Hardware hoarder

Picked up a new toy!  I figured it was a decent deal since 4tb NAS drives are $125~150 each.

Pair of 4tb Seagate NAS drives
4gb DDR3 sodimm
Intel Atom D2550 @ 1.86GHz
ASRock AD2550R/U3S3 Mini ITX Server Motherboard
Chenbro Mini-ITX Home/Small Business NAS Server Chassis Case SR30169 w/ PSU

The specs on the motherboard say it will do only 4gb of DDR3 ram, however the previous owner had a single module in there.  I put a pair of 4gb modules in there and it saw all 8gb!  Unfortunately it recognizes the pc3-12800 as pc3-10600 but whatever.  The case holds has four drive trays, that can hold either a 2.5 or 3.5" drive in each drive sled.  There is also an internal 2.5" drive tray.

In comparison to my FreeNAS ITX build it has a way slower CPU (cpu mark of 667 vs 1740), only takes 8gb vs. 16gb of ram, consumes less power 10-watts vs. 17-watts.  Six ports and PCI-E on the AsRocks VS. four SATA ports and PCI on the Gigabyte.

For kicks and grins I installed VMware ESXi v5.5.  It complained a few times during install.  Surprisingly it did complete and run! It even saw the NIC and the 3gbps SATA controller, not the 6gbps (no surprise).  This CPU doesn't have Intel-VT so I cannot run 64bit OS's.

Eventually I will make it into a NAS4Free or Windows Storage server or something to be used for backups.

Installed Windows 7 just for testing....Ignore the graphics rating as Intel GMA3600 video card drivers aren't loaded (by the way, there doesn't seem to be Windows 64bit drivers).

Interesting that Seagate 4tb NAS drives (5400rpms 64mb cache) outperform the HGST 1tb (7200rpm 32mb cache).

***update: so I benchmarked the 2nd HGST 1tb SATA drive in this system and if come in around 85 mbps according to ATTO vs. 130ish.....  Probably not advisable to but these two in the same RAID.  I suspect that drive is going to die at some point.