Intel D945GSEJT build in M350 ITX case

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Lockheed
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Intel D945GSEJT build in M350 ITX case

Post by Lockheed » Mon Jun 15, 2009 6:16 pm

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Cov
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Re: Intel D945GSEJT build in M350 ITX case

Post by Cov » Mon Jun 15, 2009 7:15 pm

Lockheed wrote:... Only source of noise is the WD Green HD.
Nice one & thanks for all the pictures !!
First thing I thought when I read WD Green HD, that's the 3.5", right.
How on earth would he fit that into THAT case, I wondered !
Never thought you could twist it by 90 degrees and just fix it on the HDD frame.

What OS do you use and is the Intel Atom N270 strong enough ?
Can you hear your system at all ? I mean, the HDD is the only noise maker, right.
I could imagine it's not audible anymore.
  • How would the performance and power consumption of your system change by replacing the HDD with a SSD I wonder.
    How would the performance and power consumption change by using the Zotac GeForce 9300 iTX (incl 4GB) instead of the Intel (incl 1GB) I wonder.
Power draw: ... 18-19W when actively writing/reading from the NAS.
I find it hard to believe, honestly.
That is so cool.

By the way ...what do you think about the all-around material quality of the M350 ?

Lockheed
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Re: Intel D945GSEJT build in M350 ITX case

Post by Lockheed » Tue Jun 16, 2009 11:50 am

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Cov
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Post by Cov » Tue Jun 16, 2009 12:03 pm

Hey, thank you very much for your response.
The M350 cost about $40.- where you live ?

Let me see, $40.- are round about Euro 29.- ... now that's a little shock.
We have two big online retailer who have this case for Euro 49.99 which converts to about $70.- !!!

Life's a bitch sometimes.

Dr_John
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me too, but can't get FreeNAS to publish shares

Post by Dr_John » Tue Jul 07, 2009 6:22 am

Lockheed,

I too independently came up with the same configuration and loaded FreeNAS on it. The only difference was that I selected a Seagate 1TB 5900RPM green hard drive the basis of some comments regarding the reliability/performance of the WD green hard drives. I also mounted the hard drive somewhat differently: I purchase a second strap and drilled holes in them so that all 4 screws can be used to mount the hard drive. This machine runs cool to the touch without a fan! And, I can't hear anything from it except at boot time when the hard drive initializes.

I had some problems installing FreeNAS. The LiveCD 0.69.1 i386 didn't seem to work because it couldn't properly identify the Realtek NIC. The latest download LiveCD 0.69.2 i386 seems to install ok. I can configure everything from the web interface. However, although Windows can see the NAS, it doesn't seem to be able to find the shares that I created. I keep on getting the message "\\Freenas is not accessible. The network path was not found." Any ideas?

Thanks. This should be a really big leap forward from my Maxtor Shared Storage Device that has served me so well for the last few years.

JamieG
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Post by JamieG » Tue Jul 07, 2009 3:43 pm

Wow, looks good.

Just wondering if you could answer one question for me Lockheed:

if you went with a 2.5 inch hard drive or SSD and mounted it entirely under that cage/rack area, how much space would you have to ghetto-mount a fan over the CPU / northbridge area - both vertically and horizontally?

I'm wondering whether I could fit a normal 92x25x25 fan or a Scythe Slipstream Slim 100x10x10 fan in that area over a passive heatsink...

isme^
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Post by isme^ » Wed Jul 08, 2009 12:44 am

Did you use any heathsinks other than the ones that came with the mobo ?
What temps are you running ?

Dr_John
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Post by Dr_John » Sat Jul 11, 2009 6:17 am

Here is an update on the unit that I built. There were two small things that I did wrong in setting up FreeNAS, but once I discovered them it works just fine. The only thing that I have to gripe about is that shares are limited to just one user, and the name of the share has to be the user name. This can be fixed by manually editing the smb.conf file, but since users and shares are logically separated by essentially all OS's, that same approach should be used by FreeNAS. But, that aside, it works like a champ.

One thing of note is that it works from the 24W (12V, 2A) wall wort that I bought from mini-box. Also, to correct my previous post, it does warm up a bit, although SLOWLY. After about 4 hours, it is warm (I estimate case temperature of about 30C). Hard drive temperature is reported at 44C. Since the biggest issue in making silent PC's is heat management, having one that dissipates well under 24W makes it a lot easier.

I'd post photos, but I don't know how. Perhaps in a later post.

