Zacate - Did I just not do my homework?

[SunnyD]

Earlier this week I picked up an Asrock E350M1 off one of the forums, and 8gb of ram from one of the newegg "We make ram manufacturers cry" sales, with the intention of putting up a WHS2011 server. The idea was a storage server to make it easier for my wife to get to her gobs of photos, and a light multipurpose server for things I see fit (like moving a Terraria dedicated server off my desktop).

Yesterday the ram came in, so I was finally able to get the ball rolling. It took me a good 3 hours or so to get WHS installed, which seemed inordinately long. The OS install itself is a pain in the ass, but that's not the topic for here.

When it's all said and done, yes, I understand it's a low power 1.6GHz cpu, but it is a dual. I simply expect a bit more performance out of it. Things got a good bit better once I installed the AHCI drivers (in itself a chore just to find), as hard drive access to that point was abysmal. But it still doesn't feel quite right. Is the CPU really that underpowered? I'd have figured it was essentially a modern Athlon II x2 cpu with a lower clock, but even that shouldn't have this much of an issue with essentially Win2k8 R2.

Are my expectations out of line?

--- EDIT ---
Putting the system spec here so it's easier to find:

Asrock E350M1
8GB GSkill DDR3-1333
Boot drive: 2.5" WD Scorpio Blue 320GB
GigE Ethernet to the switch, rest of network is wireless

 

[tincart]

Are my expectations out of line?

Yes.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/328?vs=114

 

[Ancalagon44]

Yeah, clock for clock an Athlon X2 will beat it substantially as far as I know. Its probably closer to a Pentium M in performance.

 

[SunnyD]

Yes.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/328?vs=114

Looking at those numbers, clock for clock seems to put Zacate at ~25% disadvantage. It still doesn't quite explain the general "overall slowdown" I seem to feel with the system which happens randomly. It's not constant.

 

[fuzzymath10]

I have an atom netbook that is at least predictably slow but feels relatively smooth. However it has an ssd. Maybe that's your problem?

 

[sm625]

It depends on what kinds of file access speeds you are getting. Anyone who tells you your cpu is too slow without even any transfer rate numbers is just talking out their wazoo. Are you going over gigabit ethernet? Wireless?? How long does it take to copy a 100MB file from pc to server, and how long from server to pc?

 

[veri745]

Looking at those numbers, clock for clock seems to put Zacate at ~25% disadvantage. It still doesn't quite explain the general "overall slowdown" I seem to feel with the system which happens randomly. It's not constant.

I agree. While the bobcat cores are slightly slower than Athlon II, clock for clock, that shouldn't make usability feel clunky or unresponsive.

I'm guessing it's something HDD related. Possibly driver, or is your regular system on SSD? AMD doesn't have the best history when it comes to chipset drivers for HDDs.

 

[Genx87]

I havent used WHS. But I cant imagine zacate being slow for file access. I could fire up an old P4 or Athlon XP and for file server stuff and it should be fine. It is all disc throughput. You sure your hard drives are functioning correctly? Or maybe a controller issue?

 

[SunnyD]

I put the system spec up top. I'm not talking about file access at this point, but rather general system responsiveness. Things like simply loading the dashboard seem to take an inordinately long time right on the server. Windows Updates alone took a good two hours to install (not download, actually install). I haven't even gotten to the point of migrating my storage pool over to the thing yet.

 

[AtenRa]

Two things,

Get an SSD (120GB Intel 320 series will be fine) and Windows 7 ultimate 64-bit

 

[SunnyD]

Two things,

Get an SSD (120GB Intel 320 series will be fine) and Windows 7 ultimate 64-bit

No and no. There's no need for a SSD on a storage server, and using Win7 defeats the purpose of using WHS in the first place.

 

[blckgrffn]

No and no. There's no need for a SSD on a storage server, and using Win7 defeats the purpose of using WHS in the first place.

Hah! 🙂

I am subscribing to this thread to see how it shakes out. In the next week I plan on installing WHS 2011 on a Pentium D 920 - which can't be that much quicker than this thing. I'll chime back in if I think it is also horribly slow.

A server admin friend of mine complained about unresponsiveness of WHS 2011 with his Q6600 until he upped the ram to 8GB - I thought that must be some sort of fluke... maybe not?

I am planning on also installing it onto a Pentium G620 but I can't imagine that will be slow.

As I would recommend exactly the type of setup you have to others for a file serving WHS setup I am hoping you can figure out what the stumbling block is. With WHS so cheap it seems natural that folks would be installing it in some greater numbers over last generation.

That mobile hard drive is pretty slow but I install VMs on my laptop that is also running encryption software in the background and it takes ~15 minutes to install vanilla R2 and then maybe 30 minutes to roll in all the updates. It's hard to believe that it could be slower being on actual hardware!

