ASRock Intel Avoton C2750 2.4GHz/DDR3/SATA3/V&2GbE/Mini-ITX Motherboard and CPU Combo C2750D4I Color Box

I purchased the C2550D4I and the C2750D4I for a client so he could pick the one he wanted on site. He chose the C2550D4I so I returned the C2750D4I but I will add my C2550D4I review here because it is the same exact thing except the 2750 has a more powerful CPU. As far as everything else features and what not they are the same. This is a great little board with lots of potential and many different possible configurations. Obviously this is a perfect build your own NAS solution, but to tell you the truth if that is all you plan on using it for then get the C2550D4I model. The C2750D4I model has more than enough power to do much more, will be a perfect headless small business or @home server. I can not tell you how the board perform with Windows Server Op systems, but with Linux Server distros, even running multiple VM's great performance. So rather that just install something like FreeNAS you can install a Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS/RHEL/SuSe server distro as base and then the possibilities are endless from there. You can run many different protocols/daemons without any issues. Many will say but it has an Atom processor, just because Avoton to the name its still an Atom. This is true but I was happy with the performance compared the the previous generation, it is not Xeon this is true, but you will be surprised what you will be able to do with this chip. It has 8 dedicated cores (not 4x cores with H/T =8 cores, but 8x cores without H/T =8 cores), Also supports VT-x, EPT, and AES-NI. Here is the huge (746 pages) Intel Atom C2000 Microserver Datasheet: https://www-ssl.Intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/atom-c2000-microserver-datasheet.pdf The board takes 1600MHz ECC UDIMM's and 12 onboard SATA channels 6 of which support RAID (Marvell SE9172: 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s RAID 0/1, Marvell SE9230: 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s RAID 0/1/10), issues with the Marvell SE9230 chipset have been resolved with a recent firmware upgrade. Here is my breakdown of how the SATA channels are best used: 6 of them are Intel C2750 ports (2 x SATA3, 4 x SATA2) everyone knows whatever the Intel SATA ports are rated as thats what you will get, the same can not be said with Marvel chipsets but we will get to that later. Many people will say why the hell even have 4 SATA2 ports they are useless nowadays, but this is not true. Most people don't even understand how SATA channels are used, and how they impact or do not impact performance of the SATA devices. Just because a device is SATA3 DOES NOT MEAN YOU WILL BE GETTING 6.0 Gb/s in/out transfer speeds. All that is the link speed, that is just what that channel is capable of handling, but unless your SATA devices are capable of producing in/out speeds greater than around 300MB/s you will not see and performance degradation using it on a SATA2 channel as apposed to a SATA3 channel. That being said the 2 Intel SATA3 ports are ideal for SSD drives, I setup one of these boards with 2 Samsung 850 Pro SSD's in the 2 SATA3 port and used Linux software RAID as the root partition and easily got speeds over 1GB/s NOT 1Gb/s thats over 1000 MEGABYTES/sec. So the 4 remaining SATA2 ports would be great for mechanical hard drives or other type devices ie. optical drives. So then You are left with 6 more SATA3 ports on the marvel side of things. The only time you should really see a difference between the Intel SATA3 ports and the Marvel SATA3 port performance is if you are using high speed SSD's. Its just a fact of light that Intel SATA channels are better than Marvel, but with the Marvel chipsets you get a wide array of RAID feature with a whole bunch of buzzwords attached to them. I tend not to go down that path, I would only use the onboard Marvel RAID ROM for RAID0, RAID1, or RAID10, not any of the SSD/HDD hybrid caching services. If I wanted to go down that road I would set it up with software rather than using the Marvel ROM. Thats just personal opinion formed from experience, others will swear by it, and Marvel will show you all kinds of stats that makes it look like a no brain'r but again just not my thing. If you are interested in running a RAID 5/6 array well you can't with the equipment that comes out of the box, but thats what the PCIE 2.0 x8 port is for. There are plenty of great performing hardware RAID cards available in that format. The board has a dedicated BMC NIC as well as dual Intel i210 Gigabit LAN ports (with Teaming function), so you have several options for networking/system administration. You can use the dual Intel LANs as a team for the main network connection, and the Realtek RTL8211E to manage the BMC on a totally separate network, use the dual Intel LANs as a team for the main network connection and the board will emulate the BMC mac so you can access it without having to use the Realtek RTL8211E port, or you can just connect one Intel port for main network and BMC emulation. So that leaves you with many options to choose from with a wide array of networking possibilities. Unless you have worked with Enterprise class equipment and/or purpose built servers the words BMC/IPMI mean nothing to you. An over simplified definition of these things is basically Remote System Management, many will say so what I use VNC, Remote Desktop and what not with regular computers. But this is so much more, once it is setup you can do anything from a remote location you can do if you were sitting in front of the board itself. Complete power management from Off/On/Reboot, Virtualizing Media (using local CD/HDD/ISOs on the remote server), and a whole bunch of different management tools and toys. So you can see why the average user could be excited by the little board with a lot of bang for your buck, Enterprise @home! So from the C2550D4I model, up to the C2750D4I model, with all the different add-on bells and whistles you can get for it, you can get anything from a nice and cheap home built NAS solution up to a pretty damn well performing Linux Server without the need to shell out thousands of dollars. So overall I give it 4 out of 5 stars, it is not perfect, but its definitely better than average as far as I am concerned. NOW GO BUILD AND LEARN SOMETHING!!!

EDIT: 4 years update - Now 3 starsBoard was replaced under RMA early last year due to the watchdog issue (watchdog was writing to flash every update, causing the memory to wear out). About a year in on the replacement board and the board just stopped working. IPMI still works properly and reports everything is good, power supply is putting out the correct voltages, but the board will not POST. It is effectively dead.In the end I'm going to give this board 2 stars. It didn't necessarily outlast it's warranty, and the replacement board only lasted 1 year. Too many failures from a board that is supposed to be in a commercial server environment. I would have expected a board like this to last 5 years minimum.=============================================EDIT: ~9 month update - Now 4 starsAfter fighting issues, I completely stopped using the 4x SATA ports on the 88SE9230 controller until September (my first opportunity to do any major updates).I updated the BIOS and the firmware for the 88SE9230 controller and voila, no more issues. I have now been testing the 88SE9230 SATA ports for 5 months with random read/writes and have no issues to report.As a side note, I do want to thank ASRock's technical support team for providing updates. It took them a while, but they did get the correct information to me.Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to apply them for several months.=============================================Original review:Major issues here: Extremely limited RAM support, SATA controller issues, need to disable several features for stability.Memory: Most models on the Memory QVL are not available or are super-special order from the manufacturer. After calling Crucial, they have already discontinued 2 of the options on the list. PLEASE qualify more RAM!Disable features: In order to get the board to remain stable (ie Not crash or cause Kernel panics at random) there are 2 options in the BIOS that need to be disabled. These are 1)CPU C State and 2)Speedstep.SATA: This *BY FAR* the biggest issue. I've tried all of the BIOS version available on ASRock's website, the oldest is the most stable for SATA. During high I/O loads, the SATA interface tends to crash. With ver 1.80 BIOS, that happens after 5-20 minutes. With ver 1.50 BIOS that happens after 1-3 hours. This is a *GIANT* issue, as you cannot build/rebuild a RAID array without lots of I/O. No RAID makes this board effectively useless, since NAS appears to be it's designed purpose.Still waiting to hear back from ASRock support (no phone support, email only). I'll give the benefit of the doubt, but will be returning this board if support is unresponsive.