Lockheed
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Post by Lockheed » Sat Jul 11, 2009 1:12 pm

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Lockheed
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Post by Lockheed » Sat Jul 11, 2009 1:32 pm

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Dr_John
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Post by Dr_John » Sat Jul 11, 2009 5:53 pm

Lockheed,

What I mean is that, if I have a share named \\Freenas\Dr_John, and I am user Dr_Bob, I can't use it. I must be logged in as Dr_John to use the share Dr_John. Likewise, Dr_John can't use the share \\Freenas\Dr_Bob. There is a work-around by manually editing the smb.conf file, but what should happen is that I should be able to create shares \\Freenas\share_1, \\Freenas\share_2, \\Freenas\share_3 and set access permissions independently of the share name, e.g., \\Freenas\share_1 can be accessed both by Dr_John and by Dr_Bob for read and write, \\Freenas\share_2 can be accessed for read and write by Dr_Bob, and \\Freenas\share_3 can be accessed for read only by Dr_John. You get the idea. This is standard on all OS's are far as I know, and pretty standard for NAS's too. It can be done on FreeNAS, but not from the web page configurator.

Jamie G, I don't think that you need a fan on this system. But, if you wanted to put one in, I'd suggest that you use the fan mount on the internal front panel (not visible in the photos, but present none-the-less). The air from it will go right on the heat sinks for the CPU and northbridge. The biggest thing is to make sure that there is natural convective air flow between the hard drive and the MB. With 2.5" hard drives, there is a huge space available for that. With the 3.5" hard drive, as long as you mount it from the top with at least two diagonal screws, there is still about 1/2" available. This seems to be more than adequate in my case. Besides, the CPU is running at 800MHz most of the time, so it isn't dissipating anything like as much power as it does when running balls out. So, unless you're planning on hitting this file server really hard, I'd not bother. You'll be introducing a failure mechanism and block the convective air flow when you get a failure. My two cents worth.... ;-)

Lockheed
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Post by Lockheed » Sat Jul 11, 2009 8:32 pm

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JamieG
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Post by JamieG » Sat Jul 11, 2009 9:51 pm

Dr_John wrote:Jamie G, I don't think that you need a fan on this system. But, if you wanted to put one in, I'd suggest that you use the fan mount on the internal front panel (not visible in the photos, but present none-the-less). The air from it will go right on the heat sinks for the CPU and northbridge. The biggest thing is to make sure that there is natural convective air flow between the hard drive and the MB. With 2.5" hard drives, there is a huge space available for that. With the 3.5" hard drive, as long as you mount it from the top with at least two diagonal screws, there is still about 1/2" available. This seems to be more than adequate in my case. Besides, the CPU is running at 800MHz most of the time, so it isn't dissipating anything like as much power as it does when running balls out. So, unless you're planning on hitting this file server really hard, I'd not bother. You'll be introducing a failure mechanism and block the convective air flow when you get a failure. My two cents worth.... ;-)
Ah, but I wasn't thinking of replicating Lockheed's system or using an Atom-based board.

I was thinking of using a Zotac 9300 wifi + e5200 + SSD + picoPSU in this case. Since cooling the CPU quietly with that little clearance room in the M350 might be a problem, I was considering a passive copper 1U CPU heatsink supplemented by airflow from a ghetto mounted system fan above the CPU and GPU heatsink.

Apparently this case can be fitted with mounts to go to the VESA mounting system on the back of a monitor, so I was hoping to mount the entire box that way behind my current screen.

Hence my question to Lockheed about fitting a system fan that way.

Dr_John
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Post by Dr_John » Sun Jul 12, 2009 4:52 am

Lockheed,

Well, you understand my goals correctly. And somehow you've been able to achieve them. I, unfortunately, have not been able to do that. No, I'm not sharing the /home directory. I've created directories for specific functions, but found that I can't access unless them I create a user name that is identical to the directory name. Users can only access directories with their user names.

I didn't spend a lot of time on this -- I didn't have it. But, I know that I'm not alone because a brief web search found others who have it. Also, there is no clear mechanism from the FreeNAS web pages that enable the type of sharing that you have described (BTW, I don't want these directories to be public, they must require a login).

Suggestions about how to overcome this are very welcome!

Thanks.

Lockheed
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Post by Lockheed » Sun Jul 12, 2009 7:30 pm

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Goodguy
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Post by Goodguy » Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:08 am

Hi!
I have purchased the same board and I'm trying to boot it from USB flash drive like you did. But do not manage to get it working.
I always end up with the error message: "Reboot and select proper boot device".

The USB works fine to boot from on another PC.
I'm using a PNY 4Gb USB flash.

