Nas CPU speed vs. core count

[Noel Nol Null]

I was looking at using an old laptop as my first nas and saw I had a couple upgrade options for the cpu: a 3ghz dual core, or a 1.8ghz quad core.

I haven't really seen much discussion on this so I was wonder if there even was anything to discuss.

Sorry in advance if this isn't the place to post this kind of question.

[emosun]

If the cpu is old enough to still have a socket then neither will be amazing anyway

[Electronics Wizardy]

What exact cpus, the clock speed mean almost nothing with turbo boost and different archetures.

 

If its just a nas basically any semi modern chip will fill a gigabit network. Core 2 duos can easily do this.

 

Id check the laptop has a gigabit network port

[Noel Nol Null]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What exact cpus, the clock speed mean almost nothing with turbo boost and different archetures.

 

If its just a nas basically any semi modern chip will fill a gigabit network. Core 2 duos can easily do this.

 

Id check the laptop has a gigabit network port

The cpus are amd phenom IIs (N660 & P960) so no boost.

The laptop & cpu are 10 years old but it has an ethernet port. I know it's not ideal, but I don't wanna just throw out a laptop that still has life in it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Noel Nol Null said:

The cpus are amd phenom IIs (N660 & P960) so no boost.

The laptop & cpu are 10 years old but it has an ethernet port. I know it's not ideal, but I don't wanna just throw out a laptop that still has life in it.

Is it a gigabit ethernet port? Im guess its 100m so its gonna be pretty slow

 

Might as well try it if you have the hardware.

[Noel Nol Null]

8 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Is it a gigabit ethernet port? Im guess its 100m so its gonna be pretty slow

 

Might as well try it if you have the hardware.

It is 100m. Speeds are 130 down and 145 up on a wired connection.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, Noel Nol Null said:

It is 100m. Speeds are 130 down and 145 up on a wired connection.

Your ISP speeds don't matter for a nas, its all about your local network speed.

 

Id say 100m is too slow for a nas these days, but really depends on your use case.

[Noel Nol Null]

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Your ISP speeds don't matter for a nas, its all about your local network speed.

Oh OK. Wired lan speed is 1Gbps

[Electronics Wizardy]

26 minutes ago, Noel Nol Null said:

Oh OK. Wired lan speed is 1Gbps

but you said that there is a 100m nic above. That means your limited to 100m speeds max from this laptop.

 

 

And why not test it, you seem to have the hardware and its not very hard to do a simple setup for testing.

[Noel Nol Null]

20 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

but you said that there is a 100m nic above. That means your limited to 100m speeds max from this laptop.

 

 

And why not test it, you seem to have the hardware and its not very hard to do a simple setup for testing.

How would I test it?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Noel Nol Null said:

How would I test it?

Setup a network share on the system and see how fast you can copy files.

[Noel Nol Null]

9 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Setup a network share on the system and see how fast you can copy files.

20gb folder transfers at ~10MB/s to 35MB/s. Closer to 35MB/s on average.

[Bdavis]

The CPU you choose will depend on what you want to do with your NAS. If it's just serving files for windows file shares I would go with the fast dual core. If you want to run apps or VM's go with the quad core.

 

What is your use case, and how many users will be accessing the NAS?

[Noel Nol Null]

13 hours ago, Bdavis said:

What is your use case, and how many users will be accessing the NAS?

I just plan on using it as a file share for myself.

[Needfuldoer]

Remember, Samba is still heavily dependent on single-threaded performance. Better IPC means better SMB share performance.

 

If you're only running plain old Gigabit Ethernet through, just about anything modern will be fine. Even an old Sandy Bridge i7 2600.

[wseaton]

Using a 10yr old laptop for a NAS is like using cheap flash drives to keep your tax records. Risky as hell and going to end badly.

 

Its not the CPU or NIC that concern me.

Its that 10 yr old spinning HD that will be the problem.

[Noel Nol Null]

12 hours ago, wseaton said:

Using a 10yr old laptop for a NAS is like using cheap flash drives to keep your tax records. Risky as hell and going to end badly.

 

Its not the CPU or NIC that concern me.

Its that 10 yr old spinning HD that will be the problem.

I know. I plan on getting either new hdd or an ssd, aswell as swapping out the disc drive for a sata caddy & running it in raid 1. I don't trust a 10yr old hdd to work for much longer.

[Bdavis]

A laptop is a poor choice for a production NAS. It has poor expandability. One of the main reasons for having a NAS is resilient storage as in having some sort of redundancy. By all means use the old laptop to learn and test out nas software, but a proper NAS will have at a minimum 3 drives. One for the OS, and at least two for data in either software or hardware raid. Just FYI, most NAS software doesn't work well with drives connected via USB.