VIA Announces 8 Bay Barebones NAS

[corndog]

Has Anyone done any testing of this VIA C7-D CPU? The machine otherwise seems similar to the QNAP 509 (Celeron) and new QNAP 639 (Atom) with a couple extra drives, which is nice. I wonder how that VIA CPU and associated I/O infrastructure stacks up against the QNAP?

[zedpol]

I have a 1ghz c7-d running a NAS, no raid, just one 1tb green WD drive. I get real world transfers around 30mb/s up and down. Peaks around 40, lows around 20. Runs ubuntu server. I would be wary of running an 8 bay raid setup for performance reasons.

Z

Originally Posted by corndog

Has Anyone done any testing of this VIA C7-D CPU? The machine otherwise seems similar to the QNAP 509 (Celeron) and new QNAP 639 (Atom) with a couple extra drives, which is nice. I wonder how that VIA CPU and associated I/O infrastructure stacks up against the QNAP?

I have the Artigo A2000 with the same CPU using 2 Seagate 1.5TB drives as a RAID 1 mirror (Running Fedora 10). Raw read/write performance for one disk is 100MB/s. Raw read/write performance for both disks at once is 100MB/s (NFS file IO is more like 30MB/s), which is fantastic. I suspect if there were 6 more drives in there, raw read/write performance for all 8 at once would be 100MB/s. Unless they have a hardware raid option under the hood, the performance for a full compliment of drives will be poor.

[corndog]

Yeah - it really depends a lot on the various components (PCI-e NIC, hardware RAID, or XOR offload if software raid, amount and speed of memory) almost as much as the CPU.

[thiggins]

Anyone have the Artigo 2000 running with Ubuntu? If so, which version. 8.10 doesn't seem to want to install.

I've just got an Artigo A2000 with 2Gb RAM, 4Gb Kingston CF (for OS), 2x 1Tb WD Drives, and have been trying to install Ubuntu Server or Desktop 8.10 and still having problems after 3 days of trying to make it work.

I've used unetbootin on windows to create a bootable flash USB to install to the CF (using both desktop and server ISOs). Using server 8.10 i've got as far installing the OS to the CF and setting up the RAID array - but after install I cant boot from the CF. It keeps coming up with Missing operating System, I have even taken the CF out and modified the grub menu.lst changing the root configuration, but still no dice (not sure if i did this correctly).

After resigning it was too painful to continue, I even tried FreeNAS, which I got installed but then realised that the Gigabit Ethernet interface only runs at 100MBps due to limited driver support on FreeBSD. So thats one was off the cards.

Now i'm going to try 8.04 which is a supported OS according to the VIA website.

Any help in how anyone got ubuntu 8.10 server installed would be very helpful and much appreciated. The reviewers on smalltnetbuilder seemed to have done it so i know its possible.

[corndog]

It's possible your CF card needs an MBR.

yep - was the MBR - got it fixed. Problem i'm having now is that Samba is running at 100Mbps speeds, any ideas?

Originally Posted by heen2001

yep - was the MBR - got it fixed. Problem i'm having now is that Samba is running at 100Mbps speeds, any ideas?

Are you running 8.04 or 8.10 ?

I also have an Artigo A2000, I could not install the 8.10 version, because somewhere after the loading bar finished filling the machine just froze entirelly. Tried Ubuntu 8.04, and it worked without a glitch.

I'd like to update to 8.10, if only for the better handling of power saving settings (I don't like having the fan running full speed for weeks), but I fear to get back to the frozen state.

If you are running the 8.10, then I guess the upgrade is safe, so please, tell !