sorta specs is the system? How much storage? How much RAM?

 

[frosted]

3x3TB WD Red - ZFS1
16GB Ram (as it has been mentionned before, the documentation says the maximum module size would be 4GB but it works just fine with 2x8GB modules)
lian li pc-25b (5x hot swap drive slots)

 

[xmai77]

3x3TB WD Red - ZFS1
16GB Ram (as it has been mentionned before, the documentation says the maximum module size would be 4GB but it works just fine with 2x8GB modules)
lian li pc-25b (5x hot swap drive slots)

Nice! Thanks for the info! Hopefully there's a price drop on this board coming up. It's currently at the same price as when I first looked into it.

 

[frosted]

True, but it's not really expensive either. The casing was twice the price of the board! (And it's sitting out of sight in my service room... haha)

I waited that long partially because I expected to see a new generation/replacement for this board, which has never happened. I told myself I would switch when it will happen, but maybe I'll stay with this C60 as the performances are good enough for my home office use. (As of now, bear in mind I only experienced for 1 day!)

Come back posting your throughput stats too when you'll get it :)

 

[tingo]

Nice to know there is a 16 GB RAM 6-port SATA mini-ITX board available again.

 

[Martin85]

may I ask what RAM do you use? (vendor, model) And what settings for the RAM (BIOS defaults?)

 

[decta]

i created a box on my own with a AMD-C60 motherboard (the asus one) and 2x8GB G.Skill PC3-10667U CL9 for combined 16GB Ram, which work perfect and show up as what they are.

 

[frosted]

I'm using Kingston KHX1600C10D3B1K2/16G 16GB Kit 2X8GB 1600MHz DDR3 240PIN DIMM CL10 1.5V
Also using BIOS default.

 

[tingo]

Now I'm one of the happy owners of a AMD C60 setup too.
Chassis: Fractal Design Node 304
PSU: Corsair CX 430 (not ideal, I had to use a molex - 2 x sata power connector adapter, because this PSU only has four sata power connectors)
motherboard: Asus C60M1-I
Memory: 2 x 8GB 1333MHz PC3-10600 modules (Patriot PSD38G13332)
hard drives: 6 x Seagate 3.0 TB Barracuda SATA 6GB/ s 7200rpm 64MB 3.5 inch (ST3000DM001)
usb stick: Sandisk Crtuzer Blade 4 GB (I had one laying around unused)

Installed FreeNAS 8.3.0 on it - everything worked out of the box. Set up a RAIDZ-1 from the hard drives.
Currently copying files to it - getting about 150 Megabytes per second (gigabit network).
It's still early days (only copied 762 GB so far), but I'm happy so far.

 

[Stephens]

Currently copying files to it - getting about 150 Megabytes per second (gigabit network).

That doesn't sound right as it exceeds even the thoretical maximum of gigabit networks.

 

[cyberjock]

Someone is either lying, confused, or using compression.

 

[tingo]

That doesn't sound right as it exceeds even the thoretical maximum of gigabit networks.

It is probably inaccurate reporting in the program I'm using for copying (Worker).

 

[tingo]

Someone is either lying, confused, or using compression.

The copy program (Worker) is probably the one "lying".
Checking... Hmm, no, this one is actually user error (my bad), the program is reporting kilo / mega / whatever bits per second, but using the wrong label. I should have seen that. Checking with a stopwatch helps.
So, it is really a factor ten slower, so about 14,7 - 15 Mbytes / second.

 

[frosted]

This makes more sense. That's probably the slowest it can go (using CIFS, copying multiple small files (non-continuous) etc).
Let us know what is the maximum speed you achieve by copying one single large file (1GB+).

As mentioned earlier, I get in the 50's MB/s average when transferring large files.

 

[tingo]

Nope, this is copying large files, several gigabytes each, in chunks of a few hundreds files at at time.But they way I do it is probably not the "easiest" or fastest: none of my FreeNAS boxes are using CIFS, NFS or AFP. Instead I'm using sshfs on the client machines that need to access the data.

So, for copying data from the old NAS to the new one, I'm using a client machine which mounts up both the old and the new NAS via sshfs. So in effect, I'm copying to and from the client machine, which has a Gigabit interface.