C2550D4i install

[joel1]

Hi,

I recently swapped boards in my NAS server to one with ECC memory. I bought and installed an ASRock C25504Di. I picked it because it supports ECC memory and had 8 SATAIII ports as well as 4 SATAII ports.The board swap was easy enough, fits right in. I did have a couple initial issues getting things going.

The system is in a SilverLake DS380 box. The 8 SIII ports are connected to the 8 drive backplane of the enclosure. One of the SII ports is used for the SSD boot drive ( set up as embedded ).

I found that the drives were found OK on the 2 Intel SIII ports and on the 2 port SIII Marvel controller. Four of the ports are on a Marvel 9230. With the controller enabled and the boot bios disabled, any drives on this port did not show up ( in BIOS ). ASRock support said to enable the boot option and sure enough the drives now showed up. I booted the NAS4FREE and no drives were present. After fusing for a while, I reinstalled NAS4FREE with the drives in the system. After booting the new install, the drives were all present and ready to configure. One oddity that still exists is that the drive activity LED is always on whenever there is a drive on a 9230 port.

I went from a dual core AMD CPU running 1.8GHz to the C2550 which is a quad core running at 2.4 GHz. I also went from 8GB of RAM to 16GB of ECC RAM. The old system would give me 40-50 MB/s over a 1GB LAN connection. The new setup will ratchet its way up to 80MB/s over the same LAN both using CIFS. Right now the NAS is configured as a Z2 3+2 ( WD40EFRX drives ). I ponied up for one more drive and will set it up as a Z2 4+2. This should also max out my needs. In the future I may add one or two more drives as hot swap.

I'm still learning the various setup possibilities but my plan for now is just 1 vdev and one pool consisting of the 4+2 Z2 config.

Joel

[gperks]

An excellent set up! I did a very similar build, same case and motherboard. I documented assembly instructions here, lots of photos. http://www.zfsnas.com/2015/06/01/hardware-installation/