Home server hardware. Improvements needed?

xhr

xhr

Almost 6 months ago, my USB hard drive was starting to make a sound too close to the Click of Death for my comfort and, since that was my back-up drive, I decided to build my own NAS. Thanks to a friend of mine who is a big FreeBSD fan, I bought the Absolute FreeBSD book and configured a low-power server with a couple of HDDs.

Right now, I have an AMD E-350 processor on an MSI mainboard with three 2TB WD Caviar Green HDDs and an old 40 GB laptop HDD. I've maxed-out the mainboard's RAM to 8 GB. The initial plan was to have this server act as a NAS server, but I've also installed a rather large MySQL database and I'm using it to serve a couple of tiny sites and it looks like this server is becoming more of a general-purpose server.

During the last few weeks, I've seen a couple of hardware crashes: my router was dropping packets like crazy and I had to replace it, now my WD TV Live is freezing after 10 minutes of video playback so I'm kind of planning to purchase better hardware for my home server, hoping I will be able to get more years of service and, at the same time, a significant bump in performance by dropping the E-350 platform.

That being said, I've been looking at the Xeon E3 12x0 v2 processors which seem to have a great value, but I haven't found a mainboard to match, preferably with a quality network card and I was hoping to get some recommandations from the forum.

At the same time, considering I'll probably spend close to 400 dollars for the combo, is it really worth it? Should I choose a cheaper i3 processor and a cheaper mainboard?
 
E3 is a very nice platform, but is IMHO best used in a system which takes advantage of lots of ECC-RAM and other server-grade features. I build a ~2000$ file server with it a few month ago and I'm happy about the choice.

What you seem to want is a low to mid-size NAS, for that an Intel Atom should have plenty of performance. Most of the commercial NAS vendors use those in combination with Linux for their mid-end offering - low end NAS use ARM CPUs.

If you can still find one, the Atom D525 is a very nice dual core CPU with cheap motherboards. It can also handle RAID systems easily. I use a QNAP TS-559 (5 disks) for backups and the CPU is still overpowered for just the NAS functionality. The newer Atoms don't have any relevant advantages for a small file server IMHO, but of course they will work as well.

The only case for more powerful CPUs in a file server is if you want to run ZFS, encryption or lots of services. (ZFS needs lots of RAM and D525s are limited to 4GB.)

Hope this helps.
 
Just throwing this out there. Lower end Intel chips "silently" got some ECC support, starting at Sandy Bridge. Including the i3, I'm pretty sure. A guy wrote this little C program for verification, which was enough to convince me.

It you're interested in SFF, low power. This is what I've done, and I think it's a sweet alternative to Xeon. Cheapest, lowest watt SB Pentium I could find, Mini-ITX server board, and 8GB of the Unbuffered Kingston ValueRAM.
 
heja2009 said:
E3 is a very nice platform, but is IMHO best used in a system which takes advantage of lots of ECC-RAM and other server-grade features. I build a ~2000$ file server with it a few month ago and I'm happy about the choice.

What you seem to want is a low to mid-size NAS, for that an Intel Atom should have plenty of performance. Most of the commercial NAS vendors use those in combination with Linux for their mid-end offering - low end NAS use ARM CPUs.

If you can still find one, the Atom D525 is a very nice dual core CPU with cheap motherboards. It can also handle RAID systems easily. I use a QNAP TS-559 (5 disks) for backups and the CPU is still overpowered for just the NAS functionality. The newer Atoms don't have any relevant advantages for a small file server IMHO, but of course they will work as well.
Click to expand...

Looking at the AnandTech benchmarks, the AMD E-350 CPU is a bit faster than an Atom 510 in every test they used. I'm not sure how it stacks against the 525, which has a better clock speed, but I'm sure they are in the same league.

heja2009 said:
The only case for more powerful CPUs in a file server is if you want to run ZFS, encryption or lots of services. (ZFS needs lots of RAM and D525s are limited to 4GB.)
Click to expand...

Re-reading my post, I realize I left out the most important information when it comes to a NAS: I'd really like to use a RAIDZ mirror. The E-350 platform can work with 8 GB of RAM, so that should be enough, but I'm not that convinced that ZFS is happy with that CPU.

At the same time, I've started thinking about turning my home NAS into a more powerful machine so I can offload some services from my laptop (I'd like to be portable so I have a MacBook Air) to that server (MySQL or the Ruby on Rails project I work on).
 
The HP MicroServer is a superb low-cost platform to build a FreeBSD NAS on. I've been running one for about 3 years now.

It has four swappable disk bays and a 5.25" bay, and supports 8GB of ECC RAM.

Here are the kernel boot messages.
 
How interesting, I was considering the same CPU for a new server build I was hoping to do later on in the year. I am considering the following motherboard:

Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O

and the following CPU:

Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge Retail

Does anyone know if FreeBSD 9.1 amd64 will work with this motherboard? Yes, I have checked the compatability list on Supermicros website and it doesn't list 9.1 but from what I have heard from other people it does work. Does anyone here have any experience with 9.1 amd64 on this particular motherboard? I won't be using a GUI on this server (console only).

I'll also be using 16GB of ECC RAM in this setup so it should make a really nice all round server :e
 
xhr said:
Looking at the AnandTech benchmarks, the AMD E-350 CPU is a bit faster than an Atom 510 in every test they used. I'm not sure how it stacks against the 525, which has a better clock speed, but I'm sure they are in the same league.

Re-reading my post, I realize I left out the most important information when it comes to a NAS: I'd really like to use a RAIDZ mirror. The E-350 platform can work with 8 GB of RAM, so that should be enough, but I'm not that convinced that ZFS is happy with that CPU.

At the same time, I've started thinking about turning my home NAS into a more powerful machine so I can offload some services from my laptop (I'd like to be portable so I have a MacBook Air) to that server (MySQL or the Ruby on Rails project I work on).
Click to expand...

First, I didn't want to imply the Atom is much better than the E-350, just that it makes a very nice non-ZFS NAS.
If you want to run a ZFS file server, more than 4GB of ECC RAM (on a 64-bit system) is recommended.
That leaves as low end options:
  • the lower end AMD CPUs that support ECC RAM, I don't know too much about those;
  • low end Xeon (E3), plenty of power and good server MBs, but a little expensive, only 2xSATA3;
  • new i3-3220 which has ECC support and uses the 1155 MBs as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top