There is more information on VIA website about that 8 bay VIA NSD7800 machine announced at CES.
The following is from a VIA press release:
The VIA NSD7800 is powered by a 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor and supports up to 1GB of DDR2 system memory. The front panel reveals eight 3.5" drive bays for installation of up to eight S-ATA II hard disk drives which can be installed in moments through a unique back panel mounting system reducing cluttered cabling.
The VIA NSD7800 supports a type-1 compact flash slot for embedded OS installations and uses PCI-Express-based Gigabit networking to handle file transfers quickly and easily while an array of activity LEDs keep the user updated on progress. LEDs include individual S-ATA port activity, overall hard drive activity, network activity and power. There is also the option of custom LED control and push button backup and recovery. An optional Mini-PCI port is also available for additional security related add-in cards such as hardware VPN or anti-virus modules.
The VIA NSD7800 supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2007, Windows Home Server and Linux. System monitoring and management includes Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-Alarm and Watch Dog Timer.
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15 comments:
I find this extremely interesting from a low power and high capacity perspective.
The one thing that bothers me in the specs is the fact that it has a 300 watt power supply.
If you expect that a power supply runs at it's most efficiency at around 80% of it's stated wattage, and each running drive draws around 10 watts, then that still leaves around 160 watts to power the mainboard.
My past via system only drew 28 watts including the hard drive when it was under load. (as measured by a kill-a-watt.)
The other thing that worries me is past experience with via's driver support for their hardware.
@William - Good job with the math! I'm sure the the engineers were simply accounting for the fact that a user could fill it with really inefficient drives.
As far as drivers are concerned, if they sell it pre-loaded with WHS, it won't be an issue. The system will already have all the drivers that it needs.
I like this one, but why is it most systems seem to have just a low end CPU and ram options? I know the CPU is mainly because of heat and they are all trying to passively cool the CPUs and such, but having played with the HP's I see why you want more RAM and if you do a lot of add-ins you are going to need the faster CPUs.
@Joshua - I think the current line of thinking by many is that an "alway on" server should be low power. That's also why WD came out with it's green line of hard drives.
Personally, I think an 8 drive WHS powered by an Intel Atom or VIA Nano (or the like) is a great idea.
I agree that they should not be skimping on the ram for the unit, but the reason for the low power CPU is so that you can save power on the entire system. If they skimp on ram, add-ins can cause disk swapping, which just kills performance. Current costs on ram make it a sin to put less than 2GB in each unit.
The passive cooling that is possible with some of the low power cpus is nice, since you can have a machine where the only moving parts are the hard drives. That reduces the noise that this unit produces.
Since this machine will be running non-stop it actually makes a difference in your electricity bill. (And your energy / carbon / green footprint if you care about that)
If i wanted a powerhouse of a machine running constantly, those options are easy. It's much harder to put together a system that is always on but draws very little power. I'd love it if the system were to be able to have some intelligence and do some sort of hierarchical storage management and be able to power down most of the disks when they aren't needed.
i do belive in going green, but with most of the new cpus using less power as is i think there is a better middle ground.
Re. William :
We choice 300w PSU because that's the most popular PSU in the market, doesn't means we need a big PSU for the system.
The other reason is power requirement while booting - always larger than the standard of HDD running so we got to reserve more power for system booting.
Jerry/BD of VIA
Thanks for the information. It's always useful to get an authoritative statement to compare with all the speculative ones.
SCSI drives used to be able to do a sequential start to reduce peak power load. Is there any similar setup available with SATA drives?
Basically yes, SATA has similar function but we found a very interest situation on a brand of HDDs, it's uncontrollable. the peak of power requirement is un-controllable and not only when start-up, the biggest peak is happened after 5 seconds ... @@
Netbuyercj will there be an offering to purchase the chassis with different mobo offerings?
Will it support opensolaris? I want ZFS on it!
Love the idea! Perfect setup for a file server, depending on the price I guess from a low power custom build. Only thing that bothers me is the memory and processor limitations. I know when I bumped my small server from 1gb to 2gb's of ram, and single core to dual core...the responsivness from the server, and streaming DID make a difference. If there was an option for upgrade in ram and proc, would be the perfect WHS solution.
With what I do currently with mine, this would make for lag and slow response, and maybe constand eating at the drive for normal streaming tasks.
Build another with dual core and 2gb's of ram and I'm sold. Love where their heads are at though! Case is awesome!
I recently purchased the NSD7800 Barebones, a copy of WHS OEM, and 8 Seagate ST3500418AS drives.
William C. Bonner was correct regarding the driver comment, the box comes without a driver CD or manual.
The first four SATA ports are handled by the Via southbridge VT8251, the second four are managed by a Marvell MV8861XXSE Controler, drivers for which Via does not make readily avaliable.
The system is up and running fine, and I have installed Windows Media Services 9 on WHS with out problems.
steveo1544,
Do you know if it is sold without a motherboard?
Steveo, how did you find drivers that work, I have been hunting but none have worked with WHS, want to run the OS drive in raid 1.
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