Is an x5680 Xeon and 12GB of DDR3 memory enough for a 10Gb NAS?

[Immitem]

Hi there. I am starting to look at kitting out my own home NAS for moving around and saving multigig files and was wondering if such an old processor on my OG Asus P6T lga1366 motherboard would be up to the task?

 

 I have no clue as to what I am doing when it comes to setting it up, yet, but its main use would be saving, opening, and transfering massive Blender files in the 0.5-10 gig range. As well as Zbrush, Substance Painter, texture, and cached simulation files. I also intend to do 1080P compositing in Davinci Resolve. I still need to buy a RAID card as well as a multiport 10Gig NIC and 2 PCIE fans to keep them cool. It, of course, has no onboard video but I do have a dinky little Quadro P620 that would be more than up to the task with very little power draw. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for the Xeon which I assume has an abysmal performance-per-watt rating compared to the lowliest Ryzen 3s AMD has to offer.

 

 Unfortunately the cost of starting with 4 16-20GB HDDs and a cache SSD is where most of my budget is going to go. With that in mind, can my ancient gaming rig handle a 2 port 10GB NIC and a RAID card over PCIE2 and not be bottle-necked when the network is fully saturated?

 

 Thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Sure the system should be enough CPU power wise for 10gbe samba/nfs file copies. 

 

If power is expensive a newer platform may pay for its self in a few years with the power savings though. Also with 4 HDDs your unlikely to fill 10gbe, but it will be a good amount faster than 1gbe. 

 

Pcie 2 won't be a issue as the HDDs will probably be the speed limit here.

[Needfuldoer]

That's plenty of processing power, but it's going to be pretty power-hungry. Anything based on a Haswell or later Intel CPU or any Zen based AMD CPU will be much more energy efficient.

[Immitem]

30 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Sure the system should be enough CPU power wise for 10gbe samba/nfs file copies. 

 

If power is expensive a newer platform may pay for its self in a few years with the power savings though. Also with 4 HDDs your unlikely to fill 10gbe, but it will be a good amount faster than 1gbe. 

 

Pcie 2 won't be a issue as the HDDs will probably be the speed limit here.

Awesome, thanks for the info. Power in Saskatchewan is pretty cheap, which is why I am even entertaining the idea, but it know that it is not ideal. I do hope to double my hard-drive capacity as they fill up, for a total of 8 drives, plus a cache SSD. Since DDR3 kits are so cheap, would you see any reason to upgrade to 24gigs of RAM or would that be pointless?

 

 Thanks!

[Immitem]

2 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

That's plenty of processing power, but it's going to be pretty power-hungry. Anything based on a Haswell or later Intel CPU or any Zen based AMD CPU will be much more energy efficient.

I do have a 5930K that I could potentially undervolt but I do not have a spare motherboard for it. It would probably cost me in the ball-park of 200 CAD, plus tax to get a used one from a reputable seller on ebay. My dad is looking to purchase a base level Mac mini to replace his mini itx i7 3570 PC when W10 gets discontinued by Microsoft at the end of the year so I could potentially get a cheaper motherboard for that chip. Plus, it has onboard video which saves PCIe lanes (now Gen 3) and power.

[Blue4130]

30 minutes ago, Immitem said:

Awesome, thanks for the info. Power in Saskatchewan is pretty cheap, which is why I am even entertaining the idea, but it know that it is not ideal. I do hope to double my hard-drive capacity as they fill up, for a total of 8 drives, plus a cache SSD. Since DDR3 kits are so cheap, would you see any reason to upgrade to 24gigs of RAM or would that be pointless?

 

 Thanks!

One of the upsides to being in Saskatchewan is that for 3/4 of the year, you can run sub-zero temps on it to overclock a little bit more performance out of it. jjust open the window. Instant - 20c without having to resort to LN2

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, Immitem said:

Awesome, thanks for the info. Power in Saskatchewan is pretty cheap, which is why I am even entertaining the idea, but it know that it is not ideal. I do hope to double my hard-drive capacity as they fill up, for a total of 8 drives, plus a cache SSD. Since DDR3 kits are so cheap, would you see any reason to upgrade to 24gigs of RAM or would that be pointless?

 

 Thanks!

More ram is nice, so might as well get a lot. 

 

Cache SSD probably wont' help, depends on your use case though.

[Immitem]

12 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

More ram is nice, so might as well get a lot. 

 

Cache SSD probably wont' help, depends on your use case though.

Would a cache SSD not speed up the constant opening and saving of extremely large files or is a 10gig network too slow to max out the speed of a mechal drive? In which case I might have to look at a 25 or 50gig NIC as saving a 10 gigabyte file on a mechanical harddrive could take upwards of 30-60 seconds instead of the 10 seconds my external usbc 10GBs Samsung drive can manage. Not fun, especially during an autosave.

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 hours ago, Immitem said:

Would a cache SSD not speed up the constant opening and saving of extremely large files or is a 10gig network too slow to max out the speed of a mechal drive? In which case I might have to look at a 25 or 50gig NIC as saving a 10 gigabyte file on a mechanical harddrive could take upwards of 30-60 seconds instead of the 10 seconds my external usbc 10GBs Samsung drive can manage. Not fun, especially during an autosave.

Depends on how the cache is setup, but often not really. I'd generally reccomend having a SSD only pool for files that are currently worked on, and a HDD power for less used files.

 

RAID should also help a good amount with these bigger files.

 

I'd guess your disk limited here, not network.