ASRock Rack C2750D4I Review: A Storage Motherboard with Management
by Ian Cutress on April 29, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Storage
- Atom
- ASRock
- Silvermont
- Enterprise
- server
- Avoton
Silverstone was clearly monitoring the forums with regards to the C2750D4I in order to come out with a case designed amound the concept. Our Silverstone contact also became aware that we had the motherboard in for testing and volunteered its DS380 for a quick overview. I installed the motherboard in to the case along with my rag-tag collection of storage drives (four 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14, one 2TB Western Digital Green and one 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11) which were previously spread out across several systems.
The case has a top mounted power-supply section (we used the Silverstone 300W SFF PSU) and places the C2750D4I upside down, with space for an 11” dual slot GPU. For PSUs that have a top/bottom mounted fan, Silverstone’s design means that the airflow for it is out of the case.
The rear of the case has a single 120mm fan installed, and the side of the case (for blowing onto the drives) uses two 120mm fans – all three were included in our retail sample. The fans use a dimpled design to reduce fan noise.
The drive area uses a backplane, and SATA cables from the motherboard attach to this. Users can install SAS drives using both SATA ports.
The case is designed for hot-swap systems, and as such the front eight bays allow the drives to be removed.
The front of the case has two USB ports, with the connector inside capable of being placed in a USB 3.0 header. This is where the case differs in being ideal for the C2750, as there are no USB 3.0 headers on board. Had Silverstone offered this connector as a USB 3.0/USB 2.0 hybrid, this would have been more ideal. There are two audio jacks as well should a user decide to place a different mini-ITX motherboard in the case and can take advantage of eight drive bays via an expansion card.
The front of the case is also lockable, although the key design is not a unique one. It does stop little ones pulling a drive out however.
The case is not a tool-less design, but a standard screwdriver is all I needed to put the system together. Because the C2750D4I has a small heatsink, cable management was easy enough, although the placement of the 24-pin ATX power connector meant that the cable had to go all the way across the motherboard. At the top we also have the 4 bays for 2.5” drives:
Silverstone suggested the 300W PSU that we used for the build, but if a PCIe device was installed we would have had to have used a 24-pin extension cable. Similarly, the SATA cables suggested had a small issue on the bottom SATA port:
Using my own ears (unfortunately I am not equipped to measure audio performance), the three fans installed, when active, were audible enough to disturb quiet scenes in a movie and you might not want it nearby overnight, but certainly silent compared to my normal PC or the busy road I live next to. Temperature readings from the CPU gave 40ºC at idle and 53ºC at load. Total power draw, at the wall with my drives installed using the 300W PSU on a 240V line was 52 W at idle.
Ganesh also has this motherboard in to test and will be examining the storage performance in due course.
| Silverstone DS380 | |
| Price | Link |
| Model Name | SST-DS380B |
| Material | Aluminium door, SECC body |
| Motherboard Size | Mini-ITX, DTX |
| Drive Bays |
8 x 3.5"/2.5" Hot Swappable 4 x 2.5" |
| Cooling |
1 x Rear 120mm 1200 RPM 22 dBA 2 x Side 120mm 1200 RPM 22 dBA |
| Expansion Slots | 2 |
| Front IO |
2 x USB 3.0 1 x Headphone 1 x Microphone |
| PSU | SFX |
| Expansion Card | 11" x 4.38" |
| CPU Cooler | 57 mm |
| Dimensions |
211 mm x 285 mm x 360 mm 21.6 liters |
| Warranty Period | 1 Year |
| Product Page | Link |
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SuperSpy00bob - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
Oops. I it's only mentioned in the spec chart, not in the article itself. It seemed like a glaring omission.JBVertexx - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
For home use, I don't know why you would pay so much for such a low-end processor. For $40 more you can have this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... plus a Xeon E3-1230v3.I'm running a home server on an E3-1230v2 (even cheaper), and it handles storage, Plex transcoding to everyone's devices, offloaded Blu-Ray Rip transcoding, and hosts several VMs running minecraft servers for the kids. No way you could do all that with this board.
djb61 - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
I've actually built a storage box recently using a fairly similar setup for a home NAS. I used the supermicro C2750 board however and added an IBM M1015 SAS card flashed to an IT mode LSI 9211-8i firmware for the disks. Then I have 8x4TB WD Reds in the Silverstone DS380.I'm still doing initial stress testing to make sure there are no dodgy disks etc currently so I can't comment about actual day to day use of such a system yet.
One thing I did notice with the DS380 is there appears to be a minor design flaw in the trays/backplane which is visible in the pictures here also.
The HDD trays have a clear perspex light guide built into the right side of them which allows an activity LED for the port on the backplane to illuminate to the front of the tray. This is the little square notch visible on the right hand side of the trays in the pictures here. However the activity light for the 4th bay from the top (5th from the bottom) doesn't illuminate on the tray properly despite it clearly lighting up on the backplane board. If you look at the picture of the backplane board and note the component labelled LED5 and its position relevant to the connector SATA13 and compare this to all the other LED and SATA components. The relative positioning on this bay is different and therefore is not aligned with the light guide on the HDD tray. I'm not quite sure how they managed to let that slip through the design stage but maybe Anandtech could feed it back to Silverstone.
azazel1024 - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
Why would you test power consumption in that config? It tells you nothing as it isn't remotely comparable to what it actually uses by itself or how you'd normally be using it.jwcalla - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
People are reporting that ASRock is pretty much treating this as a Windows-only board. If you have problems on other OSes, don't expect support from them.And with a Marvell controller... we can expect problems.
Krautmaster - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
well, be bechmarks are a mess for a server board like this. Why not any VM benches or Storage Benches ...I used that board for Storage Tiering in Server 2013 R2 with 3x4Tb + 4x2 TB + 2x256GB SSDs see here http://www.computerbase.de/forum/showthread.php?t=...
Bronek - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
It's worth saying that this motherboard supports up to 64GB of ECC memory. Thanks Ian, I think you just identified parts I will need for my FreeNAS build :)copilusntil0p@ - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
1. It's interesting how the used the PLX chipset givint tha fact that the Avoton is a SoC ant tha NICs ar integrated in it. 2. To those yelling "drop BMC": this board is not for you; don't judge it for what is not. 3. I've been in the situation to chose between this board and a Supermicro A1SRi-2758F for a home server. I've choose the latter and paired it with an HP P400 with 512MB cache and BBU (50$ on e-bay). So now I have a preety decent box with 5 gigabit interfeces, IPMI via AST2400 and 14 SATA ports (6 onboard from the SoC and eight SAS-to-SATA from the HP controller backed-up by 512MB of DDR2 cache). I've attached one Samsung 840 Pro SSD to one of the SATA 3 ports for SSD caching on ESXi. An givving the fact that the board comes from a manufacturer with greater experience in the server market, has an upgraded BMC controller, management software, wider accessory range (cases, controllers etc), has all LAN ports available, four USB 3 ports (one is directly attached to the board).LastQuark - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
Interesting build. I thought about this route as well and since I will be using KVM, the ASRock solution is good enough for me while keeping the part count as a minimal. Have I gone to ESXi and need more ethernet ports, that Supermicro + HP solution is the way to go with only a slight penalty in power savings.dzezik - Thursday, May 8, 2014 - link
What a stupid review. Find nothing about storage performance. You used storage motherboard and stroge enclosure to test gaming performance. Who is using his NAS server for gaming?