Best CPU and Motherboard for low power server?

[Mark77]

2 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

Why not some cheap embedded Atom board or something and just hang a bunch of SATA controllers off it?  Stick it in a suitable case, pick your NAS OS of choice and voila.

 

The 'problem' with that is that most people don't really understand what 'low-power' means in the context of Intel's chips. 

 

For instance, the i7-3770 comes in 3 versions.  The i7-3770 (77W), i7-3770S (65W), and i7-3770T (45W).

 

So the best chip to buy if you're running a 24/7 server is the 3770T, right? 

 

*nope*.  All 3 chips, identically loaded with appropriate power settings in the PC's software (ie: cpufreq in Linux, or the equivalent in Windows), will consume exactly the same amount of power. 

 

The 3770T/3770S chips have their top-end deliberately derated so that they can be integrated into "thermally challenged" platforms like the iMac.  Or put into rack servers where there might be a legitimate need for thermal de-rating to get an overall rack to meet a certain power spec.  Intel gives the buyer a discount on the chip, knowing that a lower performing chip will probably have a shorter-life-cycle than the "full-power version".  The vendor can also save money on other aspects of the motherboard by, for instance, shaving a couple voltage regulators and capacitors out of the design.

 

But if you're DIY'ing a server, going with a "low power" chip basically gets you almost nothing.  The Skylake chips, run at extremely low levels of utilization, are quite competitive with Atoms.   And if you ever need higher levels of utilization (ie: you run more applications on such a machine), then the power is there.  With an Atom, you basically end up running it full-blast, or throwing it out and buying something faster.

 

This "servethehome" article pretty much sums it up:

 

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2550-power-consumption-comparison/

 

Now, yes, the green bar on the Pentium G2120 chip is higher at the end, but the Pentium G2120 chip is doing a lot more processing than any of those other chips. 

 

 

[Jarsky]

ECC memory can be invaluable if you have critical data and utilise a software storage solution that uses memory for bit checking and as a cache, like ZFS does - regardless if you're a home user or a small business.

 

And yup, totally agree with @Mark77 on the CPU thing. People forget that Intels biggest win has been its extremely low power draw on its Ivy Bridge and higher CPU's when they aren't under load. The case fans to cool your drive, are going to use more power than a modern Skylake when its idling with Intel Speedstep - just make sure you get a half decent PSU that supports C6 & C7 power states.

 

Haswell's and above can get down as low as 0.05v compared with Ivy/Sandy 0.5v idle power consumption.

[Lord Nicoll]

On 13/10/2016 at 9:02 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

And how does ecc help a home user, you got numbers??

 

 

Also a premade nas is oftern cheaper and better than a home made unit

I was moving files from my desktop to my then server, just a normal machine. It crashed and corrupted the files, from then on I have used ECC. ECC stops crashes and prevents memory leaks (although not that much) and bit flips, all of which ruin your day. If you have a system on for months at a time, errors can occur.

[AshleyAshes]

1 hour ago, Lord Nicoll said:

I was moving files from my desktop to my then server, just a normal machine. It crashed and corrupted the files, from then on I have used ECC. ECC stops crashes and prevents memory leaks (although not that much) and bit flips, all of which ruin your day. If you have a system on for months at a time, errors can occur.

ECC does not protect against memory leaks in any way or fashion.  It also in no way protects your data from corruption should the hardware crash in the middle of a transfer. It also doesn't really offer any production from corruption occurred in a transfer at all.  This is where you'd want to use a transfer system that checksums the write of the new data vs the old data before completing. (This extensively used by digital media technicians in the film industry, where footage being copied from one drive to another can be exceptionally valuable and unreproducible so CTRL+C and CTRL-V won't cut it).  ECC won't do that for you.

