ASUS P9A-I/C2550/SAS/4L

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Hoping folks have had the time to see the ASUS P9A-I series. Rumor has it that at least one version is coming to North America. Also, rumor has it I may be picking a ASUS P9A-I/C2550/SAS/4L up tomorrow. This is one of the motherboards we previewed here.

This is the Intel Atom C2550 (4C/ 4T) based motherboard with quad i354 gigabit LAN, and 4x SFF-8087 connectors tied to Marvell 88SE9485 controllers.

Now, the fun part is that I should get the motherboard Wednesday and will be getting married on Saturday.

I do plan to have an initial piece up in short order, likely written on the 21+ hour journey to the honeymoon spot. That will mean I need to collect data quickly from the platform. If you do have any requests, please let me know and I will see what I can get done time wise.
 
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ehorn

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Jun 21, 2012
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My request?...

16 ssd's and hammer those marvel controllers :)

Congrats on the upcoming marriage!
 

Patrick

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Just arrived in the lab. Will be firing it up soon. In the meantime, I can say it is very similar to the preview piece. The board does look a little bit more brown than in the ASUS site pictures due to all of the PCB traces.
 

pgh5278

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Oct 25, 2012
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My desire, can the cpu handle it and 10gig card!
Have similar question, for example using this or new SM board with onboard 16 SAS ports?
PS 21 hrs in plane is a long time..Some fabulous island in the Indian Ocean ... that distance..
 

Patrick

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Very close. Bali.

I will see on the Supermicro board when I get back.

Code:
root@ubuntu:~# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 SoC Transaction Router (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 PCIe Root Port 1 (rev 02)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 PCIe Root Port 2 (rev 02)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 PCIe Root Port 3 (rev 02)
00:04.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 PCIe Root Port 4 (rev 02)
00:0e.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 RAS (rev 02)
00:0f.0 IOMMU: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 RCEC (rev 02)
00:13.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 SMBus 2.0 (rev 02)
00:14.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I354 (rev 03)
00:14.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I354 (rev 03)
00:14.2 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I354 (rev 03)
00:14.3 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I354 (rev 03)
00:16.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 USB Enhanced Host Controller (rev 02)
00:18.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 AHCI SATA3 Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 PCU (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Atom processor C2000 PCU SMBus (rev 02)
01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9485 SAS/SATA 6Gb/s controller (rev c3)
02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9485 SAS/SATA 6Gb/s controller (rev c3)
04:00.0 PCI bridge: ASPEED Technology, Inc. AST1150 PCI-to-PCI Bridge (rev 02)
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ASPEED Technology, Inc. ASPEED Graphics Family (rev 21)
Two notes thus far:
1. I tried booting using a standard Seasonic 650w PSU. Not enough load so it failed. Using a 150w Picopsu now.
2. The Marvell controllers get HOT!
 

Patrick

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Patrick, good choice, we used to go their to a place called AMANKILA, just fabulous..relax, remote, beach, no one else..perfect, and great food, have fun...
Excellent. I will certainly give that a try.
 

Patrick

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MSRP - $344 USD

That is not too bad. It is less than the HighPoint RocketRAID 2740 which also used Marvell 88SE9485 controllers
 

Kristian

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Jun 1, 2013
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Thank you very much for testing this board so close to your wedding and of course: Congratulations on the upcoming wedding.

If you have any time left a word on energy saving features would be greatly appreciated (I know I am a minority)

Especially I am interested in whether the board is able to enter standby or hibernate mode.
And if the on board sas controller is able to do disk spindown.
 

Patrick

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Thank you very much for testing this board so close to your wedding and of course: Congratulations on the upcoming wedding.

If you have any time left a word on energy saving features would be greatly appreciated (I know I am a minority)

Especially I am interested in whether the board is able to enter standby or hibernate mode.
And if the on board sas controller is able to do disk spindown.
Will do my best here. I am cutting it close even for the thermal imaging.

