Lets be honest, that board is perfect - yet let down by an absolute dearth of anything supporting mATX for NAS\home server work on the market.
Intel Xeon D-1500 Series Discussion
- Thread starter Patrick
- Start date
If building a NAS is your target a xeon-d upgrade to this would be brilliant if it moved to SAS12 at the same time
P9A-I/C2750/SAS/4L - Overview
I was like, how did I miss this board coming out, then saw the Marvel controller for SAS
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I know marvel isn't the best but they actually work quite well on this, granted i wanted a quad port nic when i bought mine more than the raid controllers so i haven't tested them too thoroughly they at least haven't been a bottleneck anything i've used(admittedly a small array of kingston ssd's for a few small database applications nothing super intense) but they benchmarked at their full capacityI was like, how did I miss this board coming out, then saw the Marvel controller for SAS
I just have no place for Asus in my networks anymore. I have had stupid design issues, horrendous support, and too many failures. Laptops, motherboards, video cards, etc.
Seeing the Marvell for not only the nics, but the sas as well would be a turnoff for me, as I want something that has longer term support, and as we have seen in other threads of late, companies like VMWare would rather focus on bigger names.
Seeing the Marvell for not only the nics, but the sas as well would be a turnoff for me, as I want something that has longer term support, and as we have seen in other threads of late, companies like VMWare would rather focus on bigger names.
Actually that's a point i've been curious on, the NIC is an intel i354 quad port nic but the PHY is a marvell phy, windows doesn't seem to be aware of the PHY in any manner that i've seen and i'm not sure as to the implications on this performance wise it's been stable and tests out at gigabit but i don't use it for a lot of "heavy lifting" more as a swiss army knife (lansweeper ninite pro and the ubiquiti unifi controller are all the regular use applications running on that server)
Interesting that Asus does not say anywhere on their product information page that they are intel nics, which is usually a selling point... In fact, you have to dig into the manual for the board to see Intel i354 anywhere...
The ASRock ones aren't that great with the Marvell 9172 being used for the M2 slots either... that suggests AHCI-only and not PCIe/NVME doesn't it...? I'm also yet to be convinced of the SFP+ ports running off the Cortina chips but hopefully Patrick et al getting their hands on some boards might help my confidence... but I won't hold my breath.I was like, how did I miss this board coming out, then saw the Marvel controller for SAS
Looking at the block diagram in the manual, besides the marvell sata interface, each m.2 is also connected to a pcie×1 interface. The manual also lists compatible pcie m.2 boards, though the support list does not indicate whether the protocol for the pcie boards is nvme or ahci. Regardless, with a single pcie lane, performance will be limited.
Manual available at:
http://66.226.78.22/downloadsite/Manual/D1540D4U-2O8R.pdf
The 9172 is a SATA3 AHCI controller that hooks up via 1x PCIe 2.0 so I don't see how it can do anything other than AHCI M2 drives... unless they've got some fancy switching in place so that PCIe drives get access to the raw PCIe, and AHCI drives are passed through to the 9172 controller...? Their supported M2 SSD list shows both SATA3 and PCIe drives so I'm not sure how else it's meant to work with the involvement of a 9172 controller.
Edit: Aha yes, on closer inspection from the block diagram it looks like the M2 slot is fed by both the 9172 controller and a PCIe 3.0 lane direct from the CPU so the BIOS must decide which controller it connects to. But as you say, with a single lane performance will be capped at 985MB/s. But better than having to deal with a marvell controller
Looks like ASrock still can't deliver....After placing order got an email saying they need to do further testing....Not happy at all...
My Asrock Xeon D boards shipping today...Should get them by Next Monday...
so benchmarks next tuesday? XDMy Asrock Xeon D boards shipping today...Should get them by Next Monday...
So how long 'til we get those D-1541's on the market.
On the look for a new home-lab board/cpu, and got a bit put off the 1540s because of the SR-IOV issues.
On the look for a new home-lab board/cpu, and got a bit put off the 1540s because of the SR-IOV issues.