CPU effect on freenas performance? Best low powered CPU for home use?

[talexander]

Hi Guys,

I'm new to FreeNas, setup a box at work with basic ZFS pool of raid 1 2x1TB drives.

Currently have a media center PC with 700 GB used thinking of switching to a freenas system and storing it all on network.

Question:

What's the best performance/price for CPU's? I'd obviously want it on 24x7 so power is a concern. Ideas? Initially I was looking at like a 65w I3 but I'm reading some folks using as low as E350's from AMD?

Suggestions?

Thanks,

Tim

P.S. Anyone had issues using snapshot on ZFS? I make the ZFS snapshot and it says successful but its not listed and console says out of space, even though have 300GB free and trying to snapshot a 10GB dataset.

[louisk]

Unless you're planning on installing lots of plugins and doings lots of processing on the NAS, pretty much any modern 64bit CPU will work fine.

Pay attention to memory. You want 1G RAM per 1T of disk, and a minimum of 4G RAM.

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I love the e-350's. Super low power, 64bit, can handle 16GB ram, and cheap.

Here's my hardware setup
http://www.joshuaruehlig.com/nas

[andoy31]

I actually have the same dilemna --- either to go with e350 or go with intel g530; price (about $30 higher)and power consumption (~10 watts higher) are almost the same however the performance gain is more than double....

@joshua, can you share the current throughput of your setup with 8 GB and 16GB of memory?

[survive]

Hi andoy31,

Take a look at this thread:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread...ighlight=e-350

Folks seem pretty happy with them, it's nice that you get PCI-e slots instead of the PCI slots you get on an atom. Asus has one with both 1x & 16x (4x electrical) so you can add an HBA & a proper NIC!

-Will

[ProtoSD]

it's nice that you get PCI-e slots instead of the PCI slots you get on an atom. Asus has one with both 1x & 16x (4x electrical) so you can add an HBA & a proper NIC!
-Will

Hey Will,

Not sure about other Atoms, but mine has one PCIe x4 slot. My little Atom system isn't half bad at all, I'm just trying to figure out what happened to my network performance, which isn't horrible either.

[survive]

Hi protosd,

You have one of the Supermicro Atom boards, right? Those are high-class Atom boards with their PCI-e slots, double the RAM support & proper Intel NICs. That's what I would look at if I were shopping for one.

-Will

[ProtoSD]

Hi protosd,

You have one of the Supermicro Atom boards, right? Those are high-class Atom boards with their PCI-e slots, double the RAM support & proper Intel NICs. That's what I would look at if I were shopping for one.

-Will

Yup

I originally overlooked the documented 4GB max RAM but decided to take the chance and try 8GB, and it does work, which I am very pleased about. That and the PicoPSU make it very compact, quiet, and low power, as well as the nice dual Intel NICs! It uses ~45-60w depending on load, which only peaks out at 60w during a scrub with 5x 2TB disks. Mine has the 1.6Ghz D510 processor, but a few others here have the model with the 1.8Ghz D525 processor.

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I actually have the same dilemna --- either to go with e350 or go with intel g530; price (about $30 higher)and power consumption (~10 watts higher) are almost the same however the performance gain is more than double....

@joshua, can you share the current throughput of your setup with 8 GB and 16GB of memory?

I get 60-80MBps = 480-640Mbps over the network, and 300MBps = 2400Mbps localy. This is with 16GB of ram, though I got similar performance with 8GB. I believe I have more cached and I get more of a initial boost when touching commonly accessed files because of the 16GB upgrade but I can't prove it.

[joeschmuck]

I'm jealous, my system runs 63 watts idle (no drives spinning), 76 watts at idle (drive spinning but no activity), and up to 97 watts with lots of activity. It was something like 22 watts less with my video board removed but then the system doesn't boot reliably all the time without the video board installed so I had to cram it back in. I hope the OP found an acceptable answer here.