For new SageTV server - Win7 or 10?

[wayner]

Thanks Humanzee - great info. It looks like a lot of the new mobos have those M.2 slots. What is the advantage of those? Are they faster due to a higher data bandwidth?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wayner

Thanks Humanzee - great info. It looks like a lot of the new mobos have those M.2 slots. What is the advantage of those? Are they faster due to a higher data bandwidth?

M.2 is sort of a catch all mini expansion slot. It's a PCIe x4, SATA 3.0, and USB 3.0 all on the same physical port (the device can use any one of those interfaces it chooses). It does have an additional set of instructions that are designed to attach an SSD directly to the PCIe x4 instead of the SATA 3.0, making it quiet a bit faster (assuming SSD throughput that could potentially saturate a SATA 3.0 port).

That said, it is supposed to emulate a standard AHCI (SATA) port even when using the direct PCIe interface, so it shouldn't cause OS issues.

[wayner]

Should you expect to see a measurable performance improvement putting your OS on an m.2 drive rather than a SATA SSD?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wayner

Should you expect to see a measurable performance improvement putting your OS on an m.2 drive rather than a SATA SSD?

That would depend on the drive. If the memory in the drive is fast enough to saturate a SATA connection, then yes, but at the same time, it would depend on what you are using your system for. Really, the greatest advantage of the m.2 over a traditional laptop sized drive is the form factor - it being mounted on the motherboard, it doesn't require a separate protective case, making it smaller and lighter.

[stanger89]

There's also the convenience factor, an m.2 drive doesn't need a drive bay, SATA or power cables. I think at some point I'm going to migrate to an m.2 drive on my new 6700K machine, but I just couldn't justify the price when I was ordering parts, given I've got a 500GB 840 EVO in there now.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

That would depend on the drive. If the memory in the drive is fast enough to saturate a SATA connection, then yes, but at the same time, it would depend on what you are using your system for. Really, the greatest advantage of the m.2 over a traditional laptop sized drive is the form factor - it being mounted on the motherboard, it doesn't require a separate protective case, making it smaller and lighter.

This would be for a SageTV V9 server that would be driving many clients (up to 9 fixed, more if we have mobile clients for SageTV in the future), initially HD200 and HD300 extenders, and keeping an eye to what will replace these extenders in the future. I will likely get a fast CPU since I envision transcoding, particularly for playback to mobile clients, and since we will likely be migrating to 4K content over the next few years.

In an ideal world all clients would even remain connected to the server permanently to facilitiate quicker startup times. But you can't do that today due to the JVM size limitations.

[Fuzzy]

Sage really doesn't do much with the system drive in it's use. Just about everything it needs it keeps in memory, with the exception of fanart. And that speed is going to be more limited by the network than the SSD interface that is used.

Regarding your massive number of extenders, you'd likely be better off going with Linux at this point, as you'd be able to run your server in a 64-bit JVM and bump the heap up a lot larger.

[wayner]

When I switched from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD years ago there was an increase in speed - there were a few threads here a few years back.

Regarding 64 bit JVM - so this is now possible, but only on Linux? And weren't there two competing ideas here - the other being that each client/extender gets its own JVM instance. Has it now been decided to go with one large JVM instead?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wayner

When I switched from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD years ago there was an increase in speed - there were a few threads here a few years back.

Regarding 64 bit JVM - so this is now possible, but only on Linux? And weren't there two competing ideas here - the other being that each client/extender gets its own JVM instance. Has it now been decided to go with one large JVM instead?

There was no 'consensus' decision on it, but it was not a lot of work (apparently) to compile the source as 64-bit on linux, so that was done first.

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by wayner

Anyone know if you can run WHS backups from a Win 10 PC?

FYI, I didn't see an answer to this. My WHS2011 VM is backing up and monitoring four W10 clients fine. I haven't tried a bare metal restore yet though.

[wayner]

Thanks for the info - I am guessing that bare metal restores may struggle on newer systems given the same reasons above as I am guessing that the WHS2011 driver set would be similar to Win7.

[KarylFStein]

My W10 upgrade attempt this weekend was a bit complex. The W10 upgrade app warned of the "ASPEED" video driver not being supported, so I installed an old AMD PCIe video card. After a reboot things were good visually, but the W10 upgrader still complained of unsupported hardware.

The W10 upgrade app took some Googling to change its decision that the computer was not up to an upgrade. When it didn't complain I started the change to W10.

To the W10 upgrade credit it reverted to Win7 after a couple of attempts and "teal" screens of death. Note that I didn't have to restore the image I took before the upgrade to get things back to how they were before.

I then installed the AMD drivers, (in Win7), and restarted the upgrade after a reboot. This time the upgrade worked including SageTV, SageDCT, MySQL, hMailServer, etc.

Next step is a fresh W10 install...

[KarylFStein]

...and back to W7. It turns out that the Intel network drivers for W10 do not yet support trunking.

[wayner]

What is trunking and why does it matter?

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by wayner

What is trunking and why does it matter?

I should have probably said link aggregation. Basically it lets you combine multiple network interfaces into one logical one. If you're not having network speed issues with your server then it doesn't matter.

Edit: It also provides fault tolerance. One of the Ethernet ports on my MB died and I didn't even notice until one day I was in the basement and saw one of the lights on the switch was out. Windows had removed the physical interface but because I had three others in the same logical "team" the server still had network connectivity.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by stanger89

FWIW, for a server I'd get something with vPro/AMT or IPMI, being able to remotely access the "physical" console is just too darn convenient. I don't think the there's a vPro compatible 100 chipset yet is there?

It looks like the Asus Q170M-C supports vPro.