[Lord Nicoll]

31 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

ECC does not protect against memory leaks in any way or fashion.  It also in no way protects your data from corruption should the hardware crash in the middle of a transfer. It also doesn't really offer any production from corruption occurred in a transfer at all.  This is where you'd want to use a transfer system that checksums the write of the new data vs the old data before completing. (This extensively used by digital media technicians in the film industry, where footage being copied from one drive to another can be exceptionally valuable and unreproducible so CTRL+C and CTRL-V won't cut it).  ECC won't do that for you.

The files where being moved not copied. the system crashed, ECC memory is very good at stopping crashes, that is it's main job. It does this by detecting and correcting bit flips, which is memory corruption. There are many articles written on the feasible use of ECC to detect and stop memory leakes. While that is more of a fringe use, it has the potential to be quite useful. Do you use ECC RAM? I do, whether the machine (my current server) would have crashed or not without it is up for debate since I'm now a lot closer to sea level and such errors do not pose as much of an issue now. The system was Linux based so a crash on linux was most likely either hardware, or perhaps the files was already currupted, although not likely as I had just arranged the directory. 

[AshleyAshes]

3 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

The files where being moved not copied.

I don't think that you actually understand how a file move operation works.  Files and data can not actually be 'moved' from one computer to another.  It can only be copied.  When you move a file, what the system is actually doing is copying the from the old location to the new and then deleting it from the old location once the copy operation is complete.  The delete is the only thing that differentiates a 'copy' from a 'move' operation.

 

5 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

ECC memory is very good at stopping crashes, that is it's main job. It does this by detecting and correcting bit flips, which is memory corruption. There are many articles written on the feasible use of ECC to detect and stop memory leakes.

Most of this is incorrect.  The only accurate element is that it corrects single bit flips which are a pretty rare circumstance.  While these can certainly causes crashes, they are not the cause of the vast, vast, fast majority of crashes.  ECC memory will offer near minimal protection from 'crashes'.  It is not 'very good at stopping crashes' at all.  ECC also has no means to detect and stop memory leaks, memory leaks are a software issue, they are not a hardware issue and they can in no way be resolved by any form of hardware.  Memory leaks are resolved by correcting bugs and flaws in software.

 

ECC is capable of one thing: Detecting is a single bit being read matches the bit as it was written to memory initially.  This has no way to offer the additional protections you've described.  Further more, ECC memory can not detect if corrupt data was written to memory, only if it was corrupted after being written.  If your host machine, storage, network or anything else is putting out garbage and giving the memory that garbage to write, it'll happy write it and then read out the exact same garbage.  It has no idea that it wrote in corrupted data.  It only wrote the data it was given.  You are attributing false benefits to ECC and further spreading misinformation by doing so.

[Lord Nicoll]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

I don't think that you actually understand how a file move operation works.  Files and data can not actually be 'moved' from one computer to another.  It can only be copied.  When you move a file, what the system is actually doing is copying the from the old location to the new and then deleting it from the old location once the copy operation is complete.  The delete is the only thing that differentiates a 'copy' from a 'move' operation.

 

Most of this is incorrect.  The only accurate element is that it corrects single bit flips which are a pretty rare circumstance.  While these can certainly causes crashes, they are not the cause of the vast, vast, fast majority of crashes.  ECC memory will offer near minimal protection from 'crashes'.  It is not 'very good at stopping crashes' at all.  ECC also has no means to detect and stop memory leaks, memory leaks are a software issue, they are not a hardware issue and they can in no way be resolved by any form of hardware.  Memory leaks are resolved by correcting bugs and flaws in software.

 

ECC is capable of one thing: Detecting is a single bit being read matches the bit as it was written to memory initially.  This has no way to offer the additional protections you've described.  Further more, ECC memory can not detect if corrupt data was written to memory, only if it was corrupted after being written.  If your host machine, storage, network or anything else is putting out garbage and giving the memory that garbage to write, it'll happy write it and then read out the exact same garbage.  It has no idea that it wrote in corrupted data.  It only wrote the data it was given.  You are attributing false benefits to ECC and further spreading misinformation by doing so.

