So late last week I received the fan replacement I ordered. This one is a little more than half the noise volume of the original: 25 dBA vs. 42 dBA. I can’t hear this fan over my desktop computer, which has loud fans all over the place. I built that one for gaming about six years ago, and it was a bit unsettling to have this slick little new device be twice as loud.
And today my wireless antenna was delivered. I wasted no time getting that installed, and now, I am about sixty percent more satisfied. AP association is nearly instantaneous now, but performance leaves a little to be desired. Signal strength as reported by the host is 100/100, AP reports ~61 signal strength, and iperf throughput is somewhere between 15 Mb/s and 21 Mb/s.
[root@msi-k8t ~]# iperf -c 192.168.0.7
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Client connecting to 192.168.0.7, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 192.168.0.5 port 42384 connected with 192.168.0.7 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.4 sec 25.4 MBytes 20.5 Mbits/sec
[root@msi-k8t ~]# iperf -c 192.168.0.7
————————————————————
Client connecting to 192.168.0.7, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 192.168.0.5 port 42407 connected with 192.168.0.7 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 24.4 MBytes 20.4 Mbits/sec
[root@msi-k8t ~]# iperf -c 192.168.0.7
————————————————————
Client connecting to 192.168.0.7, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 192.168.0.5 port 48133 connected with 192.168.0.7 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 18.2 MBytes 15.0 Mbits/sec
A reboot later…
[root@msi-k8t ~]# iperf -c 192.168.0.7
————————————————————
Client connecting to 192.168.0.7, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 192.168.0.5 port 48139 connected with 192.168.0.7 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 19.0 MBytes 15.9 Mbits/sec
[root@msi-k8t ~]# iperf -c 192.168.0.7
————————————————————
Client connecting to 192.168.0.7, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 192.168.0.5 port 48144 connected with 192.168.0.7 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 18.6 MBytes 15.5 Mbits/sec
————————————————————
Client connecting to 192.168.0.7, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 192.168.0.5 port 36898 connected with 192.168.0.7 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 19.9 MBytes 16.6 Mbits/sec
This is better than before, of course, where It was up to to only 350 Kbits/sec throughput and hit and miss AP association. Further investigation required.
Next steps:
Storage appliance is out for this build. I think this hardware platform lends itself nicely to vitrtualization. The horsepower and I/O flexibility of the MB/CPU combination could certainly support a NAS use case, but because the enclosure limits drive population to two 2.5″ SATA, and the current available capacity of those drives being 500GB, I think it’s better to target a different (more spacious) enclosure and MB combo for the NAS appliance.