Is that CPU running full tilt all the time or is there some sort of funky throttling going on?

 

[sm625]

Knowing microsoft I would not be surprised if they purposely made it dog slow for no good reason. Is there any reason you cant just use an old copy of XP to run a basic file server?

 

[frostedflakes]

5400RPM HDD is probably the culprit.

 

[mmaestro]

My experience is that the WHS 2011 dashboard just takes a long time to come up. I'm away from home right now so I can't check how long, but I'd guess 20 seconds-ish. But I've never found it sluggish on the server desktop itself, though. How's that feel? FWIW, I'm running mine on a Wolfdale era Pentium with 4gb DDR2-800 and a Hitachi 7200rpm 3.5" drive.
Regardless, once it's up and running, it's rare to actually need to go to the dashboard anyhow, and the question becomes how's the file transfers?

5400RPM HDD is probably the culprit.

Also possible. Have you tried a faster drive to see how fast it runs on that?

 

[SunnyD]

Is that CPU running full tilt all the time or is there some sort of funky throttling going on?

To be honest, I'm not sure what it's doing for power management quite yet. I hesitate to install too many desktop-based apps on the server for stability's sake at the moment. But given I'm not too far into the game, I'm likely to be doing that soon. It's not looking like the CPU is overtaxed at this point.

Knowing microsoft I would not be surprised if they purposely made it dog slow for no good reason. Is there any reason you cant just use an old copy of XP to run a basic file server?

I want the automated client backup features plus the media streaming abilities of WHS. I was also hoping to use it as a light duty server for other things (like running a dedicated Terraria server for the kids, etc). I want a bit more in features than just simple folder shares.

5400RPM HDD is probably the culprit.

I do have a 7200rpm drive that kicking around. I was considering trying that. Honestly, drive access got a whole hell of a lot better once I got the AMD AHCI driver installed. Night and day difference. But as I said, it's not the drive access that seems problematic - it's general sluggishness.

 

[sangyup81]

It's meant to be closer to the performance of a K8, not a K10 like you said

 

[Vesku]

Have you done any performance profiling to identify the issue? Moo0 system monitor might help identify the bottleneck.

 

[yuchai]

It's likely to be the 5400 rpm notebook HD that is the culprit. I have a E-350 notebook myself, with a faster 7200 rpm HD than yours, and anything that's disk intensive is pretty slow (Win 7 startup/Windows updates installs/loading up a game etc). Performance is generally good once everything is loaded to memory.

 

[nonameo]

Run some benchmarks, this will give us a better idea of what the picture looks like.

 

[Spikesoldier]

yeah it sounds like the OS, then the HDD could be the reason behind your poor performance.

taking such a long time to install could be the fact that the AHCI driver was not installed yet.

 

[fuzzymath10]

if you say you have a scorpio blue, that's probably it. I have two Core 2 Duo laptops (T8300 and P8700--both are probably a lot faster than an E-350), and they feel dog slow in typical use with a caviar blue + 7200.2 (old gen). In fact they boot slower and load programs slower than my atom netbook. While I had an X25-m in one of them it was fantastic.

Therefore, I still blame the hard drive. If it's going to be on 24/7, it will probably be fine once you load stuff up, i.e. you'll only suffer once in awhile.

The nice part about an SSD is that because it is hard to get the boot drive to spin down, I feel more comfortable having an SSD run all the time, and have the storage drives power down.

 

[86waterpumper]

Wow some are using p4's for fileservers that are always running? Electricity is too high to do that here. Anyway I know alot think that a atom or zacate system is plenty for a fileserver but I dont' think we are quite to the point yet where you can have a powerful and efficient fileserver that will do everything that most call on them to do. Yeah it will do the job but it's not really going to feel snappy. It will get there before long, but we are probably still a year or two away.

 

[86waterpumper]

Wow some are using p4's for fileservers that are always running? Electricity is too high to do that here. Anyway I know alot think that a atom or zacate system is plenty for a fileserver but I dont' think we are quite to the point yet where you can have a powerful and efficient fileserver that will do everything that most call on them to do. Yeah it will do the job but it's not really going to feel snappy. It will get there before long, but we are probably still a year or two away. At least where a atom is concerned, it feels alot snappier at 2ghz and above when it's overclocked

 

[MrTransistorm]

Wow some are using p4's for fileservers that are always running?

Yep. Mine runs 24/7, though I dropped WHS v1 for Debian a couple of months ago. At the time that I reassigned this old desktop to home server duty, I didn't need much CPU power for general file server usage. However, I recently created a software RAID 5 array, and it's now obvious that the CPU is slowing it down (parity calculations). I also need more than 4 SATA ports. I plan to upgrade the whole system later this year.