In terms of power savings here are some data points:
  • BMC only is about 5.8-6.0w of power draw
  • The C2550 is a 14w TDP part.
  • Each Marvell 88SE9485 is 5.5w for a total of 11w
  • My sense is that the RAM is using about 5w
My takeaway here is that getting power savings is going to be hard given how distributed the power consumption is.

The rough part is that I could not get the motherboard to work with a Seasonic 650w PSU when I did not use hard drives. It seems like the load was too low.
 
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Kristian

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Thanks for the fast response. I should perhaps clarify my interest concerning "power savings"
My questions about the power savings where going more in the direction of the attached spindles.
And I understand that you probably can't shine much light into that because of the not (with the board) working PSU.

My current storage server has 32 HDDs attached (as the sas controller can't spin down the HDDs those are eating constantly about 160w.
So I installed "lights-out" to send the server into standby as long as there is no client online (12-14 hours a day).
 

kook

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Jul 9, 2014
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I'm considering this board for a couple of NAS.

I wonder how does the Marvell compares to LSI SAS 9201-16i or ARC-1320ix-16 for raid Z2 performance.
Does it supports port expanders? so that we could cascade 16 disks to 1 SFF port on the board, i know in the docs they state 4 disks on 4 SFF for 16 disks, but just wondering as i'm considering using the addonics RAID Tower IX 6G RT93SN6GMS with it.

Which would be a better performance enhancement on the PCI? A 10g card with TCP offloading or a dedicated non-raid HBA like the ones i mentioned above?

The voltage should be 3.8w instead right? 5.5w is for the 8 port version of the Marvell 88SE9485.
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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The voltage should be 3.8w instead right? 5.5w is for the 8 port version of the Marvell 88SE9485.
I prefer LSI by much. I'm hopeful that they review the Supermicro A1SA7-2750F with LSI onboard.

I looked at the specs. The asus has 2 of the 8 port versions for 16 total so 5.5 * 2 is right.
 

kook

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Jul 9, 2014
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My bad was thinking of the 4 ports and got confused.

The SM one also looks pretty good for specs too, just wonder how is the performance for the LSI for the price $200+ difference
 

Kristian

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Jun 1, 2013
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Thanks for the notice :) I will straight away buy 2 of them.

Edit: What is it with newegg and international customers?

They are not shipping to Europe (except for the UK).
They would ship to a mail forwarder (i.e. borderlinx) ONLY if I would have a US credit card.
And they don't ship to a mail forwarder when I try to pay via PayPal, because my address is not in the US.
They are not taking concierge services.
They are not accepting up front payment...


So as it seems I am out of luck.

Hopefully PC Connection will receive some of the C2750 boards anytime soon.
Buy Asus Motherboard, Mini ITX Socket C2750 Atom C Series Max.32GB Motherboards P9A-I/C2750/SAS/4L today at PC Connection
 
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metajames

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Jul 15, 2014
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My board came in but I can't get it to boot ESXi 5.5, Solaris 12, Open Indiana or any variant of FreeBSD including nanoBSD based FreeNAS. Just hangs wen trying to load the kernel on all these OSes. However is appears to run Linux just fine. I'm kinda at a loss as to what the problem is, perhaps it is a bios issue or I have a bad board? Anyone else try any of these installs with success?
 

Patrick

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My board came in but I can't get it to boot ESXi 5.5, Solaris 12, Open Indiana or any variant of FreeBSD including nanoBSD based FreeNAS. Just hangs wen trying to load the kernel on all these OSes. However is appears to run Linux just fine. I'm kinda at a loss as to what the problem is, perhaps it is a bios issue or I have a bad board? Anyone else try any of these installs with success?
The Bay Trail-D boards are a bit finicky with ESXi (or vice versa). I just got home and fired up ESXi 5.5 installation media and it did not work. Have a few other things to go do today since it is my first day back in over two weeks.