Advatronix Nimbus 400 File Server Review

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Low power consumption and the ability to keep the drives cool under stress are some of the desirable characteristics of file servers. In order to evaluate this aspect, we subject the system with Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials to a stability test using AIDA64. For stressing the disks (storage spaces volume using the drive bays), we used Microsoft's DiskIO with the pre-defined worst-case SATA patterns issued randomly with verification.

We find that the CPU doesn't throttle and the cores stabilize around 48 C, with the motherboard at 51 C. During this process, we also recorded power consumption at the wall. We found that the maximum power consumption was around 67 W, while the idling power consumption was around 40 W. Note that this is a 14W TDP SoC (compared to the 20W TDP version we had in the U-NAS build).

The Advatronix Nimbus 400 is the second of three file servers that we have evaluated with Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows Server / Storage Spaces. While the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks have been chosen for their relevance to file server workloads, it appears that the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmarks do not bring out what people use the Storage Spaces feature for. We are still optimizing the testbed for SPEC SFS 2014, and we do have plans to evaluate other NAS OSes used in DIY builds using the same approach down the road.

Coming to the business end of the review, we have a few things to discuss. The chassis is solid and worthy of praise. The thermal solution is top notch and the choice of a USB 3.0 PCIe card alleviates one of the shortcomings of the Intel Avoton platform / ASRock Rack C2550D4I motherboard. Advatronix has taken care to ensure that the hot-swap bays are all connected to SATA 6 Gbps ports in the system. The only problem / complaint that one could mention here is the sharing of a PCIe 2.0 x1 link amongst four USB 3.0 ports. Performance-wise, the Intel Avoton SoC a mature and known quantity. The choice of a Windows Storage Space with simple parity is not efficient when looking at the system from a performance perspective. However, people opting for Windows Server as the OS often have other compelling reasons to do so.

The build presented in this review has a diskless cost of around USD 767. Including a license for Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials (our review configuration) drives up the price to USD 1493. The Intel Avoton platform has proved very popular for systems with file serving and / or NAS duties. Consumers considering the Avoton option (either build or purchase) would do well to take a closer look at the Advatronix Nimbus 400.