You mixed parity bit and full 7 bit (32 bit memory units) 8 bit for 64 bit groups up. Yes, it is, go actually read up what modern ECC is. How about you stop spreading the false assertions that it isn't that great? It's added for a reason, and it performs said actions a lot better than parity bits on it's own. ECC RAM can also be used for memory leaks by detecting it sooner. These errors can also create vulnerabilities in systems. http://www.hpcaconf.org/hpca11/papers/28_qin-safemem.pdf

[AshleyAshes]

12 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

You mixed parity bit and full 7 bit (32 bit memory units) 8 bit for 64 bit groups up. Yes, it is, go actually read up what modern ECC is. How about you stop spreading the false assertions that it isn't that great? It's added for a reason, and it performs said actions a lot better than parity bits on it's own. ECC RAM can also be used for memory leaks by detecting it sooner. These errors can also create vulnerabilities in systems. http://www.hpcaconf.org/hpca11/papers/28_qin-safemem.pdf

This is an experimental paper that is not used in any actual operating system or software product...   It also doesn't SOLVE/PREVENT memory leaks ('Prevents Memory Leaks', your EXACT words) with false positives, it can only allow DETECTION though an exploit of the design for debugging purposes for developers.  It would not offer any actual protections to a users system...

 

This article is literally the top Google result for 'ECC Memory Leaks'.  You just Googled it and cited it without ever reading it, didn't you?

[Lord Nicoll]

39 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

This is an experimental paper that is not used in any actual operating system or software product...   It also doesn't SOLVE/PREVENT memory leaks ('Prevents Memory Leaks', your EXACT words) with false positives, it can only allow DETECTION though an exploit of the design for debugging purposes for developers.  It would not offer any actual protections to a users system...

 

This article is literally the top Google result for 'ECC Memory Leaks'.  You just Googled it and cited it without ever reading it, didn't you?

No. The article is something I read a while ago, which is why I knew about. Detecting it and then solving it before it is a major issue is preventing it from being a major issue or even causing a crash. ECC memory was developed and implemented for a reason, to prevent crashes related to memory (there are similar advances in GPU, USB, CPU, PCIe) to minimalise errors that would cause a system crash. I noted you didn't try to correct me on the difference of parity memory (pretty much all memory and chipsets now) and ECC. Further the software I used deleted the file as it moved. I had to recover the directory and the files from the HDD to get them back again.  

edit: I don't actually think that was the exact PDF, but it is in the same vain. 

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, Lord Nicoll said:

Further the software I used deleted the file as it moved. I had to recover the directory and the files from the HDD to get them back again.  

So you used some kind of janky, broken abnormal software with a copy function that deleted every bit of data as it was copied to the new location rather than not deleting anything until the file copy function was complete?  I'd love to hear what software you used to do that, since it's not the native function in any OS... And it's an entirely stupid implementation.  A user would have to be an insane idiot to take such software and go 'This seems like a super thing to use'.  Please, enlighten us as to what possessed you to operate it and what it was so that we can be sure to NEVER use it.

[Lord Nicoll]

1 minute ago, AshleyAshes said:

So you used some kind of janky, broken abnormal software with a copy function that deleted every bit of data as it was copied to the new location rather than not deleting anything until the file copy function was complete?  I'd love to hear what software you used to do that, since it's not the native function in any OS... And it's an entirely stupid implementation.  A user would have to be an insane idiot to take such software and go 'This seems like a super thing to use'.  Please, enlighten us as to what possessed you to operate it and what it was so that we can be sure to NEVER use it.

well I wrote it so you're in luck, you'll never find it. There was a reason for such activities (ok it was mostly laziness in that I usually go away and let it do it's thing and then not have to worry about deleting such files) You don't seem to see needs for such software, no wonder you didn't see a need for ECC, you fail to see uses in such programmes. 

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, Lord Nicoll said:

well I wrote it

Good job.  A+.  Amazing software design.  Flawless.  Very impressive.  Coder of the year.