CPU Importance in a Home Server Situation

[soja]

I'm gathering more and more important data and it is still all not backed up, and spread across multiple drives. I want to build myself a storage server and have been following Linus's server changes for a while. I am wondering if the CPU in the server is important. What I gather is software raid relies on the server hardware, but if I buy a dedicated RAID card from someone like LSI it would take care of all of the heavy lifting.

Will multiple transfers benefit from multiple threads available? Will practically any CPU do?

Thanks

[azeotrope]

If you're not planning to do anything other than file sharing then you really don't need a fancy cpu. for example, I run a software raid6 setup on a AMD a4 3400 which can sustain 400MB/s writes, well over the gigabit network bottleneck. I don't understand why so many people put i3's into their dedicated storage servers, it simply isn't necessary, especially if the server isn't doing raid calcs. SMB/CIFS or FTP takes hardly any cpu usage. look at these all-in-one NAS systems (QNAP, SYnology etc) which are all virtually all running atoms and md raid and do so perfectly fine.

[soja]

Thanks for the information.