Hi, I've been doing some research and need opinions from people who have either a D510MO or D945GSEJT setup. I'm thinking of building a low power 24/7 file server & iTunes server. I like the D945GSEJT's TDP, my main concern is that it may not have the processing power. Even though I'm just going to be doing file serving and streaming music and videos, I've read that the dual core atom can make a difference to the network throughput. What are people's experience with using these boards for such purposes?

I have a couple of D510MO servers and overall I'm quite happy with them. One is my backup file server running a 2 TB Seagate LP as the store drive. It can sustain about 70-80 MB/sec over gigabit with peaks a bit higher. When doing this it gets close to maxing out one of its cores. Idle is 28W with both the Seagate and a 2.5" boot drive spinning. OS on the fileserver is 2008 R2, Win 7 should be very similar performance wise.

I don't have a D945GSEJT, but compared to my N270 based netbook the D510 is about 30% faster per core in the test's I have run. Part of that is being able to run a 64 bit OS on the D510.

If you are really concerned about power use then the D945GSEJT should be fine. It may not be able to sustain the same transfer rates as the D510, but I would guess it would be close. If you are planning to do anything else with the server and/or run software RAID then the extra CPU power of the D510 is probably worth the few extra watts.

I did some relevant benchmarks with a D945GSEJT here recently:

13W idle Atom N270 server for 236 euros

Perhaps someone could describe a way (on linux) to test the transfer rates while taking harddrive speed out of the picture. That would tell if the CPU limits transfer speed. Many people seem interested about that.

I use iperf. You can use it on both Windows and Linux/BSD and even between different OSes.

On one PC run "iperf -s" to make it the test server.

On the other PC(s) run "iperf -c 192.168.0.1 -w64k" Replace the IP with your server. Also try different TCP window sizes by changing the 64k to something else like 32k or 128k.

I ran the benchmark a couple of times and the results are in the thread I linked. It seems to be able to push about 90MB/s so the CPU is not necessarily the limiting factor there.

As a point of comparison in iperf I can get 118MB/sec between my D510 and the onboard NIC of a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R. Both running Server 2008 R2. Pretty close to theoretical max of 125MB/sec.

Still, 90MB/sec is more than enough for a home fileserver.

Thanks for all your valuable advice everyone, much appreciated! I will take your experiences into consideration when making a decision. Looks like the D945GSEJT may be enough for what I need. Cheers =)

I'm a little late, but I have D945GSEJT....

It does ~70-80MB/s over gigabit network with "old" WD 1TB 10EACS drive. I believe the drive itself is a limiting factor here...

I'm quite satisfied with it tough...