If I hit F2 during boot I can see the USB as device to boot from, so it is detected at least.

Did you have any problems to setup bios in order to boot from the Sandisk Cruzer you are using? Any suggestions?

Goodguy
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Post by Goodguy » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:48 am

Finally I found it!
In BIOS USB Configuration, USB Legacy must be enabled.
Otherwise USB boot will fail.

Cov
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Post by Cov » Sun Sep 20, 2009 12:26 pm

Thanks !!! I think you're one of the good guys .. :wink:

Coastie
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Post by Coastie » Mon Oct 12, 2009 10:59 pm

nice looking build. I hope to build a new NAS to replace a couple Buffalo TeraSations that I currently use. I am looking at the M350 case, and an Atom motherboard. Since you added the 3.5 HDD in sideways, do you think there is an oppertunity to have 3 or 4 2.5" drives in there?

I can start fine with 2 2.5 drives, but would like the space for a 3rd or 4th if necessary in the future.

I realize there are currently just a few Atom motherboards with 4 SATA headers, but I am hoping that changes with the pinetrail platform.

Jay_S
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Post by Jay_S » Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:52 am

Lockheed, Dr_John, Goodguy, and anyone else who owns this motherboard -

I'm curious about the network performance of this motherboard/CPU combo. I plan to purchase this in the coming months, and while I don't need to saturate my gigabit LAN I'm curious if it can. My understanding is that fast NAS performance requires 1) PCIe gigabit NICs, 2) fast HDDs on both ends, and 3) a capable OS on both ends.

In his/her original post, Lockheed wrote:
Samba read speed is 33-35MB/sec.
The WD green drives are capable of much more that 33-35MB/s based on the drives I own (WD10EADS) and from what I've read online. If you don't mind me asking, what OS is your client running?

My home network is a mixture of Windows XP, Vista SP1, and Ubuntu clients connecting to an unRAID server. Write speeds to the server are terrible, but that's a "feature" of unRAID. :? My read speeds depend on the client OS. None of my XP clients can break 40-45MB/s. My Vista client is a notebook, who's internal drive can't keep up with my gigabit LAN. My HTPC dual-boots XP and the Windows 7 RC. In XP, I can't break 45MB/s. Booting into Win7 on the same machine, network reads hit ~80MB/s. I believe this is about the limit of my WD10EADS drives.

If your clients are running XP, you might consider trying Windows 7 (if you can still find a RC/beta copy). Windows 7, like Vista SP1, brings a much-improved file copy engine and SMB. You can read more about this here.

Lockheed
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Post by Lockheed » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:15 pm

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mark19891989
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Post by mark19891989 » Fri Oct 30, 2009 8:56 am

that cool, i didnt know you could fit 3.5" drives in there ,i was gona use that case for my mediapc/file server, but i wanted more storage then a laptop drive could provide.

so insted i went matx , if i could find a mini-itx case that could hold 2 standard hard drive i would rebuild my server in no time.

dawnpatrol
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Throughput speeds...

Post by dawnpatrol » Sun Nov 01, 2009 10:27 am

The speeds aren't bad for how little power it uses. But if you wanna saturate gigabit, I don't think this is the right board.

I suspect the board can transfer data much quicker (I have the same hardwre but can't prove it yet):

I was chatting to a friend about this today (he is a systems administrator and also has the various Cisco quals) and he reckons that the botleneck is Samba. Even with the non-Intel Gigabit nics he is now getting about 330 mb/sec..using ssh..and he thinks the limit is now the processor in that it can't code stuff quickly enough for ssh. This was despite the processor being 4 core...but he seems to think that ssh can only use one core and it is that which is being maxed out.

I asked him why nobody does anything about the limitation of Samba..but he reckoned that people just accept it for what it is.

Food for thought maybe..hope this helps. :lol:

Coastie
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Post by Coastie » Mon Nov 09, 2009 2:41 pm

I read an article (can't find the darn link again) about trying to saturate a gigabit network. They tried all combos of software and hardware, RAID, SSD, etc. The only way they were able to get close to the therotical limit was to trasnfer large files from memory to memory (ram disk to ram disk if I remember correctly) The bottleneck was always the HDD/SSD or the bus.

Coastie
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Post by Coastie » Mon Nov 09, 2009 3:23 pm

Found that link... but I need >3 posts to be able to post it lol

Coastie
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Post by Coastie » Mon Nov 09, 2009 3:23 pm


Lockheed
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Re: Throughput speeds...

Post by Lockheed » Sat Nov 21, 2009 8:32 pm

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