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Yesterday Intel announced the Atom D425 and D525 platforms targeted for small storage servers. Both chips are 1.8GHz parts with Hyper-Threading. The Atom D425 is a single core with 512KB of cache (10w TDP) and the Atom D525 (13w TDP) being the dual core chip with 1MB of L2 cache.

The chips support both the DDR2 like the Atom D410 and Atom D510 did, but also support DDR3 SODIMMs. Generally speaking, DDR3 SODIMMs use slightly less power than their DDR2 variants. The TDP of the new chips is identical to the older D410 and D510 chips rated at 1.66GHz. Read the full story

Although Intel’s Atom CPUs have made a splash in the mini ITX space, many users prefer the small form factor yet want more computing power than the Atom can muster. In response to this need, motherboard manufacturers have started to build standard socket motherboards in small form factors such as mITX.

Over the past decade, features such as video, audio, and network interfaces have moved from occupying expansion slots to being integrated directly on the motherboards. For many users onboard video, audio, and LAN obviate the need for add-on cards in a system. With all of this basic functionality onboard, smaller motherboards have become possible, such as mini ITX. Read the full story

As one would gather from my previous Intel Atom D510 and NM10 post, I am not the biggest fan of the current D510 Atom platform with NM10 chipset. ZOTAC, to its credit, did take a rather mediocre platform and build a solid board around it. The most probable use case is a streaming media HTPC (non h.264) to a legacy 720p display. The nice thing about the ZOTAC offering is that it has quite a few expansion options for a D510/ NM10 based system, and it is ready to go out of the box. Unlike other Intel and AMD platforms, the Atom D510 and accompanying heatsink do not need to be installed by the user. One can literally plug in a display, mouse, keyboard, RAM, storage drive(s), and 20-pin power source and start using the system. As a preview, my end conclusion is that the ZOTAC board is a great choice given the platform, but the Intel platform leaves a lot to be desired. Read the full story

As a follow-on to the Supermicro X8SIL-F review, I had some interest in seeing power consumption figures for the CPU’s involved. I have already discussed the Intel Core i3-530′s low idle power consumption and relatively low maximum power consumption extensively. As I have a habit of doing, I decided to use an Intel Xeon X3340 in the new server for two reasons. First, I wanted to see a performance of the X3440 versus the other CPU’s I have tested for video encoding and transcoding on a Windows Home Server platform. Second, I wanted to have a server running Microsoft Hyper-V Server with Windows Home Server and Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating systems running in Hyper-V virtual machines. In the end, I found that the Xeon X3440 provides a great feature set, relatively low power consumption, and performance all at a reasonable cost.

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The Supermicro X8SIL-F mATX motherboard is becoming a favorite for home servers, especially those built upon Core i3′s and Core i5′s because it provides lots of expandability in a small form factor, and has IPMI 2.0. The Supermicro X8SIL-F’s supported processors can easily handle a network attached storage (NAS) virtual machine as well as additional virtual machines for other purposes. As I eluded to in my previous post, the major difference between the revision v1.01 and v1.02 boards, at least as far as I have seen, is the support for the Intel Core i3 and i5 CPU’s as well as the Intel Pentium G6950 in the v1.02 X8SIL-F versus support only for Intel   CPU’s in v1.01. With the virtualization support and hyperthreading in the Intel Core i3 and i5′s as well as the low power consumption of Intel’s 32nm process, it is a great, low cost and low power combination.

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Shortly after posting my last benchmarks on the dual OCZ Vertex 120GB in Raid 0 setup, I received an e-mail to try the new Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6.0.1014 drivers, which were supposed to enable TRIM in raid. These new drivers were released, taken down, then re-released in March 2010. The big improvement was supposed to be TRIM is enabled for Raid 0, 1, 10, but not enabled for Raid 5. Unfortuneately, this seems not to be working so the best that can be done is the background garbage collection in firmware v1.5 for OCZ’s Indilinx based SSDs. Since I am only working with two 120GB drives at the moment, I decided to give them a shot. Just for reference, the original benchmarks were done with the standard, off the shelf, Windows 7 64-bit RTM drivers.

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As many have saw, Intel Corporation unvieled its new Atom platform for small business and home storage/ NAS products at CeBIT. It seems like this is not a Windows Home Server V2 (WHS V2) or Vail